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:
“Ye could not know where lies a thing so fair,
No stone is there to show, no tongue to say,
What was; no dirge, except the hollow sea’s,
Mourns o’er the beauty of the Cyclades.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good—the atavism of an older ideal.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)