A 430,000-year-old wooden stick used by hominins for digging, recovered from a site in southern Greece. Photograph: Dimitris Michailidis via The New York Times
Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece – the earliest wooden tools on record.
The findings suggest early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was pub
Continue Reading on The Irish Times
This preview shows approximately 15% of the article. Read the full story on the publisher's website to support quality journalism.