The Rarest Wooden Artefacts Ever Found

Found a giant stick in the woods. Uh, there has never been a human that didn't use wood as a tool. I found some pretty graphic footage of a chimpanzeee fishing a squirrel out of a log. Poor little chap.

But it really illustrates just how long humans have been using tools. All apes use wood as tools in some way. There's never been a human that didn't know how to use wood as a tool um for anything else. Um, I know this is a bit of a cliche, but but it is really true.

If wood preserved better, we we wouldn't consider the stone age the stone age. We'd call [music] it the wood age. It just doesn't survive archaeologically. It's going to rot.

Look, it's only been in the ground for probably a month. It's already rotting away. However, in rare circumstances, rare rare circumstances, [music] wood does survive. And yeah, I've been finding some really cool examples of extremely ancient [music] wood.

Okay, take a look at this. What you are looking at is a photo of a piece of wood recovered from Calambo Falls in Zambia on the shores of Lake Tangan. It's actually the world's second deepest lake, which I did not know at all. Goes down to 1,471 m in places.

Uh, pretty crazy. What you are looking at, though, is the remains of some form of ancient joint. You can see there's a pole extending up into this little crevice. It's actually like a carved joint.

[music] You can see it most clearly here. There's really been a notch that's been taken out of this wood. What's truly incredible is their age, though. They were dated to roughly 476,000 years ago.

That's so long ago. Which means it wasn't modern humans doing this, but probably someone more like this person here. This is the cabway cranium found in the cab mine in Zambia just about 700 km south of where those wooden artifacts were excavated at 300 years old. It's about the same age as the earliest modern human remains we have from Jeel Hood in Morocco in the north of Africa.

Um but clearly it belongs to a different population, right? It's got these super thick brow ridges, very shallow forehead. The cranium is really more archaic. It's really typical of this time period we call the muddle in the middle....