300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing, southwest China.

Evidence of Early and Middle Pleistocene wooden implements is exceptionally rare, and existing evidence has been found only in Africa and western Eurasia. We report an assemblage of 35 wooden implements from the site of Gantangqing in southwestern China, which was found associated with stone tools, antler billets (soft hammers), and cut-marked bones and is dated from ~361,000 to ~250,000 years at a 95% confidence interval. The wooden implements include digging sticks and small, complete, hand-held pointed tools. The sophistication of many of these tools offsets the seemingly "primitive" aspects of stone tool assemblages in the East Asian Early Paleolithic. This discovery suggests that wooden implements might have played an important role in hominin survival and adaptation in Middle Pleistocene East Asia. Editor's summary: Wooden tools from the early Paleolithic Period are extremely rare, with only two previously known discoveries, one in Europe and one in Africa. In both cases, the tools were hunting implements, spears, and spear tips. Liu et al. describe several wooden tools from a 300,000-year-old site in China. These tools were not used for hunting, but rather appear to have been designed to obtain and process plant foods. This finding shows that wooden tools were being used across a much wider range at the time, and also provides insight into how cultures from different environments may have developed locally useful implements. —Sacha Vignieri [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]