by Jerges Cervantes

Created on: September 30, 2010

The Stone age was the early term used to describe the beginning time when humans, or our distant ancestors, began to use stone as tools. It is then furthered into two more periods of time known as the Bronze age and the Iron age respectively. All these ages were meant to convey when we began using certain tools in the genus homo, Stone age for stone tools, Bronze age for the advent of metallurgy, and Iron age for the period of time when we first started manipulating iron and steel.

However, in more recent years with the increase in the archaeological record, these common-use terms no longer have such a linear progression. The Ages have since been refined into new time periods known as the Pleistocene epoch, the Holocene epoch, and the Historical Record (the time period when written accounts took place). The Stone age is covered mostly within the Paleolithic epoch.

The Stone Age technically began in the Paleolithic Period during the Pleistocene epoch almost 2.6mya (million years ago) stretching to the beginning of agriculture 12,000 years ago. The Paleolithic period is further subdivided into 3 time periods; The Lower Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, and the Upper Paleolithic respectively.

LOWER PALEOLITHIC (or the first stage of the Old Stone Age)

The Lower Paleolithic industry is marked by the first use of stone tools by hominids. Homo habilis was the first discovered to be using tools to cleave meat off bone, as well as break the bone to extract the marrow. This marks a period where we get away from our Australopithecene roots of being mainly omnivorous, to becoming early carnivores. The first example of these tools is known as the Olduwan tradition, and involved mostly the hammering and flaking of stone to create a tool. The Olduwan tradition actually marks the beginning of the archaelogical record, as this is the point where we first begin seeing widespread tool use in the hominids.

The other aspect to the Lower Paleolithic is known as the Acheulean, and are mostly associated with homo erectus and begin around 1.8mya. It is typically noted that this period is also when we left Africa to populate Eurasia, as most often Acheulean tool use is seen throughout Europe and Asia, where Olduwan is limited only to Africa.

MIDDLE PALEOLITHIC (the second stage of the Old Stone Age)

The Middle Paleolithic, or Middle Stone Age, spans from around 300,000 years ago to 30,000, and is marked by homo neanderthalensis(Neanderthals) and anatomically modern humans developing

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