Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

The Paleolithic is usually subdivided into three eras based on tool types: 1) the Lower Paleolithic, which begins roughly three million years ago with the manufacture of the first crude Oldowan pebble tools by the early hominids and continues throughout the 1.5-million-year period during which the emerging humans such as Homo erectus made their more finely worked Acheulean hand axes; 2) the Middle Paleolithic, which begins approximately 250,000 years ago and is generally associated with the Neandertals and their Mousterian flake tools; and 3) the Upper Paleolithic, which begins roughly fifty thousand years ago and corresponds to the time of the anatomically modern humans such as the Cro-Magnons, who made the finest and most varied stone tools from long, thin blades of fine-grained stone such as flint and obsidian.

*This is roughly where the book ended and continued on with listing; sources, an extensive glossary and index.*