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

Abstract Early Palaeolithic wooden implements are exceptionally rare. The best known are the spears and throwing sticks from Schöningen, Germany dated to ca. 300–330 thousand years (kyr) ago 1,2 and the 171-kyr old digging sticks from Poggetti Vecchi, Italy 3 . Here, we report a unique assemblage of 35 wooden implements from the site of Gantangqing, southwestern China, which was found associated with stone tools, antler soft hammers and cut-marked bones, and is dated to ca. 361–250 kyr at 95% probability. The wooden implements include digging sticks and complete, small, hand-held pointed tools. The tips of several had starch grains of plants with starch-rich rhizomes. We suggest that most of these tools were used for digging the rhizomes of sub-aquatic plants on the edges of an ancient lake. This discovery provides the earliest tangible evidence for the exploitation of sub-surface plant foods in the Middle Pleistocene. It also highlights the probable role of plant foods (especially underground storage organs [USOs]) in sub-tropical and tropical environments in which a wide variety of edible plants were available, and implies that hominins had a detailed knowledge of which plants, and which parts of plants, were edible. These tools also show that organic materials played an important role in Middle Pleistocene technology, and the sophistication of many of these tools off-sets the seemingly “primitive” design of stone tools in the East Asian Early Palaeolithic.