Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Mesolithic is the archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic, representing the final era of hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe and the Middle East. In Europe it spans roughly 15,000 to 5,000 BP; in the Middle East it spans roughly 20,000 to 10,000 BP.
Hodder Westropp coined the term "Mesolithic" in 1866, one year after John Lubbock introduced "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic" in his 1865 book Pre-historic Times. Westropp's proposal was immediately controversial and debated by scholars for decades.
Mesolithic people primarily used microlithic technology, making composite tools from small Mode V chipped stone tools called microliths. In some regions, including Ireland, parts of Portugal, the Isle of Man, and the Tyrrhenian Islands, a macrolithic technology was used instead.
The Shigir Idol is a rare Mesolithic wooden sculpture carved from a single plank of larch, found in the Urals region. Covered in geometric motifs and topped with a human head, it once stood over five metres tall. It survives only in fragments.
Some Mesolithic communities did make pottery, particularly in north-eastern Europe, Siberia, and some southern European and North African sites, in a tradition dating roughly between 9,000 and 5,850 years ago. The earliest known pottery in the world, however, comes from Xianrendong cave in China, dated to between 20,000 and 19,000 years ago.
The Mesolithic ended with the gradual spread of the Neolithic package of farming, herding, polished stone axes, timber longhouses, and pottery into Europe and the Middle East. Some communities resisted for millennia; evidence from the Blatterhohle in Hagen suggests Mesolithic descendants maintained a foraging lifestyle for more than 2,000 years after farming arrived in their region.