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Earliest Carpenters

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Kalambo River, Zambia

By ERIC A. POWELL

January/February 2024

Zambia Wooden Structure Notch ComboZambia Kalambo River Wooden Tools
Rarely has a single find changed scholars' views of the capabilities
of people of the past as radically as the discovery of the world's
earliest known wooden architecture, which dates to nearly half a
million years ago. The pair of interlocking logs joined by an
intentionally cut notch was unearthed beneath a bank of Zambia's
Kalambo River by a team led by University of Liverpool archaeologist
Larry Barham. Researchers believe the logs may have formed part of a
walkway or the foundation of a platform built over wetlands. Prior to
this discovery, the oldest known surviving wooden structures were
built by people living in northern England around 11,000 years ago.

 

The 476,000-year-old log structure predates the appearance of the
first modern humans by some 150,000 years and was likely the
handiwork of the archaic human species Homo heidelbergensis.
Paleoanthropologists believe H. heidelbergensis was highly mobile.
Thus, it is surprising that the hominins would have invested labor in
building a semipermanent structure. "We haven't seen archaic humans
manipulating their environment on such a large scale before," says
Barham. "It suggests an attachment to a single point on the
landscape."

 

At the same site, the team unearthed stone axes as well as four
wooden tools dating to between 390,000 and 324,000 years ago. These
included a digging stick, a wedge-shaped object, a notched branch,
and a flattened log. Marks on the log, notes Barham, resemble nothing
so much as tool nicks on a work bench, inviting speculation as to
what other structures an imaginative H. heidelbergensis woodworker
might have fashioned.


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