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Archaeologists have discovered the oldest wooden instruments ever located in East Asia. | Credit: bo li
Archaeologists have discovered 35 wooden instruments from the old stone era in China, which say they show an impressive craftsmanship, sophisticated cognitive skills and offer new insights for what ancient people may have eaten.
300,000-year instruments are the oldest wooden artifacts ever documented in East Asia, according to a study published on Thursday (July 3) in the magazine ScienceS These include digging sticks made of pine and hardwood, hooks for cutting roots and small, pointed tools for extracting edible plants from the ground.
“This discovery is exceptional because it retains a moment when early people use complex wooden tools to collect underground food resources,” a lead author of the study of the author AreProfessor at the Earth School, Atmospheric and Life Science at the University of Wallongong Australia, says in a statementS
The instruments date back to the early Paleolithic period, also known as the Old Stone Age (3,3 million to 300,000 years ago). The wooden artifacts of this time are extremely rare due to organic decomposition and only a handful of archeological sites have gave similar objectsAccording to the new study. But most of these objects including Copies of Schöning in Germanywere designed for hunting – these newly discovered tools were made for digging.
Researchers found instruments buried in oxygen -poor clay sludge on the shore of an ancient lake in Gantangking, an archeological site in southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. The sediments maintained a deliberate evaluation and scraping of the instruments, as well as the plant and soils remains at some of the edges that give researchers the clues for the function of the tools.
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“Our results suggest that hominins in Gantangqing have made strategic use of food resources on the lake,” the researchers wrote in the study. “They made planned visits to the lake and brought with them made tools of selected wood for the operation of underground tubers, rhizomes or hoods.”
Such planned visits show that 300,000 years ago, human ancestors in East Asia made and used tools for specific purposes, demonstrating a significant forecast and intention, the researchers wrote. The artifacts also suggest that these early people have had a good understanding of which plants and parts of the plants were edible, the researchers note.
The tools were preserved thanks to oxygen -poor clay sediments. | Credit: bo li
“The instruments show a level of planning and craftsmanship, which disputes the idea that East Asian hominins were technologically conservative,” Li said in the statement. This idea is rooted in previous discoveries in East Asia by stone instruments that seemed “primitive” compared to instruments found in Western Eurasia and Africa, according to the study.
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Researchers date the tools using a technique developed by LI that uses infrared luminescence and another method called Electronic spin resonancewhich measures the age of the material through the number of electrons caught in the defects of crystals due to exposure to natural radiation. Both produce estimates showing that wooden instruments are between 250,000 and 361,000 years old.
The plant remains on the instruments are not identified as their decomposition is too advanced, but other plants remain in gantangqing show that early people there eat fruits, pine nuts, hazelnuts, kiwi and water tubers, according to the study.
“The discovery disputes previous assumptions about the early adaptation of man,” does he say in the statement. “While modern European sites (such as Shönting in Germany) focused on hunting large mammals, Gantangking reveals a unique strategy for survival on a plant -based basis.”