Archaeologists have discovered the world's oldest wooden instruments in Greece

Scientists have discovered on the territory of Greece the oldest known to date wooden tools, the age of which is estimated at about 430 thousand years. The find was made on the shore of an ancient lake in the Megalopolis basin and described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Archaeologists found two wooden artefacts. The first is a thin stick about 80 centimetres long, which, according to the researchers, could have been used for digging in wet soil. The second item is a more compact fragment of willow or poplar wood, the purpose of which remains unclear. Scientists speculate that it could have served as a hand tool for working stone.

Wooden implements are very rarely preserved in the archaeological record, as wood deteriorates rapidly. They can only be found under exceptional conditions - for example, in ice, caves, or wet environments. In this case, the artefacts were probably quickly buried by precipitation and left in water-saturated soil for long periods of time, which ensured their preservation.

Although the wooden tools themselves were not directly dated, the age was determined from the geological layers of the site, which had previously yielded rich archaeological material. At the site, researchers have found stone tools and ancient elephant bones with traces of butchery, indicating the active activity of ancient people.

Human remains have not yet been found, so it is not known exactly who used these tools. It could have been Neanderthals, earlier representatives of the genus Homo or other ancient hominins.

According to one of the authors of the study Annemieke Milks from the University of Reading, the opportunity to work with such objects - a rare luck: even after hundreds of thousands of years they allow you to literally "touch" the technology of ancient people.

Archaeologists note that the Megalopolis basin probably hides many more finds, but it is the simplicity and "inconspicuousness" of wooden tools makes them particularly difficult to interpret. Nevertheless, the new find provides a unique insight into the role that wooden technology played in the daily lives of early humans, an aspect that has remained poorly understood to date.