Archaeologists dug into a riverbank in Zambia and uncovered what they call the earliest known wood construction by humans. The half-million year-old artifacts could change how we see Stone-Age people.
Larry Barham and Geoff Duller/University of LiverpoolThe find didn't look like much at first – basically a log, lying crosswise over another log., professor of archaeology at the University of Liverpool."But when you look closely and you remove the sand around it, you can see where one sits on top of the other is a notch."
That analogy suggested to Barham that these logs were once part of a platform or the base of a structure. If true, that would make this site by far the oldest example ofWe know very little about how early humans worked with wood because so few of the artifacts survive. Previous discoveries have been limited to small, portable tools and somewhat ambiguous wood scraps.
That would place this site well before the evolution of homo sapiens, thought to have emerged around 300,000 years ago.Those ancient hominins, such as homo erectus and homo heidelbergensis, were thought to have been nomadic hunter-gatherers. But the new site suggests that they may have hung around certain areas where it was relatively easy to make a living.
"There's been a long history of [European] researchers just coming in and working in isolation, discovering stuff and then going out there and sort of writing stuff in a very complicated, scientific way that doesn't trickle back to the very community where these sites are. This new approach, where there's active involvement of the local collaborators, I'm hoping this sets a standard to be followed or imitated by other researchers that would want to work in Zambia.
"There was a period when archaeology kind of just died out because the archaeologists stopped coming to Zambia to do any kind of work," says Katongo."We don't have a lot of trained Zambians actively doing archaeology. I'm thinking now there will be more people drawn to look at Zambia again."
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