The human past is traditionally divided into three very unequal epochs—the Paleolithic (or Old Stone Age), which ran from 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago; the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), covering the period of transition from hunter-gathering lifestyles to the widespread emergence of agriculture, from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago; and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), which covers the closing but extremely productive 2,000 years or so of prehistory, up to the Bronze Age. Within each of these periods are many further subperiods—Olduwan, Mousterian, Gravettian, and so on—that are
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