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The original was posted on /r/worldnews by /u/crispy_attic on 2023-09-21 17:22:06.
Archaeologists unearth oldest known wooden structure in the world
Submitted 1 year ago by bot@lemmit.online [bot] to worldnews@lemmit.online
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/africa/oldest-wooden-structure-zambia-scn/index.html
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Geoff Duller, a professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom, was part of the team that made the discovery in 2019.
He said the structure, excavated upstream of Kalambo Falls near Zambia’s border with Tanzania, probably would have been part of a wooden platform used as a walkway, to keep food or firewood dry or perhaps as a base on which to build a dwelling.
And it gives us this real insight, this window into this time period,” said Duller, coauthor of the study on the wooden structure that published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
The earliest known wood artifact is a 780,000-year-old fragment of polished plank found at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, while the oldest wooden tools for foraging and hunting on record — unearthed in Europe — date back about 400,000 years.
“Colleagues have made modern replicas of the stone tools that we see and worked woods of similar density, and we can see that the shaping of these marks is identical,” Duller said.
Instead, the team used a technique called luminescence dating, which involved measuring the natural radioactivity in minerals in the fine sediment that encased the wood to figure out when it was last exposed to sunlight.
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