https://www.nature.com/articles/d4 [login to see] 8-4?utm_placement=newsletter
Some 500,000 years ago in central Africa, ancient human relatives chopped down trees and transformed the wood into digging tools, wedges and what might just be the world’s earliest-known wooden structure.
Now, remnants of this ancient woodworking have been found at an archaeological site in Zambia called Kalambo Falls. Researchers can’t definitively identify the possible structure, which might have been a raised platform, a shelter or something else entirely. Whatever it was, it pre-dates the evolution of Homo sapiens by more than 100,000 years, hinting that hominins that lived long before our own species were already working wood.