430,000-year-old wooden handheld tools from Greece are the oldest on record — and they predate modern humans

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered 430,000-year-old handheld wooden tools, the oldest surviving examples of their kind in the world, a new study finds. The two tools, found on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, were created by an unidentified hominin species that predates modern humans.

"The objects represent the oldest hand-held wooden tools ever found, pushing back evidence of this type of tool use by at least 40,000 years," the researchers wrote in a statement.

One of the wooden tools, which was found in the site of Marathousa, is 31.9 inches (81 centimeters) long and is splintered and frayed at one end, which suggests that it was likely used as a digging stick. "The tool has a morphology and size comparable to digging sticks," the team wrote in the study, which was published Jan. 26 in the journal PNAS.

The other wooden tool is 2.2 inches (5.7 cm) long and has been completely debarked, with rounding and pitting at one end. It's not clear what it was used for, but it's possible that it may have been used to help craft stone tools, the researchers wrote.

The artifacts appear to have become buried in wet soil, the researchers wrote in the study. This allowed the wooden tools, and other organic remains, to be preserved in a low-oxygen environment.

The scientists also excavated the remains of animals and plants from the site, which enabled them to reconstruct what the landscape would have looked like around the time the tools were made.

"The fauna comprises both terrestrial and semiaquatic mammals, as well as freshwater mollusks, turtles, and birds indicating a rich lakeshore environment," the team wrote in the paper. The finds also include the remains of elephants, hippopotamuses, deer and wild boar.

At the time the wooden tools were used, the climate in Europe was experiencing "an extremely cold glacial period," but this lakeshore environment would have been a place of relative comfort, study first author Annemieke Milks, an archaeologist at the University of Reading in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

Early humans

The tools date to around 430,000 years ago — around 130,000 years before Homo sapiens existed — and it's not clear which hominin made them. "There aren't human remains from [Marathousa] and for this period there is a bit of ambiguity at the moment about hominin species. It could have been Homo heidelbergensis, or possibly very early Neanderthals," Milks said.

Tools made of stone and bones have previously been identified at the site, and the new discovery of wooden tools means that early humans were using a variety of materials, Milks noted. For instance, the oldest known wooden structure in the world, which was found in Zambia, is even older and from 476,000 years ago.

We "understand that these hominins had an understanding of these different materials and their properties, and used different tools presumably for different tasks," Milks said. "I think it really helps us understand how humans in the deep past were making use of so many different materials and resources in their surroundings."

Study co-author Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropology professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email that these "tools provide a rare glimpse into a component of their technology that we know very little about, that which was based on [perishable] plant derived materials rather than stones." They "highlight the behavioral adaptability and flexibility of the Marathousa hominins," she added.

Excavations at the site were carried out between 2013 to 2019. The digging stick was found in 2015, and the wooden tools whose purpose is uncertain was discovered in 2018.