Archaeologists have unearthed an assemblage of 35 wooden tools — digging sticks and small, complete, hand-held pointed tools — at the Early Paleolithic site of Gantangqing in southwestern China. This discovery reveals that hominins who used these tools crafted the wooden implements not for hunting, but for digging and processing plants.

The wooden tools found at the site of Gantangqing in China. Image credit: Liu et al., doi: 10.1126/science.adr8540.

Although early humans have worked with wood for over a million years, wooden artifacts are quite rare in the archaeological record, particularly during the Early and Middle Pleistocene.

Most ancient wooden tools have been found in Africa and western Eurasia, with notable examples that include spears and throwing sticks from Germany and the UK, dating back 300,000 to 400,000 years, as well as structural elements like interlocking logs from Zambia and wooden planks and digging sticks from sites in Israel and Italy.

While the long-standing bamboo hypothesis argues that early East Asian populations relied on bamboo for toolmaking, archaeological evidence for organic material-based tools from the region is scarce.

In new research, Dr. Jian-Hui Liu from the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and colleagues examined a wide range of artifacts from the Gantangqing site in southwestern China.

Among these are 35 wooden artifacts that exhibit clear evidence of intentional shaping and use, including signs of carving, smoothing, and wear, suggesting that they were purposefully crafted by hominins.

These tools, most of which were fashioned from pine, range from large two-handed digging sticks to smaller hand-held implements, and even include hook-like tools potentially used for cutting plant roots.

“Compared to other well-known contemporaneous wooden tool sites in Europe, which are generally characterized by medium-sized hunting gear, Gantangqing stands out for its broader and more diverse array of small, hand-held tools designed primarily for digging up and processing plants,” the researchers said.

“The sophistication of these wooden tools underscores the importance of organic artifacts in interpreting early human behavior, particularly in regions where stone tools alone suggest a more ‘primitive’ technological landscape.”

A paper on the findings was published today in the journal Science.

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Jian-Hui Liu et al. 2025. 300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing, southwest China. Science 389 (6755): 78-83; doi: 10.1126/science.adr8540