Ancient stone tools and other artefacts allow us to understand how early-human objects were conceived, how people lived and interacted with each other and their surroundings.
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Stone Age time coordinates
The Stone Age indicates the large period during which stone was widely used to make utensils. So far, the first stone tools have been dated around2,6 million years ago.The end is set at the first use of bronze around 3,300 BCE. Stone was not the only material used for tool making, yet it was the most durable one when it came to decaying and thus survived better than the others.
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Some Stone Age Facts
Early in the Stone Age, humans lived in tiny,roaming groups. During this period, the Earth was in the middle of anIce Age.
Stone Age humans huntedlarge mammals, such as mammoths, giant bison and deers. They usedstone toolstocut,weight and crush, earning better skills at extracting meat and other nutrients from animals and plants than their ancestors.
Around 14,000 years ago, Earth entered a warmer time and many of the large Ice Age animals were extinct. In theFertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region surrounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and the east by the Persian Gulf, wild corn and cereal became abundant as it got warmer. Humans started to build houses. They changed the nomadic lifestyle for farming.
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Early Stone Age Tools
The first production of stone tools dates back to about2.6 million years ago. The oldest stone utensils, called theOldowan toolkit, consist of:
•Hammerstonesthat show signs of beatings on their surfaces
•Stone coresthat show flake marks along the edges
•Sharp stone flakesthat allow to have cutting edges, along with lots of debris from percussion flaking.
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By about1.76 million years ago, early humans began shaping larger stones to create sharper objects for cutting purposes, like new kind of tools calledhandaxes. These utensils and other types of‘large cutting tools’characterize theAcheulean toolkit. These toolkits were made for an immense period,ending by around 400,000 to 250,000 years ago.
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Middle Stone Age Tools
你们关于400000年和200000年之间ars ago, stone shaping techniques began to increase. One of the main innovations was the application of the“prepared core technique”, in which a core was particularly flaked on one side so that a flake, predetermined in size and shape, could be produced in a single cut.
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Middle Stone Age toolkits includedspikes, which could be hafted on to shafts to make spears. They could be attached to smaller, sleeker shafts to create darts, arrows, and other weapons.Stone awlscould have been used to perforate hides and scrapers were useful in preparing hide. Moreover, wood and other materials were used in this period.
Later Stone Age Tools
During the Later Stone Age, the speed of innovations grew. In addition to stone, people experimented with different raw materials (bone, ivory and antler). The level of craftsmanship increased, andHomo Sapiens groupssearched for their own unique cultural identity and adopted their ways of creating objects. The toolkits of Later Stone Age were diverse and reflected the cultural diversity of the earlier times, such as for example,‘Upper Paleolithic’toolkits in Europe
and‘Late Stone Age’toolkits in Africa.
Scale in centimetres. Photo taken January 16, 1982 at the IFAN Museum, Dakar, Sénégal. Collected by J. Joffre.
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Info sources:
https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/stone-age
https://www.britannica.com/event/Stone-Age/Europe#ref52343
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/stone-tools
https://sciencing.com/list-neolithic-stone-tools-8252604.html
