https://www.iflscience.com/300000-year-old-wooden-tools-made-by-denisovans-discovered-in-china-79857

A remarkable collection of wooden tools dated to
around 300,000 years ago has been discovered at an
archaeological site in southwest China. Specially
designed to harvest vegetation, the assemblage
reveals how prehistoric hominids in this
subtropical environment relied heavily on plants
for their diet, while also highlighting the
surprising technological skill of East Asian
humans at a time when the region was supposedly
inhabited by primitive communities.
...



https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr8540
300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing,
southwest China

Editor’s summary
Wooden tools from the early Paleolithic Period are
extremely rare, with only two previously known
discoveries, one in Europe and one in Africa. In
both cases, the tools were hunting implements,
spears, and spear tips. Liu et al. describe several
wooden tools from a 300,000-year-old site in China.
These tools were not used for hunting, but rather
appear to have been designed to obtain and process
plant foods. This finding shows that wooden tools
were being used across a much wider range at the
time, and also provides insight into how cultures
from different environments may have developed
locally useful implements. —Sacha Vignieri


Abstract
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.

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