2023-09-22 18:28:13
According to a study published this week, archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure in the world in Africa, almost half a million years old.
A discovery that reshuffles the cards of our knowledge of the first humans. Exceptionally well preserved, a wooden structure around 500,000 years old and older than the first known homo sapiens was unearthed by archaeologists in Africa, according to a study published last Wednesday.
Indeed, this complex construction was discovered on the prehistoric site of Kalambo Falls in what is now Zambia, and dates back at least 476,000 years, before the supposed appearance of our own species, Homo sapiens.
This construction consists of two interlocking logs, connected transversely by a notch intentionally made in order to build a structure, probably the foundation of a raised platform, a passage or a habitat, depending on the study published in Nature. A collection of wooden tools, including a digging stick, was also unearthed at the site. This discovery is all the more rare because it is difficult to preserve wood over time.
While the oldest wooden structure known to date was “only” 9,000 years old, Larry Barham, professor at the British University of Liverpool and first author of the study, did not expect to find such a treasure while digging the prehistoric site of Kalambo, located on the banks of the river of the same name, above waterfalls 235 meters high.
Who built the structure?
Especially since the deposits are so old that they do not correspond to the time when homo sapiens lived, whose oldest fossils date back around 300,000 years. However, the research was unable to determine which human lineage was at work, but archaeologist Barham did not rule out the hypothesis of dealing with homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species which lived between approximately 700,000 and 220,000 years BCE.
Apart from the fossil of a homo heidelbergensis skull, discovered in Zambia in the 1920s, “there is no other known hominin in the region”. The discovery has, in any case, “changed his vision” of our first ancestors. “They used their intelligence to transform their environment and make their lives easier, if only by making a platform to sit on the edge of the river,” deciphered the archaeologist.
“The fact that they were able to work wood on a large scale presupposes cognitive abilities such as planning, visualizing the finished product before its conception, moving objects mentally in space,” observed prehistorian Sophie Archambault de Beaune , professor at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, who did not participate in the work.
Furthermore, according to the authors of the study, the structure was conducive to “sustainable occupation” due to the presence of a perennial water source and the forest, which “calls into question the idea that these first men were nomads.
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