First farmers crafted ancient water wells without metal tools
Discovery in German dig proves skill of ancient carpenters despite lack of metal carving tools
The people who lived in eastern Germany around 7,000 years ago are thought to have been some of the first farmers.
Now, new archaeological evidence suggests they were also skilled woodworkers, crafting intricate water wells some 2,000 years before metal tools were forged in Europe.
Sophisticated in construction, four wells discovered near Leipzig were built using stone carving implements and wooden mauls and wedges, said Willy Tegel, a researcher at the Institute for Forest Growth at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
"The first farmers were also the first carpenters," Tegel and his colleagues wrote in a study published this month in the journal PLoS One. The people who built the wells were members of the so-called Linear Pottery Culture, which produced pottery with distinctive incised lines more than 6,500 years ago.
Archaeologists believe these ancient people migrated from areas that are now the Ukraine and Slovakia through the fertile regions of Central Europe.
The wells were discovered as part of an excavation of areas about 193 kilometres southwest of Berlin.