We call it the Stone Age. The name took hold in the 19th century, when the first prehistorians classified remains according to the material that had best withstood time: knapped stone, then polished stone, then metals. But if we could travel back and walk into a PalaeolithicPalaeolithicThe oldest and longest period of prehistory (c. 3.3 Ma–12,000 BC), defined by chipped stone tools and a hunter-gatherer way of life.→ hunters' camp, something else entirely would probably strike us. We would see wood everywhere. Spears leaning against the rock wall, handles, digging sticks, trays, poles holding up shelters, fires kept going day and night, bark containers. Stone would occupy only a small corner of that scene.
Wood is the most widely used material in all of human history, and yet the least known in prehistoryPrehistoryThe span of human history before the invention of writing, from the Palaeolithic to the Metal Ages, known mainly through material remains.→. It rots, burns, breaks up and almost always vanishes without trace. The few wooden objects that have come down to us survived by a miracle, under exceptional conditions. But each one of them changes the way we see the past. From logs joined together nearly half a million years ago in Zambia to the SchöningenSchöningenGerman site that yielded eight wooden throwing spears about 300,000 years old, among the oldest known wooden weapons.→ spears, from the Neanderthal impressions of the Abric Romaní to the dugout canoes of the Mesolithic, this feature sets out in search of the wooden world that stone has made us forget.
The great forgotten material of prehistory
To measure the scale of the problem, we need only compare with the hunter-gatherer societies observed by ethnographers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among Aboriginal Australians, the San of the Kalahari or the peoples of the Far North, most equipment is made from plant or animal materials: wood, bark, fibre, leather and bone. Stone tools often serve only to make and maintain these objects. A digging stickdigging stickPointed wooden tool used to dig the ground to extract roots, tubers or small animals.→, a spear-thrower, a shield, a container, a canoe: none of it would survive a few centuries in the ground.
Archaeologists call this a preservation bias. At an ordinary Palaeolithic site, all that remains is mineral: knapped stones, sometimes bones, more rarely charcoal. Everything else, which probably made up most of the material culture, has disappeared. A prehistorian reconstructing a group's life from its flints alone is like someone trying to describe a modern house from the screws and nails found in its ruins.
This absence long weighed on our image of early humans. Without wood, they were credited with a rudimentary technology, limited to a few struck stones. The discoveries of recent decades show, on the contrary, that woodworking is as old as stone knappingknappingThe set of operations for fracturing a stone block to extract flakes or blades.→, and that it probably played at least as important a role in the evolution of our technical abilities.
How can wood survive?
Wood is an organic material, made mainly of cellulose and lignin. Exposed to air, moisture and micro-organisms, it is broken down by fungi, bacteria and insects within a few years or decades. For it to last tens or hundreds of thousands of years, these processes must be halted.
The most common case is that of waterlogged, oxygen-free environments: peatPeatA waterlogged organic soil formed by accumulated plants; it seals and remarkably preserves wood and ancient remains.→ bogs, lake beds, riverbanks and clay sediments. In these anaerobic conditions, the organisms responsible for decay cannot act. This is how the Schöningen spears, buried in the deposits of an ancient lake, were preserved, as were the canoes and bows of the Mesolithic, recovered from the peat bogs of northern Europe.
Other extreme environments play the same protective role. The cold of glaciers and permafrostPermafrostPermanently frozen ground; in the Altai, water seeping into kurgans froze into ice lenses that preserved bodies, textiles and wood for millennia.→ preserved the equipment of Ötzi the Iceman and the objects in the Scythian tombs of the Altai. The aridity of deserts has preserved wooden objects in Egypt and the American Southwest. Finally, there are indirect forms of preservation: charring, which turns wood into almost indestructible charcoal, and mineralisation, when minerals replace or mould the organic matter. It was this last process that made it possible to find, at the Abric Romaní in Catalonia, the hollow impressions of Neanderthal tools in travertine.7
The first traces: invisible wood
Even before finding wooden objects, archaeologists detected their existence indirectly. Under the microscope, the edges of stone tools retain wear traces characteristic of the material worked: a bright polish, striations, rounding. As early as the 1980s, these use-wearuse-wearMicro-traces left on a tool by its use, studied through use-wear analysis to reconstruct its function.→ analyses showed that some stone flakes more than one and a half million years old, from East AfricaAfricaThe cradle of humankind: the continent where the first hominins appeared, then Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago, before the expansion to the rest of the world.→, had been used to scrape or cut wood. The earliest members of the genus Homo were therefore already working this material.
Plant residues preserved on tool edges, such as fibres or phytoliths, the tiny silica particles produced by plants, confirm these observations. And at a few exceptional sites, fragments of wood themselves have been found. At Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, sediments about 780,000 years old yielded pieces of wood, including a plank with a polished surface, associated with AcheuleanAcheuleanLower Palaeolithic technical culture characterised by hand axes, present across three continents.→ handaxes. These remains are hard to interpret, but they bear witness to an ancient familiarity between hominins and trees.
Kalambo Falls: the world's oldest construction
In 2023, a discovery pushed the history of wooden architecture back by several hundred thousand years. At Kalambo Falls in Zambia, near the Tanzanian border, the team of Larry Barham of the University of Liverpool uncovered two logs deliberately joined together. The upper log had been shaped and notched to fit over the lower one, at right angles. Tool marks are visible on both pieces.1
Using luminescence datingLuminescence datingA method dating the last heating or light exposure of sediments and minerals by measuring energy trapped in the crystal.→, which measures the time elapsed since the sand grains surrounding the remains were last exposed to light, the researchers established that the structure is at least 476,000 years old. It may have served as the base of a raised platform, a walkway or foundations in an area that flooded regularly. The same site produced four other wooden objects dated to between 390,000 and 324,000 years ago: a wedge, a digging stick, a cut log and a notched branch.1
"Forget the label 'Stone Age', look at what these people were doing," Larry Barham summed up.1 At a time so remote that we do not even know which human species lived at Kalambo, hominins were able to join pieces of wood to modify their surroundings. It is a capacity for planning and building previously reserved for much more recent periods.
Clacton and Marathousa: the first points
The oldest known wooden weapon was discovered in 1911 by an amateur prehistorian, Samuel Hazzledine Warren, on the beach at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. It is the tip of a spear carved from yew, about 37 centimetres long and dated to around 400,000 years ago. Warren first thought he had found a piece of antler, before recognising a shaped point.4
For decades, many specialists doubted this interpretation. It seemed impossible that such early hominins could have designed and made a hunting weapon. Some saw it instead as a digging stick. It was not until the discovery of the Schöningen spears in the 1990s that the Clacton point came to be generally accepted as the tip of a spear, probably a thrusting weapon held in the hand.4
More recently, the Greek site of Marathousa 1Marathousa 1Open-air Palaeolithic site in the Megalopolis basin, Greece, on the shore of an ancient lake, where the oldest handheld wooden tools were found.→, in the Megalopolis basin, has yielded worked wooden objects around 430,000 years old, preserved in the sediments of an ancient lake. They rank among the oldest known portable wooden tools in Europe and confirm that Middle PleistocenePleistoceneThe geological epoch of the great ice ages (c. 2.6 Ma–11,700 BP), spanning most of human prehistory.→Middle PleistoceneGeological subperiod (about 770,000 to 126,000 years ago) marked by growing behavioural complexity among hominins.→ humans had already mastered the shaping of this material.
Schöningen, the arsenal of horse hunters
Between 1994 and 1999, in an open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme made one of the most important discoveries in the history of prehistoric research. In the deposits of an ancient lake, among thousands of horse bones bearing cut marks, his team uncovered about ten perfectly preserved wooden spears.3
The complete spears measure between 1.84 and 2.53 metres, with diameters of 29 to 47 millimetres. Most are made of spruce, one of pine. They were shaped with remarkable care: the point was cut from the hardest part of the trunk, at the base of the tree, and the centre of gravity lies towards the front, as on a modern javelin. Two shorter sticks, pointed at both ends, may have served as throwing sticks.3
The age of these weapons has varied a great deal. First estimated at 380,000 to 400,000 years, they were later brought down to about 300,000 years. In 2025, a new study published in Science Advances, based on the racemisation of amino acids preserved in the opercula of small freshwater snails, dated them to around 200,000 years ago.2 If this age is confirmed, they would have been made by early NeanderthalsNeanderthalsA fossil humanity of Eurasia, robust and cold-adapted, extinct around 40,000 years before present.→. Whatever their exact age, the Schöningen spears showed once and for all that Middle Pleistocene humans were organised hunters, capable of planning a collective hunt for wild horses.
Throwing spears or thrusting spears?
The Schöningen spears revived an old debate: did hunters of the Lower and Middle PalaeolithicMiddle PalaeolithicA Palaeolithic period (c. 300,000 to 40,000 years ago) associated mainly with Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, marked by Levallois tools.→ throw their weapons, or did they strike their prey at close quarters? The question matters, because hunting at a distance greatly reduces the risks and requires particular skills of coordination and aim.
Experiments have tried to settle it. Experienced javelin throwers hurled replicas of Schöningen spear II 15 to 20 metres. Their weight and balance are close to those of modern javelins.3 Other pieces, such as spear VI, which does not taper towards the back, are rather interpreted as thrusting weapons. The hunters probably had both kinds of weapon, used according to circumstances.
Lehringen, the spear and the elephant
Another striking piece of evidence comes from Lehringen, also in Lower Saxony. In 1948, workers there uncovered the skeleton of a straight-tusked elephant, between whose ribs lay a yew-wood spear nearly 2.40 metres long. Dated to around 120,000 years ago, it was made by Neanderthals.46
The context suggests it was used to bring down the animal, perhaps bogged down at the edge of a lake. The image of a group of hunters taking on a pachyderm weighing several tonnes with wooden spears sums up the boldness of these societies.
Fire, the woodworker's tool
Working wood with stone tools takes time and patience. But hominins soon discovered a valuable ally: fire. By carefully heating a piece of wood, one can straighten it, harden it, or make its charred parts easier to scrape away. The technique is still used by many hunting peoples to make points and digging sticks.
The oldest evidence of this practice comes from Poggetti Vecchi in Tuscany. This hot-spring site, dated to about 171,000 years ago, has yielded several dozen boxwood sticks associated with elephant remains. Analysis of their surfaces showed that they had been partly charred in a controlled way, then scraped with stone tools to obtain a regular shape. The researchers interpret them as digging sticks, perhaps also used for other tasks.5
The choice of boxwood is no accident. It is one of the hardest and densest woods in Europe, highly resistant to wear. As at the Abric Romaní, where Scots pine and juniper were chosen according to use, the Neanderthals of Poggetti Vecchi knew the properties of different woods and selected their raw material carefully.
Neanderthals, master woodworkers
Long described as brutish, Neanderthals now appear as accomplished woodworkers. The most eloquent example comes from the Abric Romaní at Capellades in Catalonia. In this rock shelterRock shelterA shallow cavity at the foot of a cliff or under a rocky overhang, offering natural shelter; a favoured site of prehistoric habitation and rock art.→, lime-rich water moulded in travertine the wooden objects left behind by Neanderthals between 62,000 and 40,000 years ago. A study published in October 2026 identified two spears 2.45 and 1.99 metres long, a club carved from a single block, bark trays set near the hearths, digging sticks and a pole more than five metres long, probably supporting a windbreak around a resting area.7
At Aranbaltza in the Basque Country, a Neanderthal digging stick made of yew has been dated to around 90,000 years ago. And across Europe, Neanderthals fixed their stone tools to wooden handles using a glue they made by heating birch bark. This birch tar, found at several sites, implies remarkable control of temperature. Recent experiments even suggest that it had antibacterial properties, which could have made it a remedy for treating wounds.13
The handle was a crucial invention. By fixing a stone point to the end of a wooden shaft, one creates a composite tool, more effective and versatile than either of its parts. The technique, attested among Neanderthals as well as early African Homo sapiensHomo sapiensThe present-day human species, which emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago, the only surviving human lineage after the extinction of Neanderthals and Denisovans.→, marks a decisive step in the history of technology.
Sapiens and the revolution in projectile weapons
With the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe more than 40,000 years ago, wooden equipment became even more varied. Hunters of the Upper PalaeolithicUpper PalaeolithicThe final phase of the Palaeolithic (c. 45,000 to 10,000 years ago), marked by Homo sapiens in Europe, art, ornaments and a succession of cultures (AurignacianAurignacianThe earliest culture of the European Upper Palaeolithic (c. 43,000–33,000 BC), tied to the arrival of Homo sapiens and the first artworks.→, GravettianGravettianAn Upper Palaeolithic culture (c. 33,000–21,000 BC) spanning from the Atlantic to Siberia, famous for its ivory female figurines ("Venuses") and, at Dolní Věstonice, the oldest fired ceramics.→, SolutreanSolutreanA European Upper Palaeolithic culture (c. 22,000–17,000 BC), remarkable for its leaf-shaped lithic points worked with flat retouch. Contemporary with the second art phase of Cosquer Cave.→, MagdalenianMagdalenianThe last great Upper Palaeolithic culture (c. 17,000–12,000 BC), the peak of cave art (Lascaux).→).→ used the spear-thrower, a stick fitted with a hook that extends the arm and makes it possible to hurl a dart much further and with much greater force. The surviving examples are often carved from reindeer antler, but many were probably made of wood and have simply disappeared.
Then came the bow, perhaps one of the most important inventions of prehistory. The oldest direct evidence of wooden arrows comes from Stellmoor, near Hamburg, where reindeer hunters abandoned around a hundred pine arrow shafts in the sediments of an ancient lake some 12,000 years ago. But much older stone projectile points, found in Africa and Asia, suggest that the bow may have been invented far earlier, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the Stellmoor hunters drew their strings.
Wood was also used for building. At Ohalo II, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, hunter-gatherersHunter-gatherersA way of life based on hunting, fishing and gathering wild resources, without farming or herding; it dominated almost the whole of human history.→ built brushwood huts around 23,000 years ago, and their floors have yielded thousands of seeds and the remains of plant bedding. Everywhere, the people of the Upper Palaeolithic sheltered under structures of wood, hides and plants of which almost nothing remains.
This scarcity of remains explains a paradox. The Upper Palaeolithic is the best-documented period of European prehistory, with its painted caves, its ornaments and its tools of bone and antler. Yet its objects of plant wood remain almost entirely unknown, apart from a few charred pieces or items preserved in waterlogged settings. Their presence can nonetheless be sensed everywhere: in the hafting traces on stone points, in hearths, in the post holes of dwellings, and even in the gestures depicted on cave walls. The wooden world of the painters of Lascaux and Chauvet is, for us, a world of shadows.
Paddles and canoes of the Mesolithic
At the end of the last glacial period, a little under 12,000 years ago, forests reconquered Europe. The hunter-gatherers of the MesolithicMesolithicThe period between the Palaeolithic and the NeolithicNeolithicThe "New Stone Age": a period marked by farming, herding, settlement and pottery, from around 10,000 BC.→ (c. 10,000–6,000 BC in Europe), still based on hunting and gathering.→ now lived among the trees, along lakes, rivers and coasts. Wood became more than ever the basic material of their existence. And the peat bogs of northern Europe have preserved an exceptional number of their objects.
At Star Carr in Yorkshire, on the edge of a former lake, hunters built wooden platforms along the shore more than 11,000 years ago and left behind a paddle, one of the oldest known.10 It bears witness to lake navigation that was already well established. Star Carr is one of the most intensively studied Mesolithic sites in Europe: excavated since the late 1940s, it has also yielded barbed points of antler, beads of amber and shale, and evidence that the inhabitants deliberately burned the reeds along the shore, perhaps to improve access to the water or to attract game to fresh growth. The same site has yielded worked timbers, the remains of what may be one of the oldest houses in Britain, and a remarkable series of red deer antler frontlets, all reminders that these lakeside communities lived in close partnership with the forest and the water.
The oldest boat in the world
Sometimes the boats themselves have survived. In 1955, during the construction of a motorway near the village of Pesse in the Netherlands, workers uncovered a dugout canoe carved from the trunk of a Scots pine. It is 2.98 metres long and 44 centimetres wide, and radiocarbon dating places it between 8040 and 7510 BC. It is the oldest known boat in the world.8
To make a dugout canoe, a trunk was hollowed out using fire and tools of stone or bone, by gradually burning the wood and then scraping away the charred parts. These simple boats made it possible to fish, to hunt waterfowl, to carry materials and to travel quickly along waterways. They played an essential role in the settlement of the wetlands of Mesolithic Europe. Some archaeologists have questioned whether the small Pesse vessel was truly seaworthy, but experiments with a replica showed that it could indeed be paddled, at least on calm water.
The first bows
The Danish peat bogs have yielded the oldest known bows in the world. Discovered at Holmegaard, in southern Zealand, they date to around 7000 BC. Carved from elm, they generally measure between 1.70 and 1.80 metres. Their limbs are wide and parallel, their grip narrow and stiff, and the bow bends along its whole length right to the tips.9
The choice of elm is easily explained: yew, considered the finest bow wood in Europe, did not reach Denmark until the 3rd millennium BC. Mesolithic archers therefore used the best wood available, and their design was so effective that modern archers still take inspiration from it to make long-distance flight bows.9 Making a good bow requires knowing how to choose a tree, split it along the grain, let the wood season, and then patiently thin it so that both limbs bend evenly. It is specialist know-how, handed down from generation to generation.
With the bow, hunting changed scale. An arrow shot from a bow can reach prey several tens of metres away with great accuracy. The game of the Mesolithic forests, red deer, roe deer, wild boar and aurochs, could now be hunted from a hide or by stalking, often with the help of dogs. FlintFlintA hard, brittle siliceous rock, knapped by prehistoric people to produce blades, points and sharp tools.→ arrowheads, tiny and standardised, known as microliths, are the most common trace of this revolution, but it was the wood of the bow and the shafts that made it so effective.
The Neolithic, a civilisation of wood
With the arrival of farming in Europe from the 7th millennium BC onwards, wood took on an even greater role. The first farmers cleared forests with polished stone axes, built large timber-framed houses, and made ards, sickle handles, containers, spoons and combs. The great Danubian longhouses, several tens of metres long, rested on hundreds of oak posts. Building a single one of them meant felling, trimming and transporting dozens of trees, a collective effort that shaped both the landscape and the social life of the first villages.
Neolithic wells are among the most impressive wooden remains of the period. In Germany, several wells lined with oak planks, built around 5100 or 5000 BC, have been found almost intact thanks to the water that filled them. Their construction, as boxes of interlocking planks, reveals a highly sophisticated carpentry technique at a time when tools were still made of stone.
In wet regions, Neolithic communities also built wooden trackways to cross marshes. The most famous is the Sweet Track in Somerset, England. Thanks to dendrochronology, we know that the trees used to build it were felled in the winter of 3807 to 3806 BC. Almost two kilometres long, this walkway of planks laid on crossed stakes made it possible to cross the marshes of the Somerset Levels.12 The lake villages of the Alps, built on piles along the shores of lakes in Switzerland, Germany and Italy, have also yielded thousands of perfectly preserved wooden objects.
Ötzi, a wooden toolkit
Perhaps the most telling example of the importance of wood in the Neolithic is Ötzi, the Iceman found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Italy and Austria. He died around 5,300 years ago and was preserved, together with all his equipment, by the ice of the glacier.11
And this equipment was first and foremost made of wood. Ötzi carried an unfinished yew bow 1.82 metres long and a quiver containing arrow shafts of wayfaring tree and dogwood. His copper-bladed axe was hafted on a yew handle, his flint dagger set in an ash handle. He carried a backpack with a wooden frame and containers made of birch bark.11 Each object was made from the species best suited to its use: yew for its flexibility and strength, ash for its hardness, wayfaring tree for the straightness of its stems.
Without the ice, all that would have remained of Ötzi would be a few bones, a copper blade and some pieces of flint. This contrast sums up the whole difficulty of prehistoric archaeology: the vast majority of what our ancestors used has vanished, and we must reconstruct their world from what is left.
The gestures of the prehistoric woodworker
How was wood worked without metal? Stone tools offer a far richer range of gestures than one might imagine. To fell a young tree or cut a branch, it could be notched all the way round with a sharp flake and then snapped. To obtain a long straight piece, the trunk was split along the grain using wedges of wood or antler. To shape a point or a handle, the surface was patiently scraped with scrapers, notches and denticulates, stone tools whose edges were suited to the task.
Fire completed this toolkit. Heating a piece allowed it to be straightened or bent. Lightly charring a surface made it easier to scrape. Gradually burning out the inside of a trunk made it possible to hollow it into a container or a canoe. Experimental archaeology shows that a spear comparable to those from Schöningen takes several hours of work, and that a Holmegaard-type bow requires several days.
In the Neolithic, the polished stone axe and adze, hafted on wood, transformed what was possible. They made it possible to fell large trees, to square beams and to cut planks. Experiments have shown that a well-sharpened Neolithic axe can fell a medium-sized oak in less than an hour. It was this ability to work wood on a large scale that made the houses, wells and trackways of the first farmers possible.
Wood, the fuel of humanity
Before it was a building material, wood was a fuel. The control of fire, whose oldest probable traces date back more than a million years at Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, profoundly transformed the lives of hominins: cooking food, warmth, protection against predators, light that lengthened the day, and gathering around the hearth. All of this depended on the daily collection of large quantities of wood.
The charcoal found in prehistoric hearths is also one of the main sources of information about the forests of the past. Its study, known as anthracology, makes it possible to identify the species that were burned and to reconstruct the vegetation that surrounded the sites. At the Abric Romaní, for example, more than 90% of the charcoal comes from Scots pine, a sign that the shelter was surrounded by conifer woodland.7
The choice of fuel was not left to chance. Some woods burn quickly and give intense heat, others smoulder slowly and produce long-lasting embers, and still others give off smoke that is useful for drying or smoking meat. Present-day hunter-gatherers know these properties intimately, and everything suggests that their distant predecessors knew them too. Gathering firewood was probably one of the most time-consuming daily tasks of any prehistoric camp, shared among all members of the group, children included.
What present-day hunter-gatherers teach us
To imagine the place of wood in prehistoric life, archaeologists also turn to the hunter-gatherer societies observed by ethnographers. Among Aboriginal Australians, traditional equipment includes spears, spear-throwers, shields, digging sticks, boomerangs and wooden dishes, while stone tools are relatively few and serve mainly to make and maintain these objects. Among the San of the Kalahari, the bow, arrows, digging stick and containers are all made of wood or plant materials.
These comparisons cannot reconstruct the culture of a vanished group precisely, but they give an order of magnitude. In a hunter-gatherer society, stone often accounts for only a small part of the equipment. The rest, the bulk of it, is made of wood, bark, fibres, hides and sinew. It is this invisible share that the rare prehistoric wooden finds allow us to glimpse.
Ethnography also reminds us of a dimension too often forgotten: the digging stick. In many societies, this simple pointed stick, often hardened in the fire, is the main tool used to gather roots, tubers and bulbs, and to dig out small burrowing animals. It was frequently used by women and provided a large share of the group's food. Yet because it leaves no trace in the ground, its role in prehistoric diets is almost impossible to measure. The few examples that have survived, such as the yew stick from Aranbaltza, are therefore precious witnesses to a whole sphere of daily life that stone tools alone cannot reveal.
Melting glaciers, an opportunity and a threat
Paradoxically, global warming is now giving archaeologists new opportunities to find wooden objects. In the mountains of Norway, the Alps and the Rockies, melting ice patches and glaciers are releasing arrows, bows, sticks and tools lost by hunters, sometimes several thousand years ago. These objects, preserved intact in the ice, suddenly emerge into the open air.
But this opportunity is also a race against time. Once exposed, wood deteriorates within a few seasons. Glacial archaeologists therefore survey the melt zones every summer to collect these remains before they disappear for good. The same phenomenon threatens peat bogs, dried out by drainage and rising temperatures, which risk losing the wooden treasures they have kept for millennia.
How do archaeologists study wood?
When a wooden object is discovered, speed is essential. Waterlogged wood suddenly exposed to air shrinks, cracks and can fall apart within hours. Archaeologists therefore keep it wet, document it, and then hand it over to specialist laboratories, which gradually replace the water in its cells with stabilising substances before drying it slowly.
The most widely used stabilising agent is polyethylene glycol, a waxy synthetic compound that slowly penetrates the weakened wood and takes the place of the water. The treatment can last months, or even years for large pieces such as canoes or planks, and is often completed by freeze-drying, which removes the remaining water without allowing the cells to collapse. It is a long and costly process, which partly explains why so few prehistoric wooden objects are on display in museums: many of them are still in conservation tanks, waiting their turn.
The species is identified under the microscope, by examining the cellular structure of the wood in cross-section. Traces of shaping, cutting or burning are studied with a stereo microscope and a scanning electron microscope, and increasingly with three-dimensional imaging or tomography, which make it possible to examine the inside of objects without damaging them.
Dating methods vary with the age of the remains. For the last 50,000 years, radiocarbon can be applied directly to the wood. For more recent periods, dendrochronology, which compares the sequence of a tree's growth rings with reference series, can sometimes date the felling of a tree to the exact year, as with the Sweet Track. For older periods, the sediments surrounding the objects are dated, by luminescence, by palaeomagnetism or, as at Schöningen, by the racemisation of amino acids preserved in shells.2
How wood changes our view of prehistory
Every discovery of a prehistoric wooden object has had a similar effect: it has revealed abilities in our ancestors that no one suspected. The Clacton spear was first judged too sophisticated for its time. The Schöningen spears imposed the image of organised hunters. The Kalambo logs showed that people were already building nearly half a million years ago. The impressions at the Abric Romaní revealed the furnished interior of a Neanderthal camp.17
These finds invite us to reread sites where wood has disappeared in a different light. Behind every handaxe, every scraper, every stone point, we must imagine the handles, shafts, sticks, containers and structures that went with them. Stone tools were often used to make these wooden objects, which formed the heart of prehistoric technology.
Woodworking also played a part in the evolution of our cognitive abilities. Making a balanced spear, an effective bow or a canoe means choosing a tree, anticipating how the wood will dry and warp, and carrying out long sequences of actions, sometimes over several days. These complex operational sequences, passed on through learning, reveal a remarkable capacity for planning and abstraction.
A Wood Age?
Some archaeologists now suggest, with a touch of provocation, that the Stone Age should be renamed the Wood Age. The idea is not to replace one label with another, but to remind us that stone has survived only by chance, because it is indestructible, and that it represents only a small part of what our ancestors made.
Seen from this angle, the great technical milestones of prehistory take on a different meaning. The first spears, the first handles, the first huts, the first boats and the first bows are all inventions in wood. Stone, bone and later metal served them, sharpening their points and edges, but the structure, the reach and the power of these tools came from the tree. Even the polished axe, the emblem of the Neolithic, was useless without its wooden haft and only made sense because there were trees to fell.
Every year, new discoveries enrich this fragile corpus. Lignite mines, lake beds, peat bogs and glaciers melting under the effect of global warming are yielding objects once thought lost for ever. And new methods, such as the study of mineralised impressions or microscopic residues, are making it possible to trace wood even where it has vanished.
The wooden world of prehistory will never be fully reconstructed. But every spear, every paddle, every impression brings us a little closer to the reality our ancestors lived: that of human beings who, for hundreds of thousands of years, made the forest their workshop.
No comments yet. Be the first.