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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 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.
Oldowan tools were probably used for many purposes, which have been discovered from observation of modern apes and hunter-gatherers. Nuts and bones are cracked by hitting them with hammer stones on a stone used as an anvil. Battered and pitted stones testify to this possible use. Heavy-duty tools could be used as axes for woodworking.
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.
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]
It covers the greatest portion of humanity's time (roughly 99% of "human technological history", [28] where "human" and "humanity" are interpreted to mean the genus Homo), extending from 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago, with the first documented use of stone tools by hominins such as Homo habilis, to the end of the Pleistocene around 10,000 BC. [28]
The artifacts, found preserved in soil under a later lava flow and dated at 325,000–335,000 years old, were a mix of two distinct stone tool technology traditions: bifacial tools and Levallois tools. Daniel Adler suggests that the coexistence of bifacial and Levallois tools at the site provides the first clear evidence that local populations ...
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.