It is so easy to think of it as purely a Stone Age. When we imagine early humans – both before and after the advent of Homo sapiens – wielding tools, it is implements fashioned from rocks that spring to mind. The origins of this stone technology lie over 3 million years in the past (see CWA 98), with the sophistication of the kit available to hominins reaching a milestone when Acheulean tools were first developed about 1.76 million years ago. These implements continued to be used for well over a million years, and include hand axes, cleavers, and picks that were crafted by skilled artisans capable of holding an image of the desired end product in their mind and working methodically towards that goal. As these people belonged to an itinerant world of hunter-gatherers, where communities were always on the move, the apparent absence of similarly ingenious structures has never occasioned any surprise. Instead, archaeologists have focused on the distances that groups travelled, and the ability to plan that implies, as a measure of their intelligence. Such lifestyles famously prevailed for the majority of human existence, with a settled existence and more prominent architecture only becoming relatively commonplace around the beginning of the Neolithic, starting a mere 12,000 or so years ago. It is against this backdrop that the discovery of substantial wooden structural elements at a site associated with Acheulean tools at Kalambo Falls in Zambia comes as something of a shock.
Compared to stone, wood has always seemed like a comparatively late addition to humanity’s technological repertoire. The earliest known timber object is a portion of a plank, dating back over 780,000 years, from Israel. Most early wooden artefacts, though, were small and portable, such as sticks modified for hunting or digging, which appear in Europe, for example, about 400,000 years ago. Even then, it has always seemed to be much later in the archaeological record that early humans – including Homo sapiens – set about tackling sizable pieces of timber and, by association, felling large trees. The finds from Kalambo Falls paint a very different picture. There, the combination of cutting-edge dating technology with excavations examining deposits ideally suited for the long-term preservation of wood have revealed a familiarity with woodworking that is simply stunning for the era. When it comes to understanding the lifestyles of the early humans responsible, and the way they viewed trees as a resource, the implications are nothing short of revolutionary.
A matter of time
‘The site was discovered in 1953 by the archaeologist Desmond Clark,’ says Professor Larry Barham, at the University of Liverpool. ‘He excavated a very large area of Kalambo Falls in the 1960s, and discovered a sequence of occupation running from the Early to the Middle Stone Age. There was evidence for the use of fire, and he also found what he thought were wooden tools. But a real problem was that there were only limited scientific dating techniques available, so they struggled to develop a chronology. Another complication is that the site had been disturbed by the Kalambo River, raising questions about whether the wooden objects found by Clark had been shaped by the river rather than humans. So, the big questions of whether or not there was early woodworking at the site, and how old it really was, ended up in limbo. It was that uncertainty that led me to visit Kalambo in 2006 with Geoff Duller, who had been working on dating some other African sites. We wanted to see what was there, and whether we could find sediments containing that Early to Middle Stone Age record. Most importantly, we wanted to look at whether there was a way we could date it.’
