Mesolithic Period

The Mesolithic The Epipaleolithic This box:
↑ Paleolithic
Mesolithic Europe Epipaleolithic Europe Fosna–Hensbacka culture Komsa culture Maglemosian culture Lepenski Vir culture Kunda culture Narva culture Komornica culture Swiderian culture Epipaleolithic Transylvania Mesolithic Transylvania Tardenoisian Schela Cladovei culture Mesolithic Southeastern Europe Levant Levantine corridor Natufian Khiamian Caucasus Trialetian Zagros Zarzian culture
↓ Neolithic ↓ Stone Age

In archaeology, the Mesolithic (Greek: μέσος, mesos "middle"; λίθος, lithos "stone") is the period between Paleolithic and Neolithic. The term "Epipaleolithic" is often used for areas outside northern Europe, but was also the preferred synonym used by French archaeologists until the 1960s.

Mesolithic has different time spans in different parts of Eurasia. It was originally post-, pre-agricultural material in northwest Europe about 10,000 to 5000 BCE, but material from the Levant (about 20,000 to 9500 BCE) is also labelled Mesolithic.

The term "Mesolithic" is in competition with another term, "Epipaleolithic", which means the "final Upper Paleolithic industries occurring at the end of the final glaciation which appear to merge technologically into the Mesolithic".

In the archaeology of Northern Europe, for example for archaeological sites in Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Ukraine, and Russia, the term "Mesolithic" is almost always used. In the archaeology of other areas, the term "Epipaleolithic" may be preferred by most authors, or there may be divergences between authors over which term to use or what meaning to assign to each. In the New World, neither term is used (except provisionally in the Arctic).

In the archaeology of sub-Saharan Africa, Lower Paleolithic is replaced by "Early Stone Age", Middle Paleolithic is replaced by "Middle Stone Age" and Upper Paleolithic by "Later Stone Age" according to the terminology introduced by John Hilary Goodman and Clarence van Riet Lowe of South Africa in the early 20th century. Therefore, care must be taken in translating "Mesolithic" as "Middle Stone Age", as the latter term has an unrelated technical meaning in the context of African archaeology.

The three -lithics are subdivisions of the Stone Age in the three-age system developed since classical times and given a modern archaeological meaning by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, a Danish archaeologist, in the early 19th century. Subdivisions of "earlier" and "later" were added to the Stone Age by Thomsen and especially his junior colleague and employee Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae. John Lubbock kept these divisions in his work Pre-historic Times in 1865 and introduced the terms Paleolithic ("Old Stone Age") and Neolithic ("New Stone Age") for them. He saw no need for an intermediate category.

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