Archaeologists working in southern Greece have identified wooden tools that appear to be the oldest of their kind ever found. The objects were recovered at the Marathousa 1 site in the Megalopolis Basin and dated to around 430,000 years ago. The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For decades, early technology has been judged almost entirely by stone. Wood rarely survives long enough to be seen. These pieces do. Found alongside animal remains and simple stone artefacts, they suggest that early humans were shaping and using organic materials in ways that are usually invisible to archaeology. The discovery does not rewrite everything. It adds weight, quietly, to ideas that have long been difficult to prove.
