Our knowledge of early humans is derived from the study of the remains of their activities. Much of what they used has perished but many of their tools have survived. Flint and chert were shaped into cutting tools and weapons; basalt and sandstone were used for grinding; and use was also made of wood, bone, shell and antler.
Similarities and differences in stone tools have become the basis for classifying the Stone Ages. Stone implements of a particular site form an ‘industry’ and similar industries form a culture. Each culture has been given a name derived from the site where it was first discovered or defined.
Palaeolithic (‘Old Stone’) Age (2700-12 kya)
During this period men inhabited caves or rockshelters (overhangs, etc.) and if these were not available they built shelters or lived in the open. Humans formed small groups and subsisted by gathering plants and hunting or scavenging wild animals. We know of these men from their skeletons but these are rare and fragmentary for the very early period and we know them mostly from the tools and weapons they made out of stone, bone or ivory. Fossilised bones are rare but stone tools and weapons are virtually indestructible. They occupy much of the prehistoric record and provide the evidence from which the progress of early stone technology is reconstructed.
Caves were attractive to early men. Although caves may seem to be cold and wet, they are not intensively cold and they can be heated. South-facing sites catch heat during the day and the heat absorbed by the rock is released in the evening. Rock fragments flake off from cave roofs and windblown sediments accumulate inside. This material builds up inside the caves and mixes with the traces of humanity there. The accumulation of layers can therefore be a record of many thousands of years.
The Palaeolithic (2.6 mya-10 kya) can roughly be equated to the Quaternary glaciation. Upper, Middle and Lower Palaeolithic refer to the levels in which archaeological deposits are found. The Upper Palaeolithic is thus the most recent.
| Age | Industry/Culture | kya | Humans |
| LowerPalaeolithic | Oldowan | 2700-1600 | Homo habilis |
| Acheulian | 1760-130 | Homo erectus | |
| Clactonian | 424-400 | ||
| Middle Palaeolithic | Mousterian | 160-40 | Homoneanderthalensis |
| Upper Palaeolithic | Chatelperronian | 45-36 | Homo sapiens |
| Aurignacian | 43-28 | ||
| Gravettian | 33-21 | ||
| Solutrean | 22-17 | ||
| Magdalenian | 17-12 |
• Lower Palaeolithic (2500-250 kya)
The process of making stone tools is called ‘knapping’. Repeated blows by one cobble or block of stone on another removes flakes and produces a sharp edge. Stone toolkits consist of the blocks from which the flakes have been removed (core tools), and the flakes themselves.
About 1.8 mya, a new type of stone tool, the handaxe or biface, appeared in East Africa. The handaxe is associated with Homo erectus and it has a core or large flake chipped into a shape resembling a flattened pear with the sharpened edge formed by striking flakes from both sides. From Africa the technique reached Europe and India but apparently never reached China or Indonesia. Industries where handaxes are present are called Acheulian (1.76 mya-100 kya), named after the type-site at St Acheul in northern France.
Meanwhile, the cruder Oldowan non-bifacial chopper cultures spread to Europe and Asia. Many sites in southeast England were occupied during the Hoxnian interglacial (424-374 kya). At a few sites the toolkit consists only of chopper cores and this is known as the Clactonian industry (424-400 kya), named after Clacton, England, where it appears to have been contemporaneous with an Acheulian industry.
Towards the end of the Acheulian the increasing skills of the axe makers can be seen in the Levallois technique (named after Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris) in which a preparation of the cores allows the removal of large flakes of predetermined size and shape.
• Middle Palaeolithic (250-35 kya)
In Europe, the great majority of the easily investigated sites are found in limestone areas, e.g. the Upper Danube region of south Germany. The best known concentrations of caves are in the Pyrenees and the Dordogne region of southern France.
Some of the Dordogne caves show that there was human habitation during the early stages of the last glaciation, the Weichsel (115-12 kya). The flint industry found in the levels of the French caves was Mousterian 160-40 kya), named after Le Moustier in the Dordogne, which is closely associated with the toolkits of the Neanderthals.
There are few traces of ornament or art in Neanderthal sites but there is substantial evidence of the burial of the dead. Some graves may even contain grave goods. They produced a variety of flake tools (including scrapers, points and bifaces) from Levallois and other types of cores.
• Upper Palaeolithic (35-12 kya)
The Cro-Magnons developed a more efficient way of making stone blades. With a stone hammer the toolmaker struck an antler-tine punch resting on a core. This indirect percussion split off a long, narrow sharp-edged flake, which could then be trimmed by pressure flaking, i.e. pressing a pointed tool against the blade edge to snap off tiny sub-flakes.
Five main Upper Palaeolithic cultures have been named for Western Europe: Chatelperronian (45-36 kya) thought to have evolved from the underlying Mousterian, Aurignacian (43-28 kya) developed in the Near East and spread westwards, Gravettian (33-21 kya) seems to have developed in central Europe and expanded eastwards and westwards, Solutrean (22-17 kya) appears to have developed in the Rhone Valley, and the Magdalenian (17-12 kya) apparently originated in southwest France and spread out to adjacent areas.
Prehistoric cave paintings mostly belong to the Lower Palaeolithic, from 20 kya onwards. The art at Altamira was discovered in 1879; La Mouthe was the first site to be recognised in the Dordogne in 1895; and the antiquity of the paintings at Font de Gaume was recognised in 1901, just three days after the discovery of the engravings at Les Combarelles.
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