57 Fun Facts About The Stone Age

In which part of France are the Lascaux cave paintings?

The Dordogne: four teenagers found Lascaux near Montignac in September 1940, but the crowds that followed damaged its painted horses, aurochs and deer so badly that the cave closed to the public in 1963.

What technological development marks the end of the Stone Age?

The smelting of copper is the usual dividing line. Copper had been hammered into ornaments for thousands of years first, so the metal itself was not new; melting it out of ore was.

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

The three-age system orders prehistory into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. It began as a curator's way of arranging a museum's undated antiquities in sequence, and archaeologists then adopted it.

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen divided prehistory by tool material while arranging a museum in which city?

Copenhagen: Thomsen, a merchant's son put in charge of the royal antiquities in 1816, laid the finds out by material and led visitors round himself to explain the order.

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

Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic: old, middle and new stone, from the Greek lithos. The middle term was slotted in a year after the other two were coined, as an in-between stage.

The oldest known stone tools, 3.3 million years old, were found beside Lake Turkana in which country?

Kenya: researchers stumbled on the Lomekwi tools in 2011 after taking a wrong turn, and at 3.3 million years they are older than any known fossil of our own genus.

Animal bones perhaps butchered with stone tools by Lucy's species, 3.4 million years ago, come from which country?

Ethiopia: the Dikika bones, reported in 2010, would be the oldest sign of tool use and hint that Lucy's kind, long thought vegetarian, ate meat, though other researchers dispute the marks.

Which Tanzanian site gives its name to the earliest widespread stone-tool industry?

Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania gave its name to the Oldowan industry, whose tools were made by knocking sharp-edged flakes off a river pebble with a hammerstone.

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

The pear-shaped hand axe: its makers struck a large flake from a boulder, then chipped smaller flakes off both faces to shape it, a design that lasted well over a million years.

The Schöningen spears, the oldest complete hunting weapons known, were carved entirely from what?

Wood, which almost never survives so long: the spruce and pine spears, at least 200,000 years old, lay in a brown-coal mine among the butchered bones of wild horses.

Which stone-tool industry is associated with the Neanderthals?

The Mousterian, named for the Le Moustier rock shelter in France, vanishes from European sites about 40,000 years ago, at the same time as the Neanderthals who made it.

John Lubbock, who coined 'Paleolithic' in 1865, grew up next door to which scientist?

Charles Darwin moved in next door when Lubbock was eight. The boy had hoped his father's 'great piece of news' would be a new pony, but he grew up to be a close friend of Darwin's.

The valley that gave the Neanderthals their name, where bones were found in 1856, lies in which country?

Germany: quarry workers dug the bones from a cave in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf. Skulls found earlier in Belgium and Gibraltar were only recognised as the same kind of human decades later.

Which Spanish cave's painted bison were dismissed as a modern forgery for two decades before experts admitted they were prehistoric?

Altamira: the landowner who published the paintings in 1880 was accused of having them faked, and was cleared only in 1902, years after his death, when a leading sceptic printed a 'mea culpa'.

In which country were the Mungo Man remains, about 42,000 years old, discovered?

Mungo Man was found in 1974 at Lake Mungo in New South Wales, Australia; the remains are about 42,000 years old and among the oldest known in the country.

Via which route did people first reach the Americas?

The Bering land bridge, dry ground from Siberia to Alaska while ice-age seas were low, is the generally accepted route. A Spanish missionary proposed such a land link in 1590, before Europeans had found the strait.

Which stone tools, set in rows along a shaft, mark the Mesolithic?

Microliths: one alone is too small to do real damage, but several glued into a spear or harpoon made barbs that cut deep.

Which animal was the first to be domesticated?

The dog: one of the oldest certain ones was laid in a grave beside a man and a woman at Bonn about 14,000 years ago, well before anyone farmed.

Jebel Sahaba, a cemetery in Sudan at least 13,000 years old, holds some of the earliest known evidence of what?

Warfare: many of the skeletons carry embedded stone points, and a mix of healed and fresh wounds shows repeated raids rather than one battle.

Which Neolithic tomb in Ireland is lit along its inner passage by the sunrise on the winter solstice?

Newgrange: for a few mornings around the winter solstice the rising sun shines through an opening built above the door and creeps 19 metres along the passage to light the chamber.

The first Neolithic farming cultures arose in which region?

The Fertile Crescent, arcing from the Levant to Mesopotamia, grew the first domesticated wheat, barley and pulses. Farming was later invented again from scratch elsewhere, with rice in China and maize in Mexico.

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

Orkney: Skara Brae is said to have come to light when a great storm in 1850 stripped the sand from a mound, exposing stone houses still fitted with box beds and dressers.

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

Turkey: hunter-gatherers raised Göbekli Tepe's carved stone pillars near Şanlıurfa more than 11,000 years ago, in a world that had no pottery and no metal tools.

What does the name Göbekli Tepe mean?

Potbelly Hill is what locals call the rounded mound. Archaeologists who surveyed it in the 1960s judged it of little interest, and its buried pillars were recognised only in 1994.

Which extinct humans were first identified in 2010 from the DNA of a finger bone found in a Siberian cave?

Denisovans, named after Denisova Cave in the Altai mountains. They left a mark on the living too: a few per cent of the DNA of Melanesians today comes from them.

What evidence suggests Ötzi was killed by another person?

An arrowhead in his left shoulder went unnoticed for ten years, until a 2001 X-ray. It had cut an artery, so he bled to death within minutes, and his death had first been taken for an accident.

What were Ötzi's tattoos probably for?

Treating pain is the leading explanation: many of his 61 tattoos sit over his lower back, knees and ankles, where X-rays show wear, clothing hid them, and some lie on points still used in acupuncture.

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

Austria: a workman dug her up near Willendorf, by the Danube, in 1908. Her limestone is not local, and a 2022 study matched it most closely to rock near Lake Garda, on the far side of the Alps.

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

Mammoth bones: a farmer digging out his cellar at Mezhyrich in Ukraine in 1965 struck a jawbone that proved to be part of a 15,000-year-old hut, its wall built of interlocking jaws.

Which species is credited with the oldest claimed structure, a ring of stones some 1.75 million years old?

Homo habilis is the usual candidate: the ring of piled stones, dug up in Tanzania in 1962, was read by its excavator as the footing for a windbreak of branches.

Which musical instruments, the oldest known, were carved from bird bones in European caves more than 35,000 years ago?

Flutes: the most complete is a vulture's wing bone with five finger holes. They show that music was already an established tradition when modern humans first settled Europe.

Besides a changing climate, what is most often blamed for wiping out the giant mammals of the last ice age?

Hunting by humans: on the continents people reached last, most giant mammals vanished soon after they arrived, while Africa, where the animals had lived alongside our ancestors longest, lost the fewest.

Charred remains from a 14,000-year-old fireplace in Jordan are the oldest known traces of which food?

Bread: hunter-gatherers baked flatbread from wild wheat, wild barley and ground roots thousands of years before anyone farmed, so bread is older than agriculture.

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

Petroglyphs, from the Greek for 'rock carving', were often pecked out with a stone chisel and hammerstone. On desert rock, chipping away the dark varnish leaves the paler stone beneath showing as the picture.

What is the transitional period called when people smelted a first metal, before bronze was made?

The Chalcolithic, or Copper Age: the name joins the Greek words for copper and stone, because stone tools were still the ones most people used long after the first metal appeared.

The earliest securely dated metal smelting was found in which part of Europe?

The Balkans: villagers at Belovode in Serbia were smelting ore some 7,000 years ago, and the find's discoverers argued the craft was invented separately in Europe and Asia rather than spreading from one place.

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

Sub-Saharan Africa largely went straight from stone to iron. Because Europe's sequence did not fit, archaeologists gave the region divisions of its own: an Earlier, Middle and Later Stone Age.

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

Copper and arsenic: arsenic often occurs in copper ores, so the first bronze may have been made by accident before smiths learned to add tin on purpose.

Craftspeople who make tools by striking flakes off a stone core are called what?

Flintknappers shape flint by striking it with a hammerstone or antler to detach flakes; experimental archaeologists knap replicas to learn how Stone Age tools were made.

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

Louis Leakey hosted it in Nairobi. 'Pan-African' named the subject, not the guests: scientists came from around the world, and the Frenchman Henri Breuil presided.

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

The East African Rift, stretching from the Afar region south to Mozambique, holds many of the earliest Homo fossil sites; its lakes and volcanic sediments preserved bones and allowed precise dating.

What is the name for the Stone Age operation of cutting a hole in a living person's skull?

Trepanation: many Neolithic skulls show bone regrown around the hole, so the patients lived on for years, and some went through the operation more than once.

Stonehenge's smaller 'bluestones' were hauled more than 200 km from the Preseli Hills of which country?

Wales: the monument's smaller stones travelled far further than its big ones, since the huge sarsens came only from the nearby Marlborough Downs.

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

The Natufian culture, about 13,000 to 9,500 BC, lived in year-round villages harvesting wild cereals with flint sickles; the Younger Dryas cold snap is thought to have pushed its people toward farming.

Which Levantine town had a stone wall and a massive tower some 10,000 years ago?

Jericho: its 8.5-metre stone tower, with 22 steps inside, went up around 8000 BC, built by villagers who had not yet begun to make pottery.

Geneticists dated the first Stone Age clothing from the DNA of which parasite?

Lice: body lice live only in clothing, so the point where they split from head lice shows roughly when people first dressed, a moment no dig has been able to date.

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

At Çatalhöyük, houses were packed wall to wall with no streets, so people walked across the roofs and climbed down ladders through doorways in the roof; walls were plastered and painted.

Stone Age villagers at Mehrgarh in Pakistan used a flint-tipped drill on which part of the body?

Teeth: eleven molars from graves up to 9,000 years old had been drilled, probably with skills borrowed from the village bead-makers, and wear shows the patients went on chewing on them.

Which land, now drowned beneath the North Sea, joined Britain to mainland Europe in the Mesolithic?

Doggerland: Mesolithic hunters lived on its hills and marshes until meltwater from the shrinking ice sheets drowned it, cutting Britain off as an island.

Grime's Graves, over 400 Neolithic pits in Norfolk, were dug for what?

Mining flint: the hollows were a puzzle until a Victorian clergyman dug one out from 1868 and found a deep shaft, cut through the chalk by miners using picks of red-deer antler.

Signs on artefacts of Europe's Neolithic Vinča culture are claimed as the earliest form of what?

Writing, some scholars argue: if so, the Vinča signs would be older than Sumerian script, but the inscriptions are very short, most a single sign, and remain undeciphered.

The megalithic temples of Ġgantija, more than 5,000 years old, stand in which Mediterranean country?

Malta: Ġgantija stands on its smaller island of Gozo, and its name comes from the Maltese for 'giant', after a local belief that giants built the temples.

Who found Ötzi on 19 September 1991?

Two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, saw his upper body sticking out of the melting ice, and he was first taken for the victim of a mountaineering accident.

Ötzi was first taken to Innsbruck, but a survey found his resting place lay 93 metres inside which country?

Italy: the border was meant to follow the watershed, which snow had hidden when the line was drawn. A new survey put the spot 92.56 metres on the Italian side, so Ötzi went to a museum in Bolzano.

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

Ibex: its meat was in Ötzi's stomach, which went unnoticed until a 2009 scan showed it had slid up under his ribs. He had also eaten red deer, einkorn wheat and a little bracken.

Ötzi's unfinished longbow was cut from which tree?

Yew: he was still shaping the stave, and only two of the fourteen arrows in his quiver were finished, so he had no working bow on the day he died.

Which animal's fur made Ötzi's cap?

Brown bear: a 2016 DNA study found most of his clothes were sheep, goat and cattle leather, but the cap and quiver came from wild bear and roe deer, so his people chose hides from both herd and hunt.