Stone Age

The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make stone tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC, with the advent of metalworking.

The Stone Age is the first period in the three-age system, followed by the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The Stone Age is divided into three distinct periods: the earliest and most primitive being the Paleolithic era; a transitional period with finer tools known as the Mesolithic era; and the final stage known as the Neolithic era. Neolithic peoples were the first to transition away from hunter-gatherer societies into the settled lifestyle of inhabiting towns and villages as agriculture became widespread. In the chronology of prehistory, the Neolithic era usually overlaps with the Chalcolithic ("Copper") era preceding the Bronze Age.

Quotes about the Stone Age

• The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil.
  • Don Huberts, quoted in "Fuel cells meet big business", The Economist (July 1999), p. 59; see Quote Investigator (7 January 2018), Online

• In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
  For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt.
  I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
  And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.
  * * * * * * *
  Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
  And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:—
  ‘There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
  ‘And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!’
  • Rudyard Kipling, "In the Neolithic Age" (1892)

• A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses." The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool." Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
  • August Schleicher, «Eine fabel in indogermanischer ursprache», Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der arischen, celtischen und slawischen Sprachen, ed. A. von Kuhn and A. Schleicher, Vol. 5. (Berlin, 1868), pp. 206–8; translated by R. S. P. Beekes, Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An introduction, 2nd ed. (2011), p. 287
  • Schleicher's fable is composed in a reconstructed form of the Proto-Indo-European language, which is thought to have been spoken by nomadic pastoralists of the Pontic–Caspian steppe who domesticated the horse and migrated across Europe and Asia in waggons and chariots (c. 4500–2500 BC)

• When first I whispered words of love,
    When first you turned aside to hear,
  The wingèd griffin flew above,
    The mammoth gaily gamboll’d near;
  I wore the latest thing in skins
    Your dock-leaf dress had just been mended
  And fastened-up with fishes' fins—
    The whole effect was really splendid.
  • P. G. Wodehouse, "Fashion’s Phases", st. 1, in Punch (3 August 1906)