The Stone Age Trivia
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57 free The Stone Age trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Stone Age trivia quiz spans 99% of human history, from the first sharp-edged rocks knapped 3.3 million years ago in Kenya to the copper axe carried by Ötzi the Iceman. The easy questions are the ones any school pupil should get: the three ages of prehistory, the three divisions of the Stone Age, what ended it, and what the Neolithic people started doing that changed everything. From there it gets deeper: the site of Lomekwi 3, the Olduvai Gorge industry, the pear-shaped hand axe, the Neanderthals' Mousterian tools, the Danish museum curator who invented the three-age system, the huts built of mammoth bones, the oldest known battle in Egypt, the dog joining the hunt, the mysterious pillars of Göbekli Tepe, the Orkney village with stone beds and an indoor toilet, and the 61 tattoos on the mummy from the Alps. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the Stone Age, its tool industries and its key sites before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our cave paintings, ancient history and archaeology quizzes next.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which part of France are the Lascaux cave paintings?
The Dordogne
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.
Q 02What technological development marks the end of the Stone Age?
The smelting of copper
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.
Q 03The Stone Age is the first period of which archaeological scheme?
The three-age system
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.
Q 04Christian Jürgensen Thomsen divided prehistory by tool material while arranging a museum in which city?
Copenhagen
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.
Q 05What are the three divisions of the Stone Age, in order?
Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic
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.
Q 06The oldest known stone tools, 3.3 million years old, were found beside Lake Turkana in which country?
Kenya
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.
Q 07Animal bones perhaps butchered with stone tools by Lucy's species, 3.4 million years ago, come from which country?
Ethiopia
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.
Q 08Which Tanzanian site gives its name to the earliest widespread stone-tool industry?
Olduvai Gorge
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.
Q 09What is the characteristic tool of the Acheulean industry associated with Homo erectus?
The pear-shaped hand axe
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.
Q 10The Schöningen spears, the oldest complete hunting weapons known, were carved entirely from what?
Wood
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.
Q 11Which stone-tool industry is associated with the Neanderthals?
Mousterian
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.
Q 12John Lubbock, who coined 'Paleolithic' in 1865, grew up next door to which scientist?
Charles Darwin
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.
Q 13The valley that gave the Neanderthals their name, where bones were found in 1856, lies in which country?
Germany
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.
Q 21The first Neolithic farming cultures arose in which region?
The Fertile Crescent
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.
Q 22Skara Brae, one of Europe's best-preserved Neolithic villages, is in which island group?
Orkney
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.
Q 23Göbekli Tepe, with some of the world's oldest megaliths, is in which modern country?
Turkey
Q 14Which Spanish cave's painted bison were dismissed as a modern forgery for two decades before experts admitted they were prehistoric?
Altamira
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'.
Q 15In which country were the Mungo Man remains, about 42,000 years old, discovered?
Australia
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.
Q 16Via which route did people first reach the Americas?
The Bering land bridge
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.
Q 17Which stone tools, set in rows along a shaft, mark the Mesolithic?
Microliths
Microliths: one alone is too small to do real damage, but several glued into a spear or harpoon made barbs that cut deep.
Q 18Which animal was the first to be domesticated?
The dog
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.
Q 19Jebel Sahaba, a cemetery in Sudan at least 13,000 years old, holds some of the earliest known evidence of what?
Warfare
Warfare: many of the skeletons carry embedded stone points, and a mix of healed and fresh wounds shows repeated raids rather than one battle.
Q 20Which Neolithic tomb in Ireland is lit along its inner passage by the sunrise on the winter solstice?
Newgrange
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.
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.
Q 24What does the name Göbekli Tepe mean?
Potbelly Hill
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.
Q 25Which extinct humans were first identified in 2010 from the DNA of a finger bone found in a Siberian cave?
Denisovans
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.
Q 26What evidence suggests Ötzi was killed by another person?
An arrowhead in his left shoulder
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.
Q 27What were Ötzi's tattoos probably for?
Treating pain
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.
Q 28The Venus of Willendorf, carved about 30,000 years ago, was found in 1908 in which country?
Austria
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.
Q 29Stone Age hunters in Ukraine and Poland built huts out of what unusual material?
Mammoth bones
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.
Q 30Which species is credited with the oldest claimed structure, a ring of stones some 1.75 million years old?
Homo habilis
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.