Stone Age information

The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make stone tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years^[1] and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC, with the advent of metalworking.^[2] It therefore represents nearly 99.3% of human history. Though some simple metalworking of malleable metals, particularly the use of gold and copper for purposes of ornamentation, was known in the Stone Age, it is the melting and smelting of copper that marks the end of the Stone Age.^[3] In Western Asia, this occurred by about 3,000 BC, when bronze became widespread. The term Bronze Age is used to describe the period that followed the Stone Age, as well as to describe cultures that had developed techniques and technologies for working copper alloys (bronze: originally copper and arsenic, later copper and tin) into tools, supplanting stone in many uses.

Stone Age artifacts that have been discovered include tools used by modern humans, by their predecessor species in the genus Homo, and possibly by the earlier partly contemporaneous genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Bone tools have been discovered that were used during this period as well but these are rarely preserved in the archaeological record. The Stone Age is further subdivided by the types of stone tools in use.

The Stone Age is the first period in the three-age system frequently used in archaeology to divide the timeline of human technological prehistory into functional periods, with the next two being the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, respectively. The Stone Age is also commonly divided into three distinct periods: the earliest and most primitive being the Paleolithic era; a transitional period with finer tools known as the Mesolithic era; and the final stage known as the Neolithic era. Neolithic peoples were the first to transition away from hunter-gatherer societies into the settled lifestyle of inhabiting towns and villages as agriculture became widespread. In the chronology of prehistory, the Neolithic era usually overlaps with the Chalcolithic ("Copper") era preceding the Bronze Age.

^ "Oldest tool use and meat-eating revealed | Natural History Museum". 18 August 2010. Archived from the original on 18 August 2010.
^ "Stone Age". HISTORY. Retrieved 31 May 2020.
^ Goody, Jack (2012). Metals, Culture, and Capitalism.

[nhm.ac.uk-1] "Oldest tool use and meat-eating revealed | Natural History Museum". 18 August 2010. Archived from the original on 18 August 2010.

[2] "Stone Age". HISTORY. Retrieved 31 May 2020.

[3] Goody, Jack (2012). Metals, Culture, and Capitalism.

Stone Age information

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Stone Age

Queens of the Stone Age

Stone Age Complication

Neolithic

Middle Stone Age

Late Stone Age

Nordic Stone Age

Paleolithic

List of Stone Age art

Stone Age Cartoons

Queens of the Stone Age discography

Lower Paleolithic

Iron Age

Prehistory

Prehistoric Europe

Bronze Age

Heinrich Harrer

South Asian Stone Age

Chalcolithic

The Cave Boy of the Age of Stone

List of Queens of the Stone Age contributors

The Stone Age
↑ before Homo (Pliocene)
Paleolithic Lower Paleolithic Early Stone Age Homo Control of fire Stone tools Middle Paleolithic Middle Stone Age Homo neanderthalensis Homo sapiens Recent African origin of modern humans Upper Paleolithic Later Stone Age Behavioral modernity, Atlatl, Origin of the domestic dog Epipalaeolithic Natufian Mesolithic Microliths, Bow and Arrows, Canoes Tahunian Heavy Neolithic Shepherd Neolithic Trihedral Neolithic Pre-Pottery Neolithic Neolithic Neolithic Revolution Domestication Khiamian culture Pottery Neolithic Pottery
↓ Chalcolithic
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