430,000-year-old wooden handheld tools from Greece are the oldest on record — and they predate modern humans

An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleo-lithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. .

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered 430,000-year-old handheld wooden tools, the oldest surviving examples of their kind in the world, a new study finds. The two tools, found on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, were created by an unidentified hominin species that predates modern humans.

"The objects represent the oldest hand-held wooden tools ever found, pushing back evidence of this type of tool use by at least 40,000 years," the researchers wrote in a statement.