The 8 Oldest Artifacts Ever Discovered

Paleoanthropologists used to think that the ability to make stone tools was unique to the genus Homo, the large-brained branch of hominins that first emerged around 2.8 million years ago. But in 2011, the timeline of toolmaking was pushed back hundreds of thousands of years before Homo with the discovery of primitive stone tools at a site called Lomekwi in Kenya.  

The Lomekwi stone tools date to 3.3 million years ago and were used by an unknown ancestor of modern humans who figured out how to use heavy stones to crack open nuts and smash smaller stones together to flake off sharp edges for cutting meat. Prior to the Lomekwi discovery, the earliest known stone tools dated to 2.6 million years ago.  

“So this is 700,000 years earlier,” says Kuhn. “That’s a big time gap.”  

The remarkable find at Lomekwi challenged the belief that “human” behaviors like toolmaking, meat eating and language started with Homo.  

Scientists and historians talk about the Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, but why isn’t there a Wood Age? The truth is that ancient humans probably fashioned tools and other objects out of wood since prehistoric times, but almost none of those objects survive in the archaeological record because they rot away.  

That’s why it was such a big deal in 2019 when two wooden beams dating back nearly half a million years were excavated from a waterlogged riverbank near Kalambo Falls in Zambia. The beams were notched and stacked at right angles like Lincoln Logs and may have been part of a wooden house or storage platform. A digging stick and other wooden tools were also found at the site.   

A wooden structure nearly 500,000 years old is intriguing evidence that ancient human hunter-gatherers may not have been entirely nomadic but could have settled down near water sources like Kalambo Falls.  

From 2014 to 2018, Kuhn was part of a team that excavated Bizmoune Cave on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Inside they found 33 shells from a type of sea snail that may have been the earliest known example of bling. 

Kuhn and his colleagues believe the shells, which date to 142,000 years ago, were once strung on necklaces as a primitive type of jewelry. But the shiny shell beads were more than decorative.  

“Just like today, people use these kinds of things to communicate some aspect of their identity to others,” says Kuhn. “It could have been something like marital status or group identity, or if you wore a lot of them, maybe it showed that you had access to a fairly rare resource.”  

The shells at Bizmoune Cave were fashioned by Homo sapiens, the species of modern human that first emerged about 300,000 years ago. Kuhn thinks that the emergence of shell beads 142,000 years ago corresponded to a time when localized bands of ancient humans were starting to interact and may have functioned as a type of "emblem" or signal of identity.

“One of the ways we coordinate big groups of people is through the clothes we wear, including uniforms,” says Kuhn. “If you see somebody in a police uniform, you know how to interact with them. The argument is that these shell beads provided the same kind of visual clues that were critical to organizing and navigating large social groups.”  

Art is another type of artifact that is usually lost to time. Ancient humans likely painted on all sorts of different surfaces, but the few works that survive are found in caves where fragile pigments have been protected from the elements for tens of thousands of years. 

In 2018, an international team of archaeologists dated a set of red-ocher cave paintings in Spain to 65,000 years ago, making them the oldest art on Earth. The images themselves weren’t spectacular—a stencil of a hand, a geometric shape like a ladder and some dots—but the artists were fascinating.  

At that time and place, the Spanish caves were almost certainly occupied by Neanderthals, a species of Homo that scientists once thought incapable of creating art.  

“Hundreds of Neanderthal sites have been excavated and millions of artifacts have been recovered, but there was nothing that everyone agreed was a symbolic artifact,” says Kuhn.  

The Spanish cave paintings could upend assumptions about Neanderthal creativity. The discovery was enabled by a new technique called uranium-thorium dating that analyzes the age of the calcite crust deposited on the cave walls.

“We really didn’t have the ability to do that kind of dating until fairly recently,” says Kuhn. “People knew that those cave paintings were there, but assumed that they were much younger.”  

The oldest known musical instruments are simple flutes made from bone and ivory that were discovered in two caves in Germany. The flutes have finger holes like recorders to produce distinct tones and were made between 43,000 and 35,000 years ago during a sudden flowering of creativity in Paleolithic Europe.  

Made from vulture wings and mammoth tusks, the small flutes—just 8 inches long—were part of what’s called the Aurignacian culture, the first modern human toolmaking culture in Europe.   

“When archaeologists say 'culture,' they don't mean that people necessarily spoke the same language or identified as members of the same group,” says Kuhn. “But the Aurignacian is associated with this emergence of material culture. There’s cave art, figurines and these musical instruments. People's symbolic lives are getting broader and richer, and they're expressing them in different ways.” 

It’s hard to know whether the flutes were used in rituals or as an early form of entertainment, but researchers have built replicas that bring the ancient music to life.  

Archaeologists in Slovenia believe they discovered a flute made from the bone of a cave bear that dates to 60,000 years ago and was made by Neanderthals, but that find has been disputed, Kuhn says.  

The same Aurignacian culture that produced the oldest musical instruments also left the oldest figurines of animals and people. The so-called Venus of Hohle Fels, found in the same German cave as some of the flutes, dates to 35,000 years ago. The Lion Man, also from Germany, was fashioned 40,000 years ago.

Both of these ancient figurines were carved from mammoth ivory using stone tools. The Venus stands just 2 inches tall but symbolizes sex and fertility with exaggerated breasts and genitalia. Kuhn believes she once had a head, possibly made of wood and attached to the nub at the top of the figurine.

The hybrid Lion Man, with the head of a lion and the body of a man, is 12 inches tall and may have served a religious role in shamanic rituals.  

Kuhn says Venus figurines and animal sculptures became widespread in the archaeological record during the Gravettian culture that followed the Aurignacian in Europe, but the Venus of Hohle Fels and the Lion Man represent something much earlier and unique.

"It looks like these are very idiosyncratic objects and not widely shared,” says Kuhn. "Maybe they’re related to a more inward-looking ritual or communication, as opposed to ornaments which are more outward-looking.” 

The oldest surviving boat is a wooden canoe discovered by Dutch construction workers in 1955 while clearing land for a highway. It doesn’t look like much—a hollowed-out pine log about 10 feet long and 18 inches wide—but apparently it was seaworthy enough to keep ancient humans afloat 10,000 years ago.  

Again, Kuhn emphasizes that the Dutch canoe—known as the Pesse Canoe—is merely the oldest surviving boat, not anywhere near the first boat.  

"There were people living in Australia 45,000 years ago or earlier and they had to get there by boat,” says Kuhn. “But since boats are made from organic materials, they don't preserve very well.” 

The Pesse Canoe survived because it was buried in a peat bog, a spongy soil made from decomposed plant matter. Low in oxygen and highly alkaline, peat acts as a natural preservative for organic matter, including mummified “bog bodies.”   

Ancient wheels were also made from wood, and the lack of surviving specimens makes it really difficult for historians to determine where and when the wheel was first invented. Cart wheels probably evolved from transporting heavy objects across a bunch of rolling logs. At some point, the logs became a fixed axle, and the ends of the axle were carved into wheels. 

The oldest surviving wheel was found in Slovenia in 2002. Measuring a little more than 2 feet in diameter, the wooden wheel was found next to a 4-foot wooden axle and dates to 5,200 years ago. Made from ash and oak with a square-shaped hub, the Slovenian wheel was preserved in marshlands outside of the capital, Ljubljana.