The oldest wooden structure
Two shaped logs joined with a cut notch in Zambia, 476,000 years old, predate our species.
- When
- Known to
- ± 23 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Waterlogged sediments at Kalambo Falls preserved wood that would normally have rotted: two interlocking logs, deliberately shaped, with a notch cut into the upper one so it sat across the lower. Published in 2023, they are the oldest known wooden structure — possibly a platform or walkway in a wet environment. Because wood almost never survives, the entire Palaeolithic record is biased toward stone, and finds like this hint at how much technology has simply decayed.