Most researchers think the population density in most areas was low enough to avoid violent conflict between groups. While humans had the technology to create spears and other tools to use as weapons, there’s little evidence for Stone Age wars. Stone Age food varied over time and from region to region, but included the foods typical of hunter gatherers: meats, fish, eggs, grasses, tubers, fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts. Fragments of clay containers used in food preparation at the site may be up to 16,500 years old. The oldest pottery known was found at an archaeological site in Japan. People during the Stone Age first started using clay pots to cook food and store things. Some examples of late Stone Age tools include harpoon points, bone and ivory needles, bone flutes for playing music and chisel-like stone flakes used for carving wood, antler or bone.
Different groups sought different ways of making tools. These diverse “toolkits” suggest a faster pace of innovation-and the emergence of distinct cultural identities. Groups of humans experimented with other raw materials including bone, ivory and antler, especially later on in the Stone Age. Not all Stone Age tools were made of stone.
These included hand axes, spear points for hunting large game, scrapers which could be used to prepare animal hides and awls for shredding plant fibers and making clothing. Most of the makers of Oldowan tools were right-handed, leading experts to believe that handedness evolved very early in human history.Īs technology progressed, humans created increasingly more sophisticated stone tools. Oldowan stone tools dating back nearly 2.6 million years were first discovered in Tanzania in the 1930s by archaeologist Louis Leakey. They also used hammerstones to break apart nuts, seeds and bones and to grind clay into pigment.Īrchaeologists refer to these earliest stone tools as the Oldowan toolkit. Prehistoric humans used hammerstones to chip other stones into sharp-edged flakes. Hammerstones are some of the earliest and simplest stone tools. Much of what we know about life in the Stone Age and Stone Age people comes from the tools they left behind. Experts aren’t exactly sure who these first Americans were or where they came from, though there’s some evidence these Stone Age people may have followed a footbridge between Asia and North America, which became submerged as glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age. Human artifacts in the Americas begin showing up from around this time, too. They gave up the nomadic lifestyle of their Ice Age ancestors to begin farming.
Some humans started to build permanent houses in the region. In the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the east by the Persian Gulf, wild wheat and barley became plentiful as it got warmer. Many of the large Ice Age animals went extinct. They used stone tools to cut, pound, and crush-making them better at extracting meat and other nutrients from animals and plants than their earlier ancestors.Ībout 14,000 years ago, Earth entered a warming period. Stone Age humans hunted large mammals, including wooly mammoths, giant bison and deer. Mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other megafauna roamed. During much of this period, the Earth was in an Ice Age-a period of colder global temperatures and glacial expansion. Stone Age FactsĮarly in the Stone Age, humans lived in small, nomadic groups. Stone artifacts tell anthropologists a lot about early humans, including how they made things, how they lived and how human behavior evolved over time.
Some experts believe the use of stone tools may have developed even earlier in our primate ancestors, since some modern apes, including bonobos, can also use stone tools to get food.
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Some 3.3 million years ago, an ancient species that lived on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya earned that distinction – a full 700,000 years before the earliest members of the Homo genus emerged. It is typically broken into three distinct periods: the Paleolithic Period, Mesolithic Period and Neolithic Period.ĭid you know? Humans weren’t the first to make or use stone tools. The Stone Age began about 2.6 million years ago, when researchers found the earliest evidence of humans using stone tools, and lasted until about 3,300 B.C.
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