Stone Age

• 1. Introduction

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  The Stone Age lasted for roughly 3.4 million years, an expanse so vast that it accounts for 99% of human history. It began with sharpened stone and ended only when people learned to melt and smelt copper. Fossilised animal bones bearing tool marks, 3.4 million years old, were unearthed in the Lower Awash Valley in Ethiopia. They are the oldest indirect trace we have of a hand reaching for stone. Yet the species that struck those first edges remains unknown to us. How did a single tool-making habit stretch across millions of years and three continents? Who actually made the earliest blades, and why do archaeologists argue over where one age stops and the next begins? And how did a word coined for the soil of Europe end up describing the whole of humankind's deepest past?

• 2. Naming The Ages

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  In 1859, Jens Jacob Worsaae proposed splitting the Stone Age into older and younger parts, drawing on his study of Danish kitchen middens begun in 1851. That simple cut grew into the periods archaeologists use today. The Stone Age sits first in the three-age system, followed by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. The Paleolithic, from the Greek for old stone, was coined by archaeologist John Lubbock and published in 1865 as the earliest division. A transitional stage of finer tools became the Mesolithic, and the final stage, marked by farming, became the Neolithic. The word itself was invented to describe the archaeological cultures of Europe. It travels poorly to places like parts of the Indies and Oceania, where people used stone tools until European colonisation arrived. The Association of Social Anthropologists discourages calling any living group Stone Age, warning that the label implies they are leftovers of a stage the rest of humankind has outgrown. That tension would resurface when archaeologists tried to map the framework onto Africa.

• 3. Africa's Separate System

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  In the 1920s, South African archaeologists organising their stone tool collections found the European framework simply did not fit. J. Desmond Clark put it plainly: the threefold division of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages had no validity in Africa outside the Nile valley. So in 1929, Astley John Hilary Goodwin, a professional archaeologist, and Clarence van Riet Lowe, a civil engineer and amateur archaeologist, proposed a new scheme. Their article, "Stone Age Cultures of South Africa", appeared in the Annals of the South African Museum. They named three stages: the Earlier, Middle, and Later Stone Age, with floating relative dates. In sub-Saharan Africa, iron-working was either invented locally or carried across the Sahara from the north. There was copper and bronze smelting too, yet archaeologists recognise no separate Copper Age or Bronze Age there. Louis Leakey hosted the first Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in Nairobi in 1947, where the three-stage system was formally adopted. The delegates would keep meeting every four years to settle the field's disputes.

• 4. Chasing The Transitions

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  If Period B descends from Period A, there must be a boundary between them, and the nature of that boundary is the problem. A sudden switch, where a population drops the customs of A overnight and adopts those of B, makes little evolutionary sense. The Stone Age of Europe is notably short on these known transitions. Louis Leakey offered part of the answer by proving that humans evolved in Africa. The phases could appear in Europe without transitions because migrant populations carried them there fully formed. That shifted the burden onto African archaeologists, who now had to find the missing links at home. In 1955 the Third Congress added two intermediate periods, one for the Fauresmith and Sangoan technologies, another for the Magosian. Absolute dating later exposed them as phantoms. Fauresmith turned out to be a facies of Acheulean, Sangoan a facies of Lupemban, and Magosian a mix of two different periods. In 1965, Burg Wartenstein Conference number 29 in Austria officially rejected them, attended by Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey. The search for the real transitions, though, went on.

• 5. The Oldowan Hand

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  The earliest documented stone tools come from Lomekwi 3 in West Turkana, northwestern Kenya, dated to 3.3 million years old, makers unknown. Better known are the Oldowan tools, named for the type site of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. A maker would knock pieces off a river pebble with a hammerstone, producing a core and small sharp flakes. The whole point was to create a sharp-edged rock where nature had supplied none. At Sterkfontein, Member 5 East, in South Africa, modern science detected mammalian blood cells on these Mode 1 tools. The blood came from a fresh kill, so the users likely did the killing and the butchering. Plant residues bonded to the silicon of some tools confirm they chopped plants too. In Africa these tools were made predominantly by Homo habilis, though that species inherited rather than invented the tradition. Because chimpanzees sometimes split stones to prepare food in the wild, creating an Oldowan tool by accident, the habit may run far older than the record shows. Then a new species, Homo erectus, walked into the same range, ready to carry these tools out of the continent.

• 6. Tools Across Continents

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  At Yiron, Israel, Mode 1 tools have been dated to 2.4 million years ago, about half a million years before the known Homo erectus finds. If that date holds, either another hominin left Africa first or the earliest erectus has yet to be found. Pebble tools turn up at Riwat, Pakistan, at 2.0 million years, and at Renzidong, South China, at over 2 million years. A fossil skull at Mojokerto on Java, dated to 1.8 million years, raises the possibility that erectus arose on the plains of Asia rather than in Africa. At Dmanisi, Georgia, erectus appears from 1.75 million years ago alongside pebble tools. The next leap was the Acheulean, or Mode 2, a biface worked on both faces to form a cutting edge all the way around. The earliest known instances lie in the 1.7 to 1.6 million-year layer at Kokiselei, West Turkana, Kenya. Eastward, a boundary called the Movius Line, named for Hallam L. Movius, marks the furthest reach of the Acheulean before 1 million years ago. At Athirampakkam near Chennai in Tamil Nadu, the Acheulean began at 1.51 million years ago, earlier than in North India and Europe.

• 7. Hearth And Hide

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  Around 2 million years ago, Homo habilis is believed to have built the first man-made structure in East Africa, a simple ring of stones holding tree branches in place. A similar circular arrangement, roughly 380,000 years old, was found at Terra Amata near Nice, France, though its dating has been questioned. At Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic, a structure with a timber-supported roof dates to around 23,000 BC, its walls packed from clay blocks and stones. Across East-Central Europe and Siberia, expert mammoth hunters raised huts from mammoth bones, some found along the Dniepr river valley of Ukraine. Diet ran to wild plants and animals, and people prized organ meats like livers, kidneys and brains. Large-seeded legumes appear in the Mousterian layers of Kebara Cave in Israel, and humans processed wild cereal grains as far back as 23,000 years ago. Near the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, between 15,000 and 9,000 years ago, the woolly mammoth and other megafauna died out across Asia, Europe, North America and Australia. Over-hunting, deforestation, and climate change have all been blamed for fragmenting the vast ranges those animals needed.

• 8. Marks On The Rock

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  The Cave of Chauvet in the Ardèche department of France holds the most important cave paintings of the Paleolithic, dating from about 36,000 BC. The Altamira cave paintings in Spain, made between 14,000 and 12,000 BC, show bison. The hall of bulls at Lascaux in the Dordogne dates from about 15,000 to 10,000 BC, where arrow-like symbols are sometimes read as a calendar, though the evidence stays interpretive. Petroglyphs appeared in the Neolithic as engraved abstract or symbolic images, a dominant form of pre-writing symbols found from Australia to Death Valley to Cumbe Mayo in Peru. At Cingle de la Mola in Castellón, Spain, a Mesolithic painting dated to about 7,000 to 4,000 BC shows roughly 50 bowmen in two groups marching toward each other, each gripping a bow and a fistful of arrows. The Neolithic Revolution brought agriculture, pottery, and large settlements like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, with the first Neolithic cultures starting around 7000 BC in the Fertile Crescent. The Ġgantija temples of Gozo in the Maltese archipelago, erected around 3600 to 2500 BC, are the oldest surviving free-standing structures in the world. The age ended when copper was smelted, a craft whose first evidence sits in the Vinča culture sites of modern-day Serbia, carried by a man like Ötzi the Iceman, who died around 3300 BC with a copper axe at his side.