Zambian timbers show deliberate carpentry at least 476,000 years ago

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Key facts

• Two large pieces of timber were excavated in 2019 at Kalambo Falls, Zambia, beside the Kalambo River, buried in permanently waterlogged sediment.
• The timbers lay one across the other with a deliberately cut notch where they met; surface-mark experiments were used to test whether the shaping was anthropogenic, and the team concluded the wood was worked with tools as a deliberate join.
• The wood was beyond the useful range of radiocarbon dating, so the surrounding sediment was dated instead, giving an age of at least 476,000 years with an uncertainty of about 23,000 years, and possibly closer to 554,000 years.
• The find contains no evidence identifying the builders, and the date is more than 100,000 years earlier than the earliest known Homo sapiens.
• Researchers discuss a range of possibilities for the structure - a platform, a walkway, or the foundation of something larger such as a house - without settling on one.
• Other worked wood turned up at Kalambo from later layers; in the 1950s the archaeologist J. Desmond Clark found another notch log at the site and suspected it also came from a structure.
• Comparators cited include rings of stone and bone from roughly 400,000 years ago at Taing in France and Bilzingsleben in Germany, read as hut bases.

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