Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool

The oldest known wooden tools have been found in an opencast mine in Greece. They are 430,000 years old and were made by an unidentified species of ancient human – perhaps the ancestors of Neanderthals.

Prehistoric wooden artefacts are “very scarce”, says archaeologist Dirk Leder at the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in Hannover, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Every single find is welcome.”

Yet it is likely that our extinct relatives used wooden tools for millions of years. “It might be the oldest type of tool that anybody used,” says Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Poor preservation and the difficulty of identifying wooden artefacts have limited our knowledge of them.

Harvati and her colleagues discovered the tools at a site called Marathousa 1, which they first identified in 2013 in the Megalopolis basin in southern Greece. An opencast lignite mine had exposed layers of sediments, some of them almost a million years old. “It allows us to access time periods and sediments that would otherwise have been buried,” says Harvati.

During excavations between 2013 and 2019, the team found the near-complete skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) that showed signs of butchery, along with remains of other animals and plants and more than 2000 stone tools. The animals and plants are a mix of aquatic and near-aquatic species, including hippopotamuses, indicating that the site preserves an ancient lake shore.

The researchers dated Marathousa 1 using multiple methods, including identifying traces of past shifts in Earth’s magnetic field and testing when grains were last exposed to sunlight. In 2024, they concluded that the remains are about 430,000 years old, dating back to a time when the climate was forbidding. “It’s one of the worst glacial episodes in Pleistocene Europe,” says Harvati. The Megalopolis basin may have acted as a refuge, with a cold but less extreme climate.

Out of 144 pieces of wood, the team identified two tools. One is an 81-centimetre-long stick made from the trunk of an alder tree. Most of the bark had been removed and there are many carving and chopping marks, indicating that the wood had been purposely shaped. One end is more rounded and may be a handle, while the other end is flattened and shows signs of fraying and splintering.

It may have been used for digging, says Harvati, for example to find underground tubers that could be used as food. But it may also have had other uses. She points out that it was found within the elephant bones, hinting that the hominins might have used it to help process the carcass. “I don’t really know what they were doing with it,” she says.

The second tool is more enigmatic. It is a small piece of willow or poplar, 5.7cm long and 1.2 cm to 1.5 cm across. Again, it has been stripped of bark and has marks that suggest it was purposely shaped. “This is a completely new type of wooden tool,” says Harvati. It may have been used for retouching stone tools, but “we don’t really know what it was for”, she says.

The stick is an extremely convincing example of a wooden tool, says Leder. He is less sure about the second item because it isn’t clear what it might have been used for. “My first question would be, is this actually a complete item, or is it rather a fragment of something?” he says.

No hominins have been found at Marathousa 1. Given the age of the site, it is probably too early for our species, and possibly too early for the Neanderthals who lived in Europe before us. “A first hypothesis is that what we have here is a type of pre-Neanderthal, or Homo heidelbergensis,” says Harvati. But it would be foolish to assume, she says, because Greece was a place where many groups of hominins passed through.

Other examples of ancient wooden tools include the Clacton Spear in the UK, which may be about 400,000 years old. Wooden spears found in Schöningen, Germany, were thought to be of a similar age, but Leder says multiple dating methods have put them closer to 300,000 years old and a study published in May 2025 even suggested they were just 200,000 years old. The only wooden artefacts older than those from Marathousa 1 are from Kalambo Falls in Zambia, dating back 476,000 years. These seem to be the remains of larger structures or buildings.

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