The stone tools may have been made by Australopithecus afarensis, the species whose best fossil example is Lucy, which inhabited East Africa at the same time as the date of the oldest stone tools, a yet unidentified species, or by Kenyanthropus platyops (a 3.2 to 3.5-million-year-old Pliocene hominin fossil discovered in 1999).

The oldest known Homo fossil is about 2.4-2.3 million years old compared to the 3.3 million year old stone tools. Stone tools found from 2011 to 2014 at the Lomekwi archeology site near Lake Turkana in Kenya, are dated to be 3.3 million years old, and predate the genus Homo by about one million years. Consequently, in the literature the stone tools used in the period of the Palaeolithic are divided into four 'modes', each of which designates a different form of complexity, and which in most cases followed a rough chronological order. The transitions are currently of greatest interest. One of its advantages was the simplicity of terminology for example, the Mode 1 / Mode 2 Transition. Each region had its own timeline for the succession of the Modes: for example, Mode 1 was in use in Europe long after it had been replaced by Mode 2 in Africa.Ĭlark's scheme was adopted enthusiastically by the archaeological community. He assigned to them relative dates: Modes 1 and 2 to the Lower Palaeolithic, 3 to the Middle Palaeolithic, 4 to the Upper Paleolithic, and 5 to the Mesolithic, though there were other lithic technologies outside these Modes. In 1969 in the 2nd edition of World Prehistory, Grahame Clark proposed an evolutionary progression of flint-knapping in which the 'dominant lithic technologies' occurred in a fixed sequence from Mode 1 through Mode 5. In general terms, Knapped stone tools are nearly ubiquitous in all pre-metal-using societies because they are easily manufactured, the tool stone is usually plentiful, and they are easy to transport and sharpen.Įvolution A selection of prehistoric stone toolsĪrchaeologists classify stone tools into industries (also known as complexes or technocomplexes ) that share distinctive technological or morphological characteristics.

More complex forms of reduction include the production of highly standardized blades, which can then be fashioned into a variety of tools such as scrapers, knives, sickles, and microliths. In some strategies, however, a flintknapper reduces the core to a rough unifacial, or bifacial preform, which is further reduced using soft hammer flaking techniques or by pressure flaking the edges. If the goal of the reduction strategy is to produce flakes, the remnant lithic core may be discarded once it has become too small to use. One simple form of reduction is to strike stone flakes from a nucleus (core) of material using a hammerstone or similar hard hammer fabricator. Knapped stone tools are made from cryptocrystalline materials such as chert or flint, radiolarite, chalcedony, obsidian, basalt, and quartzite via a process known as lithic reduction. Stone tools may be made of either ground stone or knapped stone, the latter fashioned by a flintknapper.

Stone has been used to make a wide variety of different tools throughout history, including arrowheads, spearheads, hand axes, and querns. Ethnoarchaeology has been a valuable research field in order to further the understanding and cultural implications of stone tool use and manufacture. Archaeologists often study such prehistoric societies, and refer to the study of stone tools as lithic analysis. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric (particularly Stone Age) cultures that have become extinct. A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone.

Tools for making obsidian blades