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430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

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1 day agoby bookofjoe

https://archive.ph/mHlUT

https://apnews.com/article/oldest-wooden-tools-marathousa-1-...

https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to...

430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.

ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!

1 day agoby drakythe

It might be just my perception, but it seems like every single time anthropologist make statements to the effect that complex human development didn't start until XX they are proven wrong. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that those "estimates" are generally used as proof to dismiss alternative timelines for human progression. I'm certainly not trying to say the planet had Atlantis with flying cars 300,000 years ago; but it certainly seems plausible that there were large/complex societies beginning long before the advent of our current written history... an idea that is regularly dismissed as foolish.

17 hours agoby brockers

There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.

1 day agoby alsetmusic

Article title is click bait.

Hominin tools that are millions of years old have already been found by archeologists.

e.g., recent news: Scientists uncover 3-million-year-old tools but they weren’t made by our ancestors: https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/scientists-uncover-3-mill...

A list of findings of earliest known hominin tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earliest_tools

1 day agoby vee-kay

Without assuming correctness, assuming instead "risk probability" - if previous advanced civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth, after evolving here naturally - what should we do as a species to not share their fate?

edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea

22 hours agoby keepamovin

The thing I’m continually surprised by is the usage of obsidian by nearly every ancient-ish civilization. The usage of bow & arrow predates farming, insane.

1 day agoby shay_ker

Pretty sure my neighbor is using these as ground cover in her garden.

12 hours agoby blobbers

> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists *thought*.

I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.

1 day agoby lugu

Sure, but did they have MCP?

20 hours agoby bbcc90

I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?

1 day agoby HocusLocus

Estimates will continue to go earlier, and more things that were, or are, alive will be considered exceptional. Seems to be a function of looking.

1 day agoby joe8756438

Ok, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view.

Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.

And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.

BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong

1 day agoby melenaboija

I wonder how would we react with tools dating back to, say, 5MY ago ...

That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.

1 day agoby notorandit

What's incredible about this too is they found it in England, which means they had to first build a boat to get there and leave the tools on the island

1 day agoby guywithahat

how do they know it was tools and not some wood some guy was munching on?

1 day agoby drsalt

Now find the tools used by the Egyptians or the people before that lived there and made the tool markings..

1 day agoby tiku

Do we know if these were formed intentionally or just happened to be in such a form and were used by those that found them?