Artifacts about 300 thousand years old have been discovered in China.

Archaeologists in China have discovered 35 wooden artifacts, ranging in age from 250 to 361 thousand years. This was reported by Science magazine on July 3.

It is specified that the artifacts were discovered in a place called Gantanqing, which was discovered in the 1980s near the Chinese city of Kunming.

So, among the discovered artifacts are digging sticks, carved from branches and roots of trees using stone blades. The palm-sized pointed implements were probably used to harvest carbohydrate-rich tubers and root crops from soft soil on the shore of a prehistoric lake, the publication noted.

"This is the first time we have discovered such an ancient site, indicating that hominins used underground food resources. This group of hominins knew which plants were edible and which were not, and specifically searched for these plants using wooden tools," Bo Li, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong and co—author of the new study, told the journal.

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The newspaper Le Figaro reported on February 7 that in the south-west of France, during excavations in the city of Bordeaux, archaeologists discovered nine sarcophagi about 1.3 thousand years old. It is specified that the artifacts were approximately preserved from the 5th to the 8th centuries.