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Many such sites have hominin bones, teeth, or footprints, but unless they also include evidence for tools or tool use, they are omitted here. This list excludes tools and tool use attributed to non-hominin species. See Tool use by non-humans. Since there are far too many hominin tool sites to list on a single page, this page attempts to list ...
Stone tool use – early human (hominid) use of stone tool technology, such as the hand axe, was similar to that of primates, which is found to be limited to the intelligence levels of modern children aged 3 to 5 years. Ancestors of homo sapiens (modern man) used stone tools as follows: Homo habilis ("handy man") – first "homo" species.
Tool use by animals is a phenomenon in which an animal uses any kind of tool in order to achieve a goal such as acquiring food and water, grooming, defense, communication, recreation or construction. [42] Originally thought to be a skill possessed only by humans, some tool use requires a sophisticated level of cognition. [43]
This era of stone tool use is called the Paleolithic, or "Old stone age", and spans all of human history up to the development of agriculture approximately 12,000 years ago. To make a stone tool, a "core" of hard stone with specific flaking properties (such as flint) was struck with a hammerstone.
The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used in the manufacture of implements with a sharp edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 2.5 million years, from the time of early hominids to Homo sapiens in the later Pleistocene era, and largely ended between 6000 and 2000 BCE with the advent of metalworking.
The use of tools by apes including chimpanzees [12] and orangutans [13] can be used to argue in favour of tool-use as an ancestral feature of the hominin family. [14] Tools made from bone, wood, or other organic materials were therefore in all probability used before the Oldowan. [ 15 ]
Stone has been used to make a wide variety of tools throughout history, including arrowheads, spearheads, hand axes, and querns. Knapped stone tools are nearly ubiquitous in pre-metal-using societies because they are easily manufactured, the tool stone raw material is usually plentiful, and they are easy to transport and sharpen.
H. erectus is credited with inventing the Acheulean stone tool industry, succeeding the Oldowan industry, [127] [128] and were the first to make lithic flakes bigger than 10 cm (3.9 in), and hand axes (which includes bifacial tools with only 2 sides, such as picks, knives, and cleavers). [129]