Discovery of half-a-million-year-old wooden structure shows we're wrong to underestimate our ancient relatives

Excavators found part of a structure formed by two overlapping logs. Barham et al. Nature (2023), Author provided

To most people, complex technologies separate modern humans from their ancestors who lived in the Stone Age, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. In today’s fast changing world, older technologies, even those from a few years ago, are often described dismissively as “Stone Age”.

Such terms serve to disconnect us from our ancient relatives, who were much more sophisticated than we sometimes think they were.