Ancient Greek wooden tools push back tool use to 430,000 years ago
Archaeologists in Greece uncovered 430,000-year-old handheld wooden tools at the Marathousa site on the Peloponnese—the oldest known of their kind and about 130,000 years before Homo sapiens. One tool is a long digging-stick-like piece about 81 cm (31.9 inches) and fragmented; the other is a small 5.7 cm (2.2 inches) debarked piece of wood. The discovery, preserved by wet soils near a lakeshore, suggests early hominins used diverse materials (including wood) for different tasks, likely made by species such as Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals, broadening our understanding of ancient technology and behavior.