The Stone Age marks a period of prehistory in which humans used primitive stone tools. Lasting roughly 2.5 million years, the Stone Age ended around 5,000 years ago when humans in the Near East began working with metal and making tools and weapons from bronze. During the Stone Age, humans shared the planet with a number of now-extinct hominin relatives, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. The Stone Age began about 2.6 million years, when researchers found the earliest evidence of humans using stone tools, and lasted until about 3,300 B.C. when the Bronze Age began.
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.
Stone artifacts tell anthropologists a lot about early humans, including how they made things, how they lived and how human behavior evolved over time.
Early in the Stone Age, humans lived in small, nomadic groups. During much of this period, the Earth was in an Ice Age—a period of colder global temperatures and glacial expansion.
Mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other megafauna roamed. Stone Age humans hunted large mammals, including wooly mammoths, giant bison and deer. 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.
About 14,000 years ago, Earth entered a warming period. Many of the large Ice Age animals went extinct. 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.
Some humans started to build permanent houses in the region. They gave up the nomadic lifestyle of their Ice Age ancestors to begin farming.
Human artifacts in the Americas begin showing up from around this time, too. 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.
Much of what we know about life in the Stone Age and Stone Age people comes from the tools they left behind.
Hammerstones are some of the earliest and simplest stone tools. Prehistoric humans used hammerstones to chip other stones into sharp-edged flakes. They also used hammerstones to break apart nuts, seeds and bones and to grind clay into pigment.
Archaeologists refer to these earliest stone tools as the Oldowan toolkit. Oldowan stone tools dating back nearly 2.6 million years were first discovered in Tanzania in the 1930s by archaeologist Louis Leakey.
Most of the makers of Oldowan tools were right-handed, leading experts to believe that handedness evolved very early in human history.
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.
Stone artifacts tell anthropologists a lot about early humans, including how they made things, how they lived and how human behavior evolved over time.
Early in the Stone Age, humans lived in small, nomadic groups. During much of this period, the Earth was in an Ice Age—a period of colder global temperatures and glacial expansion.
Mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other megafauna roamed. Stone Age humans hunted large mammals, including wooly mammoths, giant bison and deer. 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.
About 14,000 years ago, Earth entered a warming period. Many of the large Ice Age animals went extinct. 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.
Some humans started to build permanent houses in the region. They gave up the nomadic lifestyle of their Ice Age ancestors to begin farming.
Human artifacts in the Americas begin showing up from around this time, too. 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.
Much of what we know about life in the Stone Age and Stone Age people comes from the tools they left behind.
Hammerstones are some of the earliest and simplest stone tools. Prehistoric humans used hammerstones to chip other stones into sharp-edged flakes. They also used hammerstones to break apart nuts, seeds and bones and to grind clay into pigment.
Archaeologists refer to these earliest stone tools as the Oldowan toolkit. Oldowan stone tools dating back nearly 2.6 million years were first discovered in Tanzania in the 1930s by archaeologist Louis Leakey.
Most of the makers of Oldowan tools were right-handed, leading experts to believe that handedness evolved very early in human history.
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