The Stone Age: A History from Beginning to End (Prehistory)

by Hourly History

three-age system provided a chronology for prehistory (the period of human history before written records) based on technological development.

Stone Age, when most artifacts were made from stone and flint, the Bronze Age, when the first metal artifacts were created, and the Iron Age, from which time more advanced examples of metalworking were found.

These periods aren’t completely separate, and there are considerable overlaps as bronze and ironworking developed in d...

Bronze Age began around 3,000 BCE and continued until around 1,200 BCE. The Iron Age began in 1,200 BCE, but agreei...

Iron Age marked the end of prehistory and ended with the first development of writing, even though in some areas (Mesopotamia, for example), the developmen...

in modified form, used today. The Stone Age was different, mainly because it covered an enormous span of time, from the emergence of the first human species around 2.6 million years ago up to the beginning of the Bronze Age.

further subdivided into three eras: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic.

lithic is Latin and means “stone” while paleo, meso, and neo mean, respectively, “old,” ...

Paleolithic is generally used to denote a period from around 2.6 million years ago to around 10,000 BCE. Mesolithic means the period from 10,000 BCE to around 5,000 BCE. Neolithic indic...

(fair skin is more efficient at absorbing UV light and helps to avoid vitamin D deficiency in areas where there is less available sunlight).

For most of history before the beginning of the Neolithic era, the vast majority of Homo sapiens are believed to have been lactose-intolerant (unable to digest dairy products), but as the domestication of animals and the production of milk increased, many people were capable of producing lactase, the enzyme which breaks down lactose and is needed to digest dairy products.

To date, Catalhoyuk is the oldest example of what we would now call an urban environment,

There is a growing belief that the people of the Stone Age may actually have had more leisure time than most people do today and may have enjoyed a lifestyle very different from the constant struggle originally envisaged.

The notion of having tokens that denoted value did not begin until the Bronze Age when the first metal coins were produced,

However, that doesn’t mean that most Stone Age people died before the age of 40, as any average for the period is biased by high rates of infant mortality.

Recent studies looked at surviving groups of hunter-gatherer people and discovered that, if infant mortality is removed, the median age of death is between 70 and 80 years, about the same as for modern, developed societies.

possible that average life expectancy is not much better now than it was in the Stone Age; it’s just that the main causes of premature death have changed.

In areas where there were naturally occurring caves, people may also have used these as homes, refuges, and places to gather. That is why Stone Age people were originally called cavemen, though it seems likely that only a lucky few had such homes, and these were probably only used during certain periods of the years as most early humans were nomadic.

Some historians refer to this period of overlap as the Chalcolithic (Copper-Stone) Age to indicate that the end of using stone tools and the beginning of metalworking spanned an extended period of time and happened in parallel.

The Paleolithic era lasted for millions of years, during which the human species seem to have made relatively few advances and where the human lifestyle changed little.

first time in human history that not everyone had to be involved in the acquisition of food. That in turn led to the emergence of artisans who specialized in the production of certain items and most likely also to the emergence of priests or shamans (who we may regard as the first proto-scientists) who were probably the first humans to have the time to think about the planet on which we live and its relationship to the cosmos.