Amazing stuff!
The abstract does not mention the details described in the AAAS news article nor in the AAAS editor's note below. There is an obvious mismatch! Strange!
"Our understanding of ancient toolmaking and tool use suffers from survival bias: We know most about instruments made from durable materials like stone and bone. But we humans are a creative lot; our species and its close relatives fashioned implements from a wide range of materials, many of which have been lost to the archaeological record. But thanks to the preservative properties of a boggy ancient lakeshore in southern China, scientists have a rare chance to analyze prehistoric wooden tools.
Though they were first excavated in the 1980s, the thousands of sharpened wooden pieces went decades without being convincingly dated due to natural limits of radiocarbon dating.
In 2018, new techniques allowed researchers to date the tools as about 300,000 years old. And a new analysis out in Science suggests they were digging sticks, primarily used to pry carbohydrate-rich tubers and roots from the soft ground. “It’s the first time we’ve found such an old site with evidence of hominins exploiting an underground food resource ,” says geochronologist Bo Li, co-author of the study. “This group of hominins knew what plants were edible or not, and were specifically looking for these plants with wooden tools.” ..."
"... Made primarily of pine and hardwoods, the 35 tools are the oldest wooden artefacts yet found in East Asia and include digging sticks, hooks and small handheld implements.
"This discovery is exceptional because it preserves a moment in time when early humans were using sophisticated wooden tools to harvest underground food resources," ..."
From the editor's note and the abstract:
"Editor’s summary
Wooden tools from the early Paleolithic Period are extremely rare, with only two previously known discoveries, one in Europe and one in Africa. In both cases, the tools were hunting implements, spears, and spear tips. Liu et al. describe several wooden tools from a 300,000-year-old site in China. These tools were not used for hunting, but rather appear to have been designed to obtain and process plant foods. This finding shows that wooden tools were being used across a much wider range at the time, and also provides insight into how cultures from different environments may have developed locally useful implements. ...
Abstract
Evidence of Early and Middle Pleistocene wooden implements is exceptionally rare, and existing evidence has been found only in Africa and western Eurasia.
We report an assemblage of 35 wooden implements from the site of Gantangqing in southwestern China, which was found associated with stone tools, antler billets (soft hammers), and cut-marked bones and is dated from ~361,000 to ~250,000 years at a 95% confidence interval.
The wooden implements include digging sticks and small, complete, hand-held pointed tools. The sophistication of many of these tools offsets the seemingly “primitive” aspects of stone tool assemblages in the East Asian Early Paleolithic. This discovery suggests that wooden implements might have played an important role in hominin survival and adaptation in Middle Pleistocene East Asia."
Oldest wooden artefacts ever found in East Asia reveal plant-based diet of ancient humans (original news release) "Collection of sophisticated, 300,000-year-old tools found preserved in oxygen-deprived clay by global researchers"
300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing, southwest China (no public access)
Hand-size digging sticks from an ancient lakeshore were used to harvest edible roots.
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