The oldest wooden structure ever found is two logs joined by a deliberately cut notch at Kalambo Falls in Zambia, dated to at least 476,000 years — and the archaeologist who dug it up in the 1950s died without ever being able to prove it was made on purpose

The oldest wooden structure ever found is two logs joined by a deliberately cut notch at Kalambo Falls in Zambia, dated to at least 476,000 years — and the archaeologist who dug it up in the 1950s died without ever being able to prove it was made on purpose

In the 1950s, the archaeologist J. Desmond Clark was excavating below Kalambo Falls, a 235-metre waterfall on the Kalambo River near the border of Zambia and Tanzania, when he came across something that didn’t sit easily with what he expected to find. Among the stone tools and animal bone typical of a Palaeolithic site, there was a log with tapered ends and a distinct notch cut into it. Clark was convinced the shaping was deliberate, not the wor…