Overview
- Researchers identified two intentionally shaped wooden artifacts at Marathousa 1: an approximately 81-centimeter alder stick with digging-related wear and a 5.7-centimeter willow/poplar piece whose function remains unknown.
- Multiple site-dating methods, including paleomagnetic signatures and luminescence, place the finds at roughly 430,000 years, pushing back the record for handheld wooden tools by about 40,000 years.
- Waterlogged, low-oxygen sediments in a lignite mine preserved 144 wood fragments, enabling microscopic and CT analyses that separated human modification from natural or animal damage.
- The wooden pieces occur with butchered straight‑tusked elephant remains, thousands of stone tools, and worked bone, while bear claw marks on another log point to hominin–carnivore activity at the lakeshore.
- No hominin fossils were found, leaving the makers unknown; researchers note possible Middle Pleistocene populations and contrast the tools with older structural wood from Kalambo Falls.