Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism Refuted - Wooden Tools - From 290,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

A wooden tool is excavated from the site in China.

Photo: Bo Li.

2025 | Oldest wooden artefacts ever found in East Asia reveal plant-based diet of ancient humans - University of Wollongong – UOW

The childish notion of creationism took another battering today with the announcement that an international team of researchers, including University of Wollongong archaeologist Professor Bo Li, has unearthed a set of wooden tools in south-west China dating to approximately 300,000 years ago. That places them a full 290,000 years before creationists believe the Earth was formed, situating their manufacture and use within the 99.9975% of Earth’s history that occurred before the so-called ‘Creation Week’.

This date significantly predates the appearance of anatomically modern humans outside Africa. The exact identity of the archaic hominins who made and used these tools is uncertain — possibly early Denisovans, Homo heidelbergensis, or perhaps H. erectus. What we can say with confidence is that these hominins stand in stark contradiction to the Bronze Age origin myths recorded in the Bible, which many creationists insist are literal historical accounts.

The usual creationist response to such findings is to reject them outright as fabrications, the result of flawed methodology, or deliberate deception. However, the dating of these artefacts relies on a technique refined by Professor Li called electron spin resonance (ESR), which measures the time elapsed since the artefacts were buried. (See the side panel for further details.)

What Is Electron Spin Resonance Dating? Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) dating is a method used to determine the age of materials such as tooth enamel, carbonate crystals, or quartz grains in archaeological and geological contexts. It measures the number of trapped electrons accumulated in these materials over time due to exposure to natural radiation in the environment.

How it works:
When materials are buried, natural background radiation causes electrons to become trapped in imperfections within the crystal structure. ESR dating detects these trapped electrons and, combined with the dose rate of surrounding radiation, calculates how long the object has been buried.
Applications:
ESR is especially useful for dating objects beyond the range of radiocarbon dating (older than ~50,000 years), and has been applied to hominin fossils, early tools, and geological formations.
Limitations and Sources of Error

Dose Rate Estimation:
Accurate ESR dating depends on knowing the amount of radiation the object was exposed to over time. Variability in local environmental radiation can introduce significant uncertainty.
Water Content:
Water in the surrounding sediment can absorb radiation, reducing the dose received by the sample. Changes in water content over time must be estimated, and inaccuracies here affect the dating.
Thermal History:
ESR signals can be reset by heat. If the sample was exposed to high temperatures after initial burial, the dating result may be compromised.
Sample Integrity:
The presence of inclusions, cracks, or prior exposure to sunlight (for quartz) can affect the reliability of the measurements.
Complex Burial Histories:
Re-deposited materials or samples with multiple burial episodes may yield ambiguous or misleading results if not correctly identified.

Despite these limitations, when carefully applied and cross-validated with other dating methods (such as optically stimulated luminescence or uranium-series dating), ESR is a robust and valuable tool for establishing ancient timelines.

Collection of sophisticated, 300,000-year-old tools found preserved in oxygen-deprived clay by global researchers
An international team of researchers, including University of Wollongong (UOW) archaeologist Professor Bo Li, have unearthed a set of approximately 300,000-year-old wooden tools in south-west China, providing a glimpse into the lives, diets, and environment of ancient humans. Made primarily of pine and hardwoods, the 35 tools are the oldest wooden artefacts yet found in East Asia and include digging sticks, hooks and small handheld implements.

Professor Bo Li.

This discovery is exceptional because it preserves a moment in time when early humans were using sophisticated wooden tools to harvest underground food resources. The tools show a level of planning and craftsmanship that challenges the notion that East Asian hominins were technologically conservative.

Professor Bo Li, corresponding author.
School of Science
University of Wollongong
Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia.

The landmark discovery, detailed in the high-profile journal Science, sheds light on the advanced cognitive skills of East Asian hominins and their plant-centred diet in a subtropical climate. The wooden tools had been preserved in oxygen-deprived clay sediments at the site of an ancient lakeshore at Gantangqing in Jiangchuan, Yunnan, and were found among nearly 1,000 organic remains.

Professor Li (pictured above) used advanced dating techniques, including single-grain infrared luminescence, a pioneering technology he developed at UOW, on potassium feldspar grains, and electron spin resonance dating on a mammal tooth, to establish the age of the tools between 250,000-350,000 years old. The Gantangqing site dates to approximately 200,000 years old, but the wooden tools were extracted from layers dating to around 300,000 years old.

The tools display a variety of forms and functions. Two large digging sticks resemble those found at Italy’s Poggetti Vecchi site (dated to 171,000 years old), while four unique hook-shaped tools may have been used for cutting roots. Micro-wear analysis revealed deliberate polishing and scraping marks and soil residues on tool edges, indicating use for digging underground plants such as tubers and roots. The findings reveal that East Asian hominins ate a plant-based diet, with evidence of pine nuts, hazelnuts, kiwi fruit and aquatic tubers found at the site.

One of the tools being excavated at the site in China.
Photo: Bo Li

The discovery challenges previous assumptions about early human adaptation. While contemporary European sites (like Schöningen in Germany) focused on hunting large mammals, Gantangqing reveals a unique plant-based survival strategy in the subtropics. The diversity and sophistication of the wooden tools also fill a significant gap in the archaeological record, as pre-100,000-year-old wooden tools are extremely rare outside Africa and Western Eurasia.

Professor Bo Li.

About the research Professor Li was among the group of global researchers who led the study, including Dr Kieran O’Gorman, Associate Research Fellow at UOW; Dr Jianhui Liu from Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology; Professor Xing Gao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Professor Robin Dennell from the University of Exeter, as well as researchers from the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chengdu University of Technology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Hong Kong, and Yunnan University.

Publication:
Jian-Hui Liu et al.
300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing, southwest China
Science 389, 78-83 (2025). DOI:10.1126/science.adr8540

Abstract
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 ~361,000 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.

Jian-Hui Liu et al.
300,000-year-old wooden tools from Gantangqing, southwest China
Science 389, 78-83 (2025). DOI:10.1126/science.adr8540

© 2025 The American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

It's probably obvious to anyone who isn't a creationist, but this find should be a problem for creationists if only they had the intellectual integrity to confront the evidence.

Here is what ChatGPT4o thought of it:

Why This Discovery Challenges Bible Literalist Creationism. For Bible literalists — those who interpret the Book of Genesis as a factual historical account — the Earth is typically believed to be only about 6,000 to 10,000 years old, based on genealogies and chronologies from the Old Testament. According to this view, the universe, Earth, and all life forms were created during a six-day period known as "Creation Week", around 4000 BCE. Humans, fully formed and anatomically modern, are said to have appeared within that same week, and all human history — including agriculture, cities, and metalworking — must fit within that narrow timescale.

The discovery of wooden tools dating to approximately 300,000 years ago creates insurmountable problems for this worldview:

A Timeline Discrepancy of Orders of Magnitude
These artefacts predate the supposed creation of the Earth by nearly 300,000 years. They represent a time when archaic human relatives—well before *Homo sapiens*—were already engaging in tool-making and exploiting plant resources. This places sophisticated hominin behaviour hundreds of millennia before the literalist timeline even begins.
Evidence of a Long Prehistory
These tools do not appear in isolation. They add to a vast and growing body of archaeological and palaeoanthropological evidence demonstrating that human evolution and cultural development unfolded over hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. From stone tools and cave paintings to burial sites and early dwellings, these findings trace a deep prehistory inconsistent with the Genesis narrative.
Non-Anatomically Modern Tool Users
The hominins responsible for these tools were likely Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, or Denisovans — species that creationists do not accept as part of human ancestry. Literalist views often attempt to categorise all fossil hominins as either fully human (descendants of Adam) or as unrelated apes. But this find, like many others, blurs that simplistic distinction. These were clearly intelligent beings, capable of shaping tools and adapting to their environment — yet they were not Homo sapiens.
Pre-Adamic Civilisation
If literalists were to accept the evidence at face value, they would need to propose the existence of an entire pre-Adamic civilisation of non-humans who made tools, adapted to different environments, and possibly even developed rudimentary cultures — without ever being mentioned in the Bible. This introduces untenable complications to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
In summary, the find is not merely a scientific curiosity — it fundamentally undermines the young-Earth creationist model by contradicting its basic chronology, its claims about the uniqueness of modern humans, and its insistence that all life was created in its present form only a few thousand years ago.

Would any creationists like to offer a sensible explanation for why AI is wrong in this assessment, and, if not, whether they will remain creationists in spite of this insurmountable problem for the cult?

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