Stone Age Humans Used Wood

 

Humans of the Stone Age were extremely resourceful. They used organic materials close at hand to fabricate tools and useful implements. Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, is an ancient site on the bank of the Jordan River south of the historic Lake Hula. Excavations exposed the remains of fires from 780,000 years ago. There is evidence of cooked plant foods, nuts, and fish. Some wood is also preserved in the sediments, including a wooden plank with intentional shaping. This currently is the oldest modified wooden artifact in the archaeological record.

Dr. John Hawks, a world renown paleoanthropologist, recently wrote a fascinating article about the prehistoric use of organic materials. The article focuses mainly on the use of wood. Hawks wrote: 

"The most well-known archaeological site with ancient wood is Schöningen, in central Germany. At the edge of a lake 300,000 years ago, people hunted horses and left behind the butchered horse bones, stone tools, and many wooden spears, throwing sticks, and other artifacts."

 

Another site where Stone Age wooden artifacts have been found is in Italy. Hawks explains:

"Poggetti Vecchi, Italy, is a site with thermal pools that preserve evidence of straight-tusked elephants and other animals from around 170,000 years ago. Archaeologists have uncovered least 39 wooden tools, many of them interpreted as digging sticks. Many of them were described in 2018 in an article led by Biancamaria Aranguren.

All the artifacts identified at Poggetti Vecchi were made from boxwood, Buxus sempervirens."

 

Another discovery too place at Kalambo Falls. The Kalambo Falls is just upstream of where it enters Lake Tanganyika. Hawks reports:

"Last year, Lawrence Barham and collaborators reported an unexpected discovery from their recent work at Kalambo Falls. Opening new excavations into the riverbank deposits, they uncovered many wood artifacts. These include an apparent digging stick, logs that were cut by stone blades, and a remarkable pair of logs that had been notched to fit one over the other. Barham and coworkers are not sure what the function of the notched log structure may have been, but they speculate that it may have served as the foundation of a hut or shelter, or it may have served as a platform or part of a walkway, or even as a workbench. What is clear is that ancient hominins applied patterned effort to shape the logs and build with them. This structure is around 476,000 years old."

 

Also in Africa, Hawks notes:

"one of the earliest wooden artifacts from Africa is from Florisbad, South Africa. That site is a natural spring with peat deposits that can preserve organic materials for a very long time. A number of wooden artifacts were identified during excavation of the springs in the 1930s and thereafter, but these tended to disintegrate quickly after excavation. The anthropologist Kenneth Oakley visited Florisbad and took one wooden artifact to London, where the wood was treated with chemicals similar to those used to preserve artifacts from later waterlogged sites. The artifact was later examined by Desmond Clark, who interpreted it as the broken point of a larger throwing stick. In 2003, Marion Bamford and Zoë Henderson carried out a re-examination of this artifact to provide some modern detail. One of the most interesting aspects was the wood that it is made from: kundanyoka knobwood (Zanthoxylum chalybeum), which today occurs no further south than Zimbabwe. The implication is that a very much warmer climate occurred around Florisbad at the time this tool was made, although the dating and context of the artifact are still uncertain."

Hawks points out that wooden artifacts also have been found in southwestern China. Xing Gao and collaborators excavated a large area south of the city of Kunming and exposed levels of ancient lakeshore between 361,000 and 250,000 years old. The excavations revealed stone artifacts, remains of varied plants and pollen, and 35 wooden tools.

Additionally, Hawks notes that "Aranbaltza is a floodplain site in northern Spain, with several archaeological localities dating back to between 140,000 and 50,000 years ago. One of these localities is Aranbaltza III, where in 2015 Joseba Rios-Garaizar and coworkers recovered a pointed wooden tool, around 20 cm in length. The evidence of crushing and wear at the pointed end suggested that this stick had been used for digging."

Read more about Stone Age wooden artifacts here: "Four amazing Stone Age sites with ancient wooden artifacts"

Related reading: Materials Science (Part 1 - Metals); Materials Science (Part 2 - Ores); Materials Science (Part 3 - Resins and Oils); Materials Science (Part 4 - Conglomerates); Archaic Shell Technology

A Late Neolithic Structure at Durrington Walls

 

How Durrington Walls might have looked with this structure at the exact center. 

Durrington Walls in the parish of Durrington, England is the site of a large Neolithic settlement and later henge enclosure located in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. It lies 2 miles north-east of Stonehenge. Researchers have been studying ancient shafts there.

There are at least 20 shafts or pits that formed a circuit exceeding 1 mile (over 2 kilometers) in circumference. There is evidence that an inner post may have existed within the circuit of pits. 

The circle of pits is much larger than any comparable prehistoric monument in the UK. The team of archaeologists estimates there may have been more than 30 post holes originally.

The researchers believe that one of the pits (5A) was recut during the Middle Bronze Age, suggesting that the site continued to be important long after the major period of development and modification of the henge at Durrington Walls.

Testing of the shafts indicates that they were dug more than 4500 years ago, around the time Durrington Walls and Stonehenge were built. The Late Neolithic was a period when ritual structures of an enormous scale were built in various parts of he world.

Source: A Massive Pit Structure at Durrington Walls

The Stone Age

The three archaeological periods with which we are concerned in our Bible Technology Component are the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. In this article we will learn about the Stone Age.

During the Stone Age the primary material used for tools and architecture was stone. People crafted tools from stone and build structures such as tombs and temples. This was a very long period of time during which human populations dispersed across much of the Earth. The Stone Age lasted roughly 3.4 million years and ended about 2500 BC (the time of Abraham's grandfather, Nahor the Elder).

Early stone tools include sharp-edged flakes, flake fragments, and cobbles dated to between 2.5 and 2.6 million years. These were discovered at three sites along the Gona River in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Similar stone tools, known as Oldowan, have been found at Omo in southern Ethiopia, at Lokalalei in northern Kenya, and at Hadar, five miles east of the Gona River study area.

One of the oldest known stone working sites is located at Kathu in South Africa. Here archaeologists collected many thousands of stone tools and products of tool making in a few sample pits over a several acres. The archaeologists estimated that there are on average 900 artifacts per 100x100x10 cm volume of material in this area with much of the area up to 2 meters deep in artifact rich soils. This high concentration of stone artifacts, along with available source rock in nearby outcrops, suggests that this was a tool making center between 800,000 and 500,000 years ago.

During the Stone Age people crafted tools from stone and built tombs and temples using stone. Temples typically had many stone pillars such as those shown at temple entrance below.

The two Ġgantija temples in Gozo, on the island of Malta, are some of the world's oldest free-standing stone structures. They were constructed during the Neolithic period (c. 3600–2500 BC).  Other ancient temples include those found at Göbekli Tepe and Nekhen. Nekhen (called Hierakonpolis by the Greeks), is the oldest temple known to have association with Abraham's ancestors. The temple was located on the Nile, making it easy for temple officials to weigh and measure goods and assess tolls on the vessels that docked there.

Rulers at Nekhen acquired exotic goods and animals from central Africa and Afghanistan 4000 years ago. Nobles were buried with red ochre at Nekhen. At Tomb 100 there are two boats painted on the walls. Tomb 23, discovered at in 2005, is the largest burial structure from the Naqada II period (c.3500-3200 BC).

Typically the shrine cities of the ancient world were built near major water systems such as rivers and lakes. One example in the Bible is the shrine city of On (Genesis 41:45). On was called Heliopolis by the Greeks. Heliopolis means "city of the Sun." Plutarch wrote that the “priests of the Sun at Heliopolis never carry wine into their temples, for they regard it as indecent for those who are devoted to the service of any god to indulge in the drinking of wine whilst they are under the immediate inspection of their Lord and King. The priests of the other deities are not so scrupulous in this respect, for they use it, though sparingly.”

The people who lived at Biblical On called it Iunu, which means "place of pillars." Plato, who studied under a Horite priest for thirteen years, wrote "Tell me of the God of On, which was, is and shall be."

Heliopolis was the geodetic center of Egypt. The pyramid triads at Giza, Abusir and Saqqara were aligned to the obelisk at On. The shrine city of Baalbek in Lebanon also aligned to On.

Joseph married Asenath, the daughter of a priest of Heliopolis. Study of the Heliopolitan cosmogony makes it apparent that Heliopolis was conceived as the sacred center of the primeval ocean, called Nun. The many pillars of the temple symbolized the connection between the waters below and the waters above (Gen. 1:7). It is likely that Joshua, a great Hebrew leader, belonged to a ruler-priest family associated with On because he was a son of Nun (Numbers 11:28).

Usually, shrine cities were built at higher elevations to make it easier to defend the city against enemy attacks. In the Bible these ancient cities are called "the high places" and they are criticized for some religious practices that were not pleasing to the Creator.

Standing stones at the Gezer high place (Israel)
Photo: Dennis Cole.

At some high elevations the ancient stone workers constructed circles of standing stones. These have been found in many parts of the ancient world. They were places of religious ceremony linked to astronomical events. One of the most famous sites in the world is Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. Here visitors from around the world can see the remains of a circle of standing stones set within earthworks.

The oldest known stone circles date to 175,000 years ago and were formed inside the Bruniquel cave in southwestern France.

In western Europe the tall upright stones erected in prehistoric times are called menhirs. In Sardinia, 200 menhirs have been identified in the area of the island's geographic center. These date between the late Neolithic (3200-2800 BC) and the Eneolithic (2800-1800 BC). Stone circles and megaliths also have been found in Senegal and Gambia. These date to the 3rd century BC.

Related reading: Why Nekhen is Anthropologically Significant; The Pillars of Solomon's Temple; Stone Work of the Ancient World; The Tool Makers of Kathu, Circumcision and Standing Stones in the Judean Hills; Henges and Rondel Enclosures; Lithic Landscapes: Early Human Impact from Stone Tool Production on the Central Saharan Environment.