By Seth Chagi, World of Paleoanthropology
Introduction: The Silence of Wood
If archaeology were a choir, stone screams. Stone is loud, enduring, unyielding—it holds our attention across tens of thousands, sometimes millions, of years. But wood? Wood is the soft voice almost always lost to time. And yet, in the Paleolithic world, wood may have been just as vital—perhaps even more so—than stone. For every flake of obsidian or hand axe of quartzite we admire in museum cases, there might once have been ten wooden digging sticks, spears, handles, baskets, or bows that left no trace.
This absence skews our imagination. We tell ourselves a story of human ingenuity based on what survives, not necessarily on what was most important. Today, let’s bring that missing half of the toolkit into focus. Let’s listen for the quiet voice of wood.
Why Wood Vanishes
Wood is organic—vulnerable to rot, fungi, insects, fire, and the slow grind of time. For it to survive tens of thousands of years, preservation must be almost miraculous: waterlogged peat bogs, desert aridity, volcanic ash, or frozen tundra. Even then, what endures is only a fraction of what once existed. The Paleolithic record is therefore a biased ledger—stone has filled the pages, while wood and fiber technologies have been erased.
So we must ask: how different would our story of human evolution look if wood survived as faithfully as stone?
The Oldest Wooden Finds: Echoes Through Deep Time
The Schöningen Spears (Germany, ~300,000 years ago)
Eight remarkably preserved wooden spears, crafted by Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals, sit at the center of this debate. Each was carefully shaped from spruce, balanced like a modern javelin, and hardened at the tip by fire. They are the oldest complete hunting weapons we have. Imagine how long people had been making wooden weapons before these ones, by chance, ended up in the right mud at the right time.
Clacton Spear Point (England, ~400,000 years ago)
A single spear tip of yew wood. Once dismissed as crude, closer study revealed sophistication—choosing tough, elastic material and shaping it for impact. It hints at a vanished tradition of woodworking stretching far earlier than Schöningen.
Kalambo Falls (Zambia, ~300,000–400,000 years ago)
Waterlogged conditions preserved digging sticks, wedges, and even notched logs, showing evidence of shaping and joining. This is not “mere survival”—this is technology.
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (Israel, ~780,000 years ago)
Charred wood fragments, alongside stone tools and plant remains, reveal controlled fire use and likely wooden implements. This site pushes woodworking traditions close to a million years back.
Fibers, Adhesives, and Composites: The Hidden Engineers
Wood was rarely used alone. Paired with fibers, sinew, and resins, it became part of composite technologies.
- Fibers & Cordage: From twisted plant fibers at Abri du Maras (France, ~40,000 years ago) to basket impressions in clay, fibers reveal planning, dexterity, and perhaps division of labor.
- Adhesives: Birch tar from sites like Campitello (Italy, ~200,000 years ago) demonstrates deliberate chemical processes—heating bark in low oxygen to create glue.
- Composite Tools: Stone blades hafted to wooden shafts with resin and sinew blurred the line between simple tools and engineered systems.
The vanished wooden shafts were what made stone edges truly lethal.
Rebuilding the Toolkit from Shadows
When archaeologists reconstruct what a site may have looked like, the silence of wood looms large. A living Paleolithic camp might have been filled with:
- Digging sticks for tubers and roots.
- Spears and atlatls for hunting.
- Baskets and trays for gathering.
- Huts and windbreaks built from poles and branches.
- Fire drills and hearth frames.
- Infant carriers of woven fiber and wood.
In other words: the very infrastructure of daily life.
Stone was flashy, durable, and transportable. Wood was constant, practical, and everywhere.
Preservation Bias and Its Consequences
Because stone dominates the record, archaeologists once underestimated Paleolithic cognition. For decades, the story was: stone equals brains. But this is a mirage. The real brainpower may have gone into managing organic technology—planning harvest times for certain woods, mastering fire-hardening, weaving cordage, and maintaining composite tools.
If wood had survived, our timeline of “cognitive breakthroughs” might stretch back hundreds of thousands of years earlier.
Case Study: Neanderthals and the Wooden World
Neanderthals are often painted as stone-obsessed. But evidence tells a different story:
- Schöningen shows they were master woodworkers.
- Traces of cordage and birch tar adhesives prove planning and chemical skill.
- Wear patterns on teeth and hands suggest constant work with fibers and wood.
Imagine a Neanderthal toolkit: stone flakes for quick jobs, but daily reliance on wooden handles, spears, baskets, and shelters. The archaeology of stone is just the tip of their cultural iceberg.
Lessons from Indigenous Knowledge
Ethnographic parallels remind us that wood and fiber technologies often dominate subsistence life. From Australian Aboriginal digging sticks to San foraging baskets, from Amazonian blowguns to Inuit sleds, wood has always been the infrastructure of survival. Stone is important, but wood shapes the rhythms of daily existence.
The Paleolithic was almost certainly no different.
The Humility Clause: What We’ll Never Fully Know
As much as we reconstruct, there is humility in acknowledging the unknowable. Most Paleolithic wooden objects are gone forever. Entire traditions—songs sung while weaving nets, preferred woods for cradles, regional joinery styles—are beyond recovery. But acknowledging that absence is itself a step toward a truer story.
Closing Reflections: Listening to the Quiet Voices
The Paleolithic wasn’t just a world of stone—it was a world of wood, fiber, sinew, and fire. By listening for what is missing, by filling silence with cautious imagination rooted in evidence, we give our ancestors back their full ingenuity.
Next time you see a stone tool behind glass, picture the missing half: the wooden handle, the spear shaft, the basket carried alongside. And imagine the forest that whispered it all into being.
Works Cited (Selections)
- Conard, N. J., & Malina, M. (2006). Stone Age wood working at Schöningen. Nature, 444, 374–378.
- Gowlett, J. A. J. (2006). The early settlement of northern Europe: Fire history in the context of climate change and the social brain. C.R. Palevol, 5(1–2), 299–310.
- Hardy, B. L., et al. (2020). Direct evidence of fiber technology and production from the Upper Paleolithic. Scientific Reports, 10, 4889.
- Mazza, P. P., et al. (2006). A new Palaeolithic discovery: Tar-hafted stone tools in Italy. Antiquity, 80(310), 661–671.
- Thieme, H. (1997). Lower Palaeolithic hunting spears from Germany. Nature, 385, 807–810.
World of Paleoanthropology 
Such an important perspective to remember, and you do a beautiful job of clearly laying out the information.
Thank you.
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Based on the evidence from modern indigenous hunter-gatherers, the sophistication does not end with technology: it extends to a very scientific understanding of whole ecosystems, especially the degree to which people manipulate – or rather, engineer, their environment. I suggest we humans evolved a a species of keystone ecological engineers. Over hundreds of thousands of years, human learned how to do this through fire ecology and replanting.
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