Archaeologists discover 476,000 year old structure, thought to be oldest known wooden structure ...

in 2019 a team of researchers working in the far north of Zambia at the site of Colombo Falls made an unexpected archaeological discovery they found wood preserved underneath the river which would turn out to be almost half a million years old not just any old wood would there have been worked by humans including the remains or what looks to be the earliest structure known in the world in this short video I'd like to show you the excavations take you through some of the analysis we did here in Liverpool and also think about what these fines mean in terms of our understanding of early humans so join me on this journey before we visit the excavation I'd like to introduce you to the Woodlands of Zambia this part of Africa is blanketed in a beautiful tropical Woodland as far as the eye can see Wood's important today and they probably were important in the past Woods can give you fuel for making a fire they can provide food in terms of nuts and fruits you can make shelters or Huts you can make tools of wood and the bark and the leaves provide medicine and even clothing the bark can be stripped into clothing that's a traditional cloth you're seeing here which is no longer being made it's a dying art so if wood is so useful now and has been in the past why aren't we finding evidence of it in the early archaeological record and the answer lies in fact it's just not preserving except in places like Colombo Falls this is the Majestic Colombo Falls more than 230 meters high second highest Falls in Africa but the important thing is what's behind it it's the Colombo River and a basin which preserves the archaeological record including wood here you see students Excavating one of the early sites we're finding the tools that were used or the kind of tools that were used to make and shape the wood and you can see a little bit of the river as we move along this object here is being excavated with a plastic tool so it doesn't damage the edge and so we can study how it was used this is a Cleaver it's got a strong broad Edge see it curves just a little bit and it's an excellent tool we think for working hard materials like wood and you can see here a large tree trunk and beside it where I'm sitting it comes this wedge-shaped object it's a tool the most important objects though are these These are overlapping pieces of wood when we found them we thought this was an unusual Arrangement and as we started to look at them the piece on the top has a notch in the middle that Notch has been cut the ends on either side of it have been tapered and it sits on a tree beneath but again it's not just any tree the tree also has been shaped the pictures here show the white arrows and each of these is a mark left by a stone tool it could be scraping it could be chopping they're all involved in making those two pieces fit into what is the world's oldest structure we are looking at something more than 477 000 years old here almost from the moment of Discovery we had to keep the wood wet keep it from drying out from cracking and from losing the signs of the human working in the wood back here in Liverpool we have tanks specially designed for underwater photography to build 3D models of the wood you're seeing the camera specially developed and the first piece that's being examined here is the wedge do you remember the wedge near the big tree truck well here the hands are coming down holding the wedge turning it around photographs are being made next we're seeing part of the structure this is the center section the structure is is now in three parts it was naturally cracked over time and this is the middle part with the notch you're seeing Jr is for photographing it in all sort of different directions building the three-dimensional model and here it is the model we can turn it over you can look closely at the Notch and now we add the color and I can see the cut marks on it I can see where the wood has been removed that's an important piece and once we've finished the analysis we lift it carefully removing it from its photographic bath and putting it into its storage bath it's heavy it's solid and the wood the wood being conserved so once we have made the 3D models we need to understand what those marks are telling us about the tools that were used and how they were used and to do that we need experimental archeology here at Liverpool we have our own ancient Technologies workshop and Chris here is an expert in making and using stone tools he's making a flake a stone and he's going to use a stone which we found at calambo Falls as the same raw material and he's going to use that to shape a wooden handle and seeing what kind of marks the stone leaves on the wood we can then take those marks as a reference and look at the prehistoric wood and yes we do find very similar marks from scraping in our labs in Liverpool we also have a variety of different kinds of microscopic techniques of analysis Nikki here is looking at the surface of the wood for any evidence of changes from fire our research has shown not that there is direct evidence of fiber may be there but that's going to be something to examine in future work but we do have evidence that wood is partially fossilized and by that I mean minerals silica minerals dissolve in the water have actually entered the wood and replaced some of the wood structures so that's given the woods some strength that helped it survive all these hundreds of thousands of years we know how old the wooden objects are we know how they were made but the structure it's a real enigma what was it used for it's not something we're familiar with today it doesn't look like what we might think of as a structure but we have to add what is a structure well it's things that combined as a framework they support something okay once we have that idea then we can start to think maybe what was it used for how was it built and to help me think about this I turned to a childhood toy when other kids were playing with Lego I was in my room making log cabins from Lincoln Logs um and I don't know why that came to my mind but they they have they did and they have helped me think about the Calamba fall structure what's the big deal here well Lincoln Logs have a notch in them and the notch allows one piece to sit on top of another and you can build things with this you can build a log cabins but I'm not thinking early humans were building log cabins but what the notch does is when you making a structure the notch allows the framework to stay in place you can you can put pressure on it and it doesn't slip either left or right and if you have two notches but we don't in the archaeological record then it won't slip back and forth you have a stable surface so it made me think we have a surface or we have some kind of framework at Calamba Falls almost 500 000 years ago and with a framework yes you could build a household you could build a platform or you could build a walkway or adding another piece on the side you can make a platform and you can sit on the platform and they could have wet landscape that might have been there you maybe um I don't know have your lunch there or build a shelter there or storage but it is a surface that will be stable and will be dry this is teamwork this project and I want to thank my Zambian colleagues and all the other International Partners who made this work possible and would like to thank the Arts and Humanities research Council for the funding which also made this possible

Channel: KSAT 12

Views: 2,590,399

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Id: umB8dzt7jgM

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023