Archaeologists Found a 476,000-Year-Old Wooden Structure. No One Knows Who Built It.

At least 476,000 years old, the logs are the earliest known wooden structure. Since stone endures while other building materials erode away, it’s long been assumed that our most ancient ancestors worked exclusively with stone tools and created only stone structures. It appeared to be the remains of a wooden structure, cut and shaped with stone tools, and buried beside it were several more tools made of wood. It’s one of the few wooden artifacts to survive from half a million years ago—and it’s also the earliest known wooden structure built by human hands. The remnants of the newly discovered wooden structure hadn’t been exposed to the degrading effects of oxygen because it was buried in river sediments for millennia, and the silica minerals in the water helped give it the strength to last.