60 Fun Facts About The Stone Age

Roughly how long did the Stone Age last?

That is roughly 99% of human history; it ended between 4000 and 2000 BC depending on the region.

What technological development marks the end of the Stone Age?

Gold and copper were hammered for ornaments earlier, but melting and smelting copper is the true dividing line.

The Stone Age is the first period of which archaeological scheme?

The Bronze Age and Iron Age follow it.

Which Danish museum curator first arranged prehistory scientifically into stone, bronze and iron ages?

He worked with the collections of the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen from 1816 to 1825.

What are the three divisions of the Stone Age, in order?

Old stone, middle stone and new stone; the Neolithic often overlaps the Copper Age.

Where were the oldest known stone tools, dated to 3.3 million years, excavated?

They pushed the record back about 500,000 years beyond the Gona tools of Ethiopia.

The oldest indirect evidence of tool use, 3.4-million-year-old cut-marked bones, comes from which country?

They were found in the Lower Awash Valley.

The Oldowan tool industry is named after which site in Tanzania?

Oldowan tools were made by knocking flakes off river pebbles with a hammerstone.

What is the characteristic tool of the Acheulean industry associated with Homo erectus?

The industry is named for the French type site of Saint-Acheul.

About how long ago did the hand axe first appear as a new Lower Paleolithic tool?

The earliest European hand axes belong to the Abbevillian industry of the Somme valley.

Which stone-tool industry is associated with the Neanderthals?

Neanderthals nursed their elderly and practised ritual burial, suggesting an organised society.

Who coined the term 'Paleolithic', published in 1865?

It comes from Greek palaios (old) and lithos (stone).

Neanderthals lived in Europe and the Near East - which of these places has NO evidence of them?

They are also absent from Australia and the Americas.

Which Upper Paleolithic culture's makers, modern human or Neanderthal, are long disputed?

Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian are all linked to anatomically modern humans.

In which country was Mungo Man, the earliest modern human remains found beyond Africa, discovered?

The remains are dated to about 42,000 years old.

Via which route did people first reach the Americas, exposed by lower sea levels?

The earliest widely accepted dates are the Clovis culture sites, some 13,500 years ago.

What tiny tools, used in composite implements, characterise the Mesolithic?

They allowed more efficient hunting and fishing as sea levels rose after the last ice age.

Which animal was probably first domesticated, as a hunting companion, in the Mesolithic?

More complex settlements such as Lepenski Vir also appeared in this period.

The earliest known battle, in the Mesolithic, took place at Cemetery 117 in which country?

Mesolithic rock art in Spain also depicts organised bands of archers marching against each other.

The Neolithic is characterised above all by the adoption of what?

Pottery, polished stone tools and larger settlements came with it, in the so-called Neolithic Revolution.

The first Neolithic cultures began around 7000 BC in which region?

Maize in Mesoamerica and rice in the Far East were probably independent centres of farming.

Skara Brae, one of Europe's best-preserved Neolithic villages, is in which island group?

Its houses have stone beds, shelves and even an indoor toilet linked to a stream.

How was Skara Brae revealed?

It was occupied from about 3180 to 2500 BC and is part of the UNESCO 'Heart of Neolithic Orkney'.

Göbekli Tepe, with some of the world's oldest megaliths, is in which modern country?

Its circular structures of carved pillars were used from around 9500 BC in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

What does the name Göbekli Tepe mean in Turkish?

Its Kurdish name means Wish Hill.

Ötzi the Iceman, found in the Alps in 1991, carried an axe made of which metal, alongside a flint knife?

He also had a flint knife, marking the very end of the Stone Age around 3300 BC.

What evidence suggests Ötzi was killed by another person?

He also had 61 tattoos and a quiver of 14 arrows.

How many tattoos did Ötzi have?

He is Europe's oldest known natural human mummy.

The Venus of Willendorf, carved about 30,000 years ago, was found in 1908 in which country?

It is 11.1 cm tall, made of non-local oolitic limestone tinted with red ochre.

Stone Age hunters in Ukraine, Moravia and Poland built huts out of what unusual material?

The builders were expert mammoth hunters of the Dnieper valley and beyond.

Which species is believed to have made the first man-made structure, in the Rift Valley around 2 million years ago?

It was a simple arrangement of stones to hold branches in place; a similar circle at Terra Amata in France may be 380,000 years old.

A timber-roofed, clay-walled structure from about 23,000 BC was found at Dolní Věstonice in which country?

An animal-hide tent from the Magdalenian was found at Plateau Parain in France.

How far back does evidence show humans processing and eating wild cereal grains?

Flatbread is an example of grain-based Stone Age food.

Which large animals died out in a mass extinction 15,000 to 9,000 years ago?

Over-hunting, deforestation and climate change have all been blamed.

Neanderthal-era layers at which Israeli site show large-seeded legumes were eaten long before farming?

Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were also fond of organ meats such as liver, kidney and brain.

Engraved images cut into natural rock, a dominant form of pre-writing symbol, are called what?

Examples range from Sydney's rock engravings to Death Valley and Finnmark in Norway.

About how many bowmen appear in the Mesolithic rock painting 'the marching warriors' in Spain?

Two groups march toward each other, one led by a figure in a high-crowned hat.

What is the transitional period called when people smelted a first metal but had not yet made bronze?

Chalcolithic and Eneolithic both mean 'copper-stone'.

The first evidence of human metallurgy comes from Vinča culture sites in which modern country?

Sites include Majdanpek, Jarmovac, Pločnik and Rudna Glava.

In which region did the Stone Age pass directly into the Iron Age with no Bronze Age in between?

South Africa's archaeologists therefore proposed a separate 'three-stage system' in 1929.

Bronze was originally an alloy of which two elements, before tin became standard?

Bronze was widespread in Western Asia by about 3000 BC.

Craftspeople who shape flint into tools by striking it are called what?

Experimental archaeologists still make replica tools to learn how the originals were made.

Who hosted the first Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in Nairobi in 1947?

The congress adopted the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age scheme for sub-Saharan Africa.

Which great geographic feature is regarded as the cradle of the genus Homo?

It served as a corridor south into southern Africa and north down the Nile.

Which professional body discourages describing any living people as 'Stone Age'?

The term implies such groups are living relics of an earlier stage of development.

Millstones, a Stone Age technology, remained in use in Europe and North America until when?

Stone tool manufacture continued long after the Stone Age ended in a given area.

Which 'proto-Neolithic' culture of the Levant evolved the use of wild cereals into early farming?

Climatic shifts of the Younger Dryas, around 10,000 BC, are thought to have pushed these sedentary foragers into farming.

Which Levantine town of about 9000 BC had a stone wall and a massive tower?

It may have held 2,000-3,000 people; figs dated to 9400 BC were found in one of its houses.

Who coined the term 'Neolithic Revolution' in the 1920s?

The Australian archaeologist used it for the sweeping changes that came with early farming.

At Çatalhöyük 9,000 years ago, how did residents enter their houses?

Ladders stood both inside and outside, and the houses were plastered and painted with scenes of humans and animals.

At which Balochistan site was the earliest evidence of drilling teeth with flint bow drills found?

The same site documents the domestication of wheat and barley, then goats, sheep and cattle.

What is the world's oldest known engineered roadway, dated to 3838 BC?

Wooden trackways across the Somerset wetlands predate Stonehenge by centuries.

Because of its building material and pottery, the Neolithic has been nicknamed the Age of what?

Pottery itself appeared before farming in early Japan, but after it among the first West Asian farmers.

Which culture may have produced the earliest system of writing-like signs in Neolithic Europe?

Archaeologist Shan Winn thinks the signs were pictograms and ideograms rather than true writing.

The megalithic temples of Ġgantija, dating to around 3600 BC, stand on which Mediterranean island?

Its neighbour Malta has the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni, the world's only prehistoric underground temple.

Who found Ötzi on 19 September 1991?

Helmut and Erika Simon assumed they had stumbled on a recently dead mountaineer.

How far inside Italian territory was Ötzi's body found after the 1991 border survey?

The 1919 treaty border had been drawn too far north because the glacier hid the watershed.

What meat did Ötzi eat less than two hours before his death?

It was eaten with highly processed einkorn wheat bran, possibly as bread, in a mid-altitude conifer forest.

How many arrows were in Ötzi's quiver?

Only two were finished with flint tips and fletching; he also carried an unfinished 1.82-metre yew longbow.

Which animal's fur made Ötzi's cap?

His shoes used bearskin soles, deer-hide uppers and grass 'socks', and his quiver was roe deer.