Half-million-year-old wooden structure unearthed in Zambia

[cab67]

18. That's because that's what the evidence showed.

No one thought these people were stupid or incapable of doing these things.

Based on everything we'd found previously, wooden structures weren't known from that era.

And it was actually reasonable to suspect they weren't being made, too - or not being made on a widespread scale, anyway. The stone and bone tools used primarily at the time would not work very efficiently with wood.

By the way, we don't need to see the wood to identify traces of wooden stuctures, Houses and huts made of wood typically require post-holes, for example. Otherwise, the structure would collapse very easily. Post-hole fills are easily identified at archaeological sites. They've never been found at sites from that period of time.

(Full disclosure - I"m not my self an archaeologist. But I work closely with them for some of my work.)