[alecbz]

> Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable .... this find is most notable for its preservation.

This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no?

> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.

[throwup238]

That subheading is complete nonsense and I can't think of a single charitable reading of that sentence that in any way makes sense. Archaeologists have known that our ancestors have been making tools for over a million years since the Acheulean industry was conclusively dated in the 1850s. It took half a century for archaeologists to figure that out after William Smith invented stratigraphy. Scientists didn't even know what an isotope was yet.

The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing):

> Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1]

Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool with a secure context [2] was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [3]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123

[2] This is a very important term of art in archaeology. It means that the artefact was excavated by a qualified team of archaeologists that painstakingly recorded every little detail of the excavation so that the dating can be validated using several different methods (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years)

[3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...