The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 4500 BC and 2000 BC with the advent of metalworking. Stone Age artifacts include tools used by humans and by their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporaneous genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Bone tools were used during this period as well, but are more 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 of the three-age system of archaeology, which divides human technological prehistory into three periods:
- The Stone Age
- The Bronze Age
- The Iron Age
Read more about Stone Age: Historical Significance, Chronology, Modern Popular Culture and The Stone Age
Famous quotes containing the words stone and/or age:
“Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every Age has its own peculiar faith.... Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)