古生态研究组知识库

Evidence of Early and Middle Pleistocene wooden implements is exceptionally rare, and existing evidence has been found only in Africa and western Eurasia. We report an assemblage of 35 wooden implements from the site of Gantangqing in southwestern China, which was found associated with stone tools, antler billets (soft hammers), and cut-marked bones and is dated from similar to 361,000 to similar to 250,000 years at a 95% confidence interval. The wooden implements include digging sticks and small, complete, hand-held pointed tools. The sophistication of many of these tools offsets the seemingly primitive aspects of stone tool assemblages in the East Asian Early Paleolithic. This discovery suggests that wooden implements might have played an important role in hominin survival and adaptation in Middle Pleistocene East Asia.