Neander-tools
Woodworking has been around a long time; much longer than your dad’s garage shop, Medieval times or even ancient Rome.
Woodworking has been around a long time; much longer than your dad’s garage shop, Medieval times or even ancient Rome. I’m talking more than 430,000 years ago when some caveman — I’ll call him “Kevin” — picked up a piece of wood, pondered it for a few moments, and thought, “Oh, yeah, I can make something outta this.”
According to the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” archaeologists recently unearthed the oldest wooden tools ever found. Not impressive stuff, but still intelligently made tools nonetheless. One is a simple 2-1/2’ long digging stick; the other a hand-sized piece of willow or poplar researchers think was used to shape stone tools. They made these with only a good understanding of grain and rocks; no table saw, jointer, or CNC, and Kevin certainly didn’t have enough clamps.
If you’ve ever tried to carve something or create joinery without so much as a dull hand saw, it becomes clear just how remarkable that is.
Stone tools and relics are common finds, but wooden ones don’t last for thousands of years, much less hundreds of millennia. Simply put, fungus destroys it, bugs throw keggers in it, and it rots. That’s why most of what we know about prehistoric tools is from longer-lasting bone or stone. These two particular tools were quickly buried in wet sediment on an ancient lakeshore of Greece’s Megalopolis basin and displayed clear evidence of carving and chopping, indicating that Kevin and his buddies worked them purposefully.
To put this in perspective, 430,000 years ago was the Middle Pleistocene epoch, long before Homo sapiens showed up. But earlier human species — maybe Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis — were already choosing wood and shaping it for specific tasks, the same way we do material selection now.
They created techniques through basic experimentation, then passed them up the line for thousands of generations, developing a tool culture long before dovetail jigs, YouTube videos, or woodworking blogs.
We’re part of a tradition stretching back almost half a million years. We modern humans didn’t develop woodworking, humanity embraced it from the start. We made it better, and if Kevin could see our shops now, he’d think, “Whoa. Nice clamps.”
A.J. Hamler is the former editor of Woodshop News and Woodcraft Magazine. He's currently a freelance woodworking writer/editor, which is another way of stating self-employed. When he's not writing or in the shop, he enjoys science fiction, gourmet cooking and Civil War reenacting, but not at the same time.
