Two unassuming pieces of wood recovered from a prehistoric lakeshore in southern Greece have become a headline-grabbing rarity - the oldest known handheld wooden tools, dated to around 430,000 years ago. Found at Marathousa 1 in the Megalopolis Basin, the artifacts hint at a far richer toolkit for early humans than stone alone can show, one that normally vanishes without trace.
A Lakeshore Time Capsule at Marathousa 1
The tools come from a site that was once the edge of a lake, where early humans processed animal carcasses, describes a University of Reading release. Researchers have previously uncovered stone tools and evidence of butchery, including elephant remains, suggesting repeated visits and varied tasks, exactly the sort of setting where a digging stick (or multipurpose wooden implement) would make sense.
The difficulty is that wooden technology almost never survives for archaeologists to find. The team points out that wood needs exceptional conditions - such as waterlogging and rapid burial - to persist over hundreds of thousands of years. That makes Marathousa 1 a rare kind of archive, preserving not just stone and bone, but traces of the “missing majority” of perishable tools.
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430,000-year-old wooden tool from Greece that was possibly used for digging. (Harvati & Michailidis/PNAS)
What the Wooden Tools Look Like, and Their Functions
One artifact is a worked piece of alder trunk, interpreted as a digging tool (or possibly a multifunctional stick used along the lakeshore). The other is a much smaller piece of willow or poplar, shaped and handled enough to show human modification, but still mysterious in function - potentially something used in fine work, perhaps even related to stone-tool production reports the University of Reading.
In the peer-reviewed study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe systematically examining wooden remains from the site and identifying clear chopping and carving marks on the two standout objects. Their findings push direct evidence for handheld wooden tool use back by at least 40,000 years.
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Overview of 940/673-39. Fragments 1 through 4 numbered in gray. Cutaway images show areas of evidence of use as a tool. (Harvati & Michailidis/PNAS)
Importance for Human Origins Research
The Middle Pleistocene was a pivotal period when more complex behaviors and technologies emerge more clearly in the record. Yet for decades, that record has been biased toward what preserves best - stone. Finds like Marathousa 1 help correct that imbalance, showing that wooden implements were likely part of everyday problem-solving and survival hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The researchers also note a striking context detail: a separate piece of alder wood at the site bears claw marks from a large carnivore, suggesting humans and dangerous competitors were active in the same landscape. That kind of overlap - tools, butchered animals, and predator traces - adds texture to a scene that otherwise risks feeling abstract at 430,000 years remove.
Top image: 430,000-year-old wooden tool from Marathousa 1, Greece. Source: Katerina Harvati, Dimitris Michailidis/PNAS
By Gary Manners
References
Milks, A. 2026. Evidence for the earliest hominin use of wooden handheld tools found at Marathousa 1 (Greece). Available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123
University of Reading. 2026. Earliest evidence of wooden tools used by humans. Available at: https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2026/Research-News/Earliest-evidence-of-wooden-tools-used-by-humans
Yirka, B. 2026. Scientists recover the oldest wooden tools from a site in Greece. Available at: https://phys.org/news/2026-01-scientists-recover-oldest-wooden-tools.html
