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Stone age

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
Late Stone Age
Behavioral modernity, Atlatl,
Origin of the domestic dog

Mesolithic

Microliths, Bow, Canoe
Natufian
Khiamian
Tahunian
Heavy Neolithic
Shepherd Neolithic
Trihedral Neolithic
Pre-Pottery Neolithic

Neolithic

Neolithic Revolution,
Domestication
Pottery Neolithic
Pottery
Chalcolithic

before Homo (Pliocene)

Paleolithic

Mesolithic

Neolithic

The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 8700 BCE and 2000 BCE with the advent of metalworking.

Stone Age artifacts include tools used by modern humans and by their predecessor species in the genus Homo, and possibly by the earlier partly contemporaneous genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Bone tools were used during this period as well but 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 of the three-age system of archaeology, which divides human technological prehistory into three periods:

The Stone Age is contemporaneous with the evolution of the genus Homo, the only exception possibly being the early Stone Age, when species prior to Homo may have manufactured tools. According to the age and location of the current evidence, the cradle of the genus is the East African Rift System, especially toward the north in Ethiopia, where it is bordered by grasslands. The closest relative among the other living primates, the genus Pan, represents a branch that continued on in the deep forest, where the primates evolved. The rift served as a conduit for movement into southern Africa and also north down the Nile into North Africa and through the continuation of the rift in the Levant to the vast grasslands of Asia.


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Wikipedia

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