The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 4500 BC and 2000 BC with the advent of metalworking. Stone Age artifacts include tools used by humans and by their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporaneous genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Bone tools were used during this period as well, but are more 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
- The Bronze Age
- The Iron Age
Read more about Stone Age: Historical Significance, Chronology, Modern Popular Culture and The Stone Age
Famous quotes containing the words stone and/or age:
“The stone often recoils on the head of the thrower.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)