2023-10-21 08:00:00
Who could have built this wooden structure 476,000 years ago? Could it be homo heidelbergensis? Other archaic men?
Direction Zambia, and more precisely near the Kalambo River. Of the archaeologists have brought to light a wooden structure… 476,000 years old ! This is surprising given that the oldest wooden structure known to date is “only” 9,000 years old and the a wise man only appeared around 300,000 years ago. With this discovery, our entire knowledge of the first humans could be turned upside down.
Who could have built this wooden structure 476,000 years ago?
An international team of researchers from the universities of Liverpool (England), Aberystwyth (Wales) and Liège (Belgium) found several wooden objects in an assembly made of two logs. Everything was very well preserved in deposits that were nevertheless waterlogged. Which is very surprising given that “wooden artifacts rarely survive from the early Stone Age, because their conservation requires exceptional conditions”. These two pieces of wood are nested one inside the other, connected by a deep transverse cut of more than 10 centimeters which cannot be unintentional.
“This construction has no known equivalent in the African or Eurasian Paleolithic.” For archaeologist Veerle Rots, co-author of the article, it is the work of a hominid, because “there are marks of stone tools visible on the wood. These are ridges, notches, etc.” With the few elements brought to light, it is impossible to determine the general structure using these two pieces, but we know that the Stone Age populations of Kalambo adapted their environment and were not totally nomadic.
This construction therefore suggests relatively advanced technical abilities among these first men, capable of cutting pieces of wood to assemble them. For Veerle Rots, this is a major discovery: “This demonstrates that these populations of hunter-gatherers who are nomadic were either a little more sedentary during certain periods of the year, or were still involved in structuring their landscape by creating structures in places that seemed important to them. We can imagine that this concerns the exploitation of the wealth around the Kalambo River. This also implies that these modern pre-human populations had significant capacities in terms of planning and anticipation of future needs.”
Would it be a man from Heidelberg ? Other archaic men?
In addition to these two assembled logs, archaeologists discovered four wooden elements dating from 324,000 to 390,000 years ago: a wedge, a digging stick with a point, a cut log and a notched branch. All signs that the Kalambo site was occupied several times during prehistory.
To be able to precisely date their discovery, the researchers were unable to use carbon 14, as this does not allow us to go back beyond 50,000 years. The scientists analyzed the sediments in which these wooden elements were buried: “The structure was dated thanks to the dating of the sediment in which the structure is located. This is a luminescence dating method. This method makes it possible to date the last exposure to the sun of quartz or feldspar grains. This is a reliable method for dating material found in the same layers.”
As is often the case with a major discovery, this one raises new questions. The first being: who were these archaic men? Was it about a man from Heidelberg, who lived in the Middle Pleistocene, between 700,000 and 220,000 years ago? For Veerle Rots and his colleagues, we must go further: “We are still finalizing the study of the lithic tools that were found in the different levels of the site and we are planning further excavations in the years to come.”
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