300,000-year-old wooden tools found in China

A multidisciplinary research team has announced the discovery of 300,000-year-old well-preserved wooden artifacts at the Gantangqing site in Southwest China's Yunnan province, presenting the earliest finding of this kind in East Asia.

The study, published in the journal Science on Friday, has provided empirical support for the longstanding bamboo and wooden tools hypothesis, which suggests a strong reliance of ancient East Asian populations on implements made from these materials in their daily lives, with basic stone tools primarily used for processing tasks.

First unearthed in 1984, the Gantangqing site, located 5 kilometers from the Fuxian Lake in Yuxi's Jiangchuan district, has been excavated three times: in 1989; from 2014 to 2015; and from 2018 to 2019. The last two excavations yielded a diverse collection of stone tools, animal fossils, wooden materials and plant seeds, forming the foundation of the materials presented in the paper.

"The site's discovery of a large number of exquisitely preserved wooden materials and plant seeds is a rarity among Paleolithic sites, because they are highly susceptible to decay and degradation, hindering their formation as archaeological specimens," said Gao Xing, a corresponding author of the study and a researcher from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Noting that the wooden materials discovered at Paleolithic sites in Africa, Europe and West Asia are fragmented, he attributed the exceptional preservation of wooden artifacts at the Gantangqing site to its distinct location and environment.