The stick shaped by ancient people is the oldest known wooden tool

The earliest known wooden tools were found in an open pit mine in Greece. They are 430,000 years old and were made by an unidentified species of ancient human – possibly Neanderthal ancestors.

Prehistoric wooden artefacts are “very rare”, archaeologist says Dirk Leder at the Land Office for Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony in Hannover, Germany, which did not participate in the study. “Any find is welcome.”

Still, it’s likely that our extinct relatives used wooden tools for millions of years. “It may be the oldest type of tool that anyone used,” he says Kateřina Harvatiová at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Poor preservation and difficult identification of wooden artifacts have limited our knowledge of them.

Harvati and her colleagues discovered tools on a website called Marathousa 1which they first identified in 2013 in the Megalopolis basin in southern Greece. The surface lignite mine had exposed layers of sediments, some of them nearly a million years old. “It gives us access to time periods and sediments that would otherwise be buried,” says Harvati.

During excavations between 2013 and 2019, the team found an almost complete skeleton an elephant with straight tusks (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), which showed signs of butchery, along with the remains of other animals and plants and more than 2,000 stone tools. The fauna and flora are a mixture of aquatic and near-aquatic species, including hippopotamuses, suggesting that the site preserves an ancient lakeshore.

Researchers have dated Marathousa 1 using several methods, including identifying footprints past shifts in Earth’s magnetic field and testing when the grains were last exposed to sunlight. In 2024, they arrived at it the remains are about 430,000 years oldwhich dates back to a time when the climate did not permit it. “It is one of the worst glacial episodes in Pleistocene Europe,” says Harvati. The Megalopolis basin may have functioned as a refuge with a cool but less extreme climate.

From the 144 pieces of wood, the team identified two tools. One is an 81-centimeter-long stick made from an alder trunk. Most of the bark has been removed and there are many carving and chopping marks that indicate the wood was deliberately shaped. One end is more rounded and may be a handle, while the other end is flattened and shows signs of chipping and chipping.

According to Harvati, it could have been used for digging, for example to find underground tubers that could be used as food. But it could also have another use. He points out that it was found in elephant bones, suggesting that hominins may have used it to process the corpse. “I don’t really know what they did with it,” he says.

The second tool is more mysterious. It is a small piece of willow or poplar, 5.7 cm long and 1.2 cm to 1.5 cm in diameter. Again, it has been stripped of its bark and has marks that indicate it was shaped on purpose. “This is a completely new type of wood instrument,” says Harvati. It may have been used to retouch stone tools, but “we don’t really know what it was for,” he says.

The stick is an extremely convincing example of a wooden instrument, says Leder. He is less certain about the second item, as it is not clear what it could have been used for. “My first question would be, is this really a complete item, or is it more of a fragment of something?” he says.

No hominins were found in Marathouse 1. Given the age of the site, this is probably too early for our species, and perhaps too early for the Neanderthals who lived in Europe before us. “The first hypothesis is that what we have here is a type of pre-Neanderthals, or Homo heidelbergensisHowever, it would be foolish to think that Greece was a place where many groups of hominins passed through.

More examples from ancient wooden tools includes Clacton Spear in Great Britain, which may be about 400,000 years old. Wooden spears found in SchoeningenGermany, were thought to be of a similar age, but Leder says several dating methods introduced them age closer to 300,000 years and a study published in May 2025 even suggested that it did only 200,000 years old. The only wooden artifacts older than those from Marathousa 1 come from Kalambo Falls in Zambia, which date to 476,000 years ago. These appear to be the remains of larger structures or buildings.

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