Someone made very sophisticated wooden tools in China 300,000 years ago, and it might have been Denisovans or even Homo erectus.
The digging sticks, curved root-slicers, and a handful of somewhat puzzling implements were all found at a lakeshore site called Gantangqing. They are the oldest wooden tools from East Asia so far. All the previous Pleistocene tools found in the area were made from harder material like stone, bone, or antler. But logic suggests that hominins must have prepared and used softer materials as well. That thought led archaeologists to what’s called the Bamboo Hypothesis: the idea that during the Pleistocene, hominins (including our own species) might have used bamboo the way wood gets used elsewhere.
The jury’s still out on bamboo, because there’s no actual evidence of bamboo tools yet. What we now have, it turns out, are nearly three dozen tools made of wood.
