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

作者：Jian-Hui Liu, Qi-Jun Ruan, Junyi Ge, Yong‐Jiang Huang, Xiaoling Zhang, Jia Liu, Shufeng Li, Hui Shên, Yuan Wang, Thomas A. Stidham, Cheng-Long Deng, Sheng‐Hua Li, Fei Han, Yingyu Jin, Kieran O’Gorman, Bo Li, Robin Dennell, Xing Gao · 发表于：Science · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1126/science.adr8540 · 被引用次数：10 · 研究领域：Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology、Archaeology and ancient environmental studies、Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies

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.