
Gjantija Temples in Gozo, Malta, 3600-2500 BC, by Bone A and used as the feature image for Wikipedia “Stone Age” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
(8) ICE STONE AGE
We hunted the mammoth!
As I stated in my top entry for the Paleolithic, the Ice Age is the Stone Age – or rather, the most recent period of glaciation or Pleistocene Epoch, the Ice Age of popular imagination and culture, almost entirely overlaps with the Paleolithic Stone Age.
I have only the most superficial knowledge of human evolution, so I sometimes wonder how much the evolution of hominins depended on the impact of Pleistocene climate changes on Africa – or the evolution of our hominin species, homo sapiens, which occurred entirely within the Pleistocene, or its migration from Africa, similarly depended on that impact.
For that matter, the Stone Age of popular imagination and culture seems predominated by that of Paleolithic homo sapiens – and Neanderthals – in glacial or sub-glacial Europe, perhaps due to the striking imagery of Pleistocene megafauna and the cave art in Europe depicting it.
(9) FIRE STONE AGE
It’s always struck me that no matter how much stone technology was instrumental for or definitive of this period, the Stone Age is something of a misnomer because the truly impactful and game-changing technology was not stone but fire.
Claims for the control of fire by hominins extends almost as far back as that for stone tools or the Stone Age – potentially as early as 1.7 to 2 million years ago.
I’m tempted to substitute the term Cooked Stone Age as opposed to the preceding Raw Stone Age. Certainly, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss might have agreed with me on that one, given his book The Raw and the Cooked.
But seriously, although the use of fire was not limited to cooking, its use in cooking dramatically changed human food habits – allowing for a much wider range of food, particularly allowing a significant increase in meat consumption, to the extent of biological changes such as smaller teeth and digestive traits.
(10) MARITIME STONE AGE
There’s the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis or Theory, proposing that the ancestors of modern humans diverged from the other great apes by adapting to an aquatic lifestyle.
That hypothesis or theory is highly contested, such that it is generally dismissed by anthropologists or other scholars of human evolution. The true aquatic watershed (heh) of human history might be described as the Maritime Stone Age – for the development of watercraft to allow humans or hominins to conquer the seas and other bodies of water. Indeed, that might date back before homo sapiens to homo erectus, with claims the latter used rafts or similar watercraft to cross straits between landmasses or to islands as early as a million years ago.
The Maritime Stone Age might also be characterized by the migration of humans beyond the African and Eurasian continents to the Americas and Oceania, whether following coastlines of land bridges or island-hopping. For the latter, the maritime achievements of Austronesian expansion and Polynesian navigation used functionally Stone Age technology.
For this concept of the Maritime Stone Age, I was tempted to substitute the Exolithic or Xenolithic – to describe those societies with functionally Stone Age technology, usually tribal hunter-gatherers, that persisted elsewhere as other societies developed into the Bronze Age or beyond, even into the modern period.