A stick found in southern Greece appears to be the oldest-known wooden tool.
The 81-centimeter (31-inch) alder-tree staff is 430,000 years old, and may have been used for digging or for food preparation. Wooden tools rarely survive so long; the same archeological site contained 2,000 stone tools, along with elephant bones and other animal remains, but just two wooden implements. But it is likely that wooden tools were “the oldest type of tool that anybody used,” one archaeologist told New Scientist; our extinct relatives probably used them for millions of years before they learnt to work stone.
Older wooden artifacts have been found, including 476,000-year-old logs in Zambia, but appear to be the remains of buildings rather than tools.