What kind of tree was the first paper made from? Where was it made?

Dr. dig responds:

Ancient people used to write on many different materials, from clay tablets, to pieces of wood or flat stones. The Egyptians invented papyrus, which they made from strips cut from the stalks of the papyrus plant (a kind of water grass that grew along the banks of the Nile). The earliest surviving papyrus is over 5,000 years old.

We get our word 'paper' from the ancient Egyptian 'papyrus.'

In the 5th century A.D., the ancient Mesoamericans made a kind of paper by pounding fig bark into long thin sheets. The ancient Chinese, however, were the first to make 'paper' that was similar to the kind of paper we use today, which is made from wood pulp. They first made this paper around the early 2nd century A.D., out of mulberry bark.

Cai Lun is credited with inventing paper in A.D. 105. He is said to have used tree bark, cloth rags, fishing nets, and pieces of hemp cloth, that were strained and spread out to dry on a mat.

However, fragments of ancient paper recently found in China indicate that the invention occurred 200 or 300 years before Cai Lun was born.