By: RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW
Early hominids made stone artifacts either by smashing rocks between a hammer and anvil (known as the bipolar technique) to produce usable pieces or by a more controlled process termed flaking, in which stone chips were fractured away from a larger rock by striking it with a hammer of stone or other hard material. Subsequently, during the lingering existence of say 10,000 years, the diversely in techniques for producing masonry artifacts - including pecking, grinding, sawing, and boring - became additionally familiar. The best rocks for flaking tended to be hard, fine-grained, or amorphous (having no crystal structure) rocks, including lava, obsidian, ignimbrite, flint, chert, quartz, silicified limestone, quartzite, and indurated shale. Ground stone tools could be made on a wider range of raw material types, including coarser grained rock such as granite.
Flaking produces several different types of stone artifacts, which archaeologists look forward to at prehistoric sites. The parent pieces of rock from which chips have been detached are called cores, and the chips removed from cores are called flakes. A flake that has had yet smaller flakes removed from one or more edges to sharpen or shape it is known as a retouched piece. The stone used to knock flakes from cores is called a hammerstone or a precursor. Other flaking artifacts include fragments and chunks, most of which are broken cores and flakes.
The terms culture and industries both refer to a system of technology (Toolmaking technique, for example) shared by different Stone Age sites of the same broad time. Experts now prefer to use the term industry instead of culture to refer to these shared Stone Age systems.
Archaeologists have divided the Stone Age into different stages, each characterized by different types of tools or tool-manufacturing techniques. The stages also imply broad time frames and are perceived as stages of human cultural development. The most widely used designations for the successive stages are Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (New Stone Age). British naturalist Sir John Lubbock in 1865 defined the Paleolithic stage as the period in which stone tools were chipped or flaked. He defined the Neolithic as the stage in which ground and polished stone axes became prevalent. These two stages also were associated with different economic and subsistence strategies: Paleolithic peoples were hunter-gatherers while Neolithic peoples were farmers. Archaeologists subsequently identified a separate stage of stone tool working in Eurasia and Africa between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, called the Mesolithic. This period is characterized by the creation of microliths, small, geometric-shaped stone artifacts attached to wood, antler, or bone to form implements such as arrows, spears, or scythes. Microliths began appearing between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age.
The Paleolithic/Mesolithic/Neolithic division system was first applied only to sites in Europe, but is now widely used (with some modification) to refer to prehistoric human development in much of Asia, Africa, and Australasia. Different terminology is often used to describe the cultural-historical chronology of the Americas, which humans did not reach until some point between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago. However, there is a general similarity, the transitional form of flaked stone tools are associated with prehistoric hunter-gatherers to both flaked and ground stone tools associated with the rise of early farming communities. The period in the Americas up to the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, when most humans were hunter-gatherers, is called Paleo-Indian and the subsequent, post-glacial period is known as Archaic.
Archaeologists subdivide the Paleolithic into the Lower Paleolithic (the earliest phase), Middle Paleolithic, and Upper Paleolithic (the later phase), based upon the presence or absence of certain classes of stone artifacts The Lower Paleolithic dates from approximately 2.5 million years ago until about 200,000 years ago. It includes the earliest record of human toolmaking and documents much of the evolutionary history of the genus Homo from its origins in Africa to its spread into Eurasia. Two successive toolmaking industries characterize the Lower Paleolithic: the Oldowan and the Acheulean.
The Oldowan industry was named by British Kenyan anthropologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey for early archaeological sites found at Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. It is also sometimes called the chopper-core or pebble-tool industry. Simple stone artifacts made from small stones or blocks of stone characterize the Oldowan industry. Mary Leakey classified Oldowan artifacts as either heavy-duty tools or light-duty tools, as both their classifications deemed to be heavy-duty tools, which include core types such as choppers, discoids, polyhedrons, and heavy-duty scrapers. Many of these cores may have been produced to generate sharp-edged flakes, but some could have been used for chopping or scraping activities as well. Light-duty tools include retouched forms such as smaller scrapers, awls (sharp, pointed tools for punching holes in animal hides or wood), and burins (chisel-like flint tools used for engraving and cutting). Oldowan techniques of manufacture included hard-hammer percussion, or detaching flakes from cores with a stone hammer; the anvil technique, striking a core on a stationary anvil to detach flakes; and bipolar technique, detaching flakes by placing the core between an anvil and the hammerstone.
Early humans probably also made tools from a wide range of materials other than stone. For example, they probably used wood for simple digging sticks, spears, clubs, or probes, and they probably used shell, hide, bark, or horn to fashion containers. Unfortunately, organic materials such as these do not normally survive from earlier Stone Age times, so archaeologists can only speculate about whether such tools were used.
Two of the oldest Oldowan sites are in Ethiopia: Gona (occupied 2.5 million years ago) and Omo (2.3 million years ago). Other well-studied Oldowan sites include Lokalalei (2.3 million years ago) and Koobi Fora (1.9 million to 1.4 million years ago), in Kenya; Olduvai Gorge (1.9 million to 1.2 million years ago), in Tanzania; Ain Hanech (perhaps 1.7 million years ago), in Algeria. The cave deposits at Sterkfontein and Swartkrans (estimated to be from 2.0 million to 1.5 million years ago), in South Africa.
Theories about the intelligence and culture of prehistoric man are beginning to be drastically revised. Accumulated evidence now depicts European men living between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago as communal men who were skilled hunters and toolmakers, who had developed formal burial rites for members of their tribes and ritual burials for animals, who had some belief in an afterlife, who took excellent care of their sick and elderly, and who, in their heyday, carried around pocket-sized calendars of their own making.
A ten-member international expedition, led by Ralph S. Solecki of Columbia University, found the bones of a dismembered deer ritually buried by Neanderthal men about 50,000 years ago. The bones of the deer's foot, jaw, and back, its shoulder blades, and the top of its skull were found buried 5 feet deep in the Nahr Ibrahim Cave, north of Beirut, Lebanon. The presence of the skull, the bed of stones on which the bones were placed, and the red-earth colouring of the bones, which was not native to the cave, indicated that a ritual known as hunters' magic was involved in the burial. Solecki interpreted the burial as an attempt "to ensure a successful hunt by the ceremonial treatment of one of the animals." Although evidence existed showing that bears were ritually treated by Neanderthal men, this was the first discovery of a lone deer buried in this manner.
An American expedition, also led by Solecki, excavated a mountain cave near Shanidar in Iraqui Kurdistan and discovered evidence that Neanderthals practiced a form of religious burial suggesting a belief in an afterlife: at least one of the nine skeletons uncovered in the cave was buried with flowers. Also found in the cave was the skeleton of a man of about 40, comparable to a modern age of 80, who had been born with a deformed right arm. A Neanderthal doctor had skilfully amputated the arm above the elbow, and judging by his death at a ripe old age, the man was carefully cared for from his boyhood until he died as a result of a rockfall inside the cave, a common peril at that time.
Recent paleontological examinations of skeletons suggest that the Neanderthals' stooped posture was the result of a vitamin D deficiency. Lack of sunlight during the Ice Age might have caused their upright posture to become deformed by rickets.
In January it was revealed that a fairly sophisticated system of notation charting the phases of the moon was used throughout most of Europe during the last Ice Age, beginning about 34,000 years ago. Marks such as scratches and notches on pieces of bones, antlers, and stone, previously regarded as decorations, were shown to be representations of the lunar calendar. Alexander Marshack, a research associate at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, began investigating the markings in 1964 and published the results of his study this year in France. The inscribed objects he studied represented all cultural levels from 34,000 to 10,000 years ago. All were pocket-sized, and as many as 24 tools were used to cut a single sequence, some covering a year or more. This system of notation seems to anticipate the development of a calendar, the concept of number, and the use of abstract symbols. It had been thought that such cognitive abilities developed only after the start of an agricultural society, less than 10,000 years ago.
A tribe of about 24 people living a Stone Age way of life was found in the Tasaday Forest on the southern Philippines' Mindanao Island in July. Anthropologists speculate that the tribe has been cut off from the rest of the world for at least 400 years and maybe as much as 2,000 years.
The tribe was first discovered five years ago by an official conducting a census survey. He described the finding a tribe of "jungle people so mysterious that they were known only as the bird who walks the forest like the wind." A long search led to the Tasaday. Interpreters at first had trouble understanding the tribe's language, which is related to Manubo, a native Filipino tongue in the Malayo-Polynesian family.
As communication became easier, it was found that the tribe calls itself the Tasaday because "the man who owns the forest in which they live told their ancestors in a dream to call themselves Tasadays, after a mountain." When asked whether they had ever been off the island, the Tasadays replied that they did not know leaving was possible; in fact, it was found that they had never even seen the ocean. The Tasadays are monogamous in mating but communal in all other ways, have no leader, know no other tribe, have known no unfriendly people, and have never heard of fighting.
The Tasadays do not cultivate food but never ventures far from their clearing; food is easily found in the lush vegetation of the forest in which they live. The staple of their diet is the pith of the wild palm. To supplement this, they catch tadpoles and small fish with their hands from the nearby streams. Monkey meat is considered a delicacy. After the monkey's hair is singed in a fire and cut away with bamboo blades sharpened by small stones, the meat is roasted.
The group includes six families with 13 children, nine of whom are boys. All matters of mutual concern, such as food gathering, are decided in an open meeting.
New information about the Mayan civilization, the most highly developed civilization in the New World before the arrival of the white man, was gained from the discovery of a 11-page codex fragment of a Mayan calendar book. (A codex is a manuscript copy of an ancient text.) The fragment is said to be part of a larger book about 20 pages long. The three other known codices were brought to Europe during the Spanish conquest but did not emerge as important historical material until the 1900's. The newly discovered codex is the first to be found in over a century.
Composed of bark cloth, like the other three, the 11-page codex is expected to reveal "pictorial information on the Venus calendar and its influence on Mayan religion and astrology," according to Michael D. Coe, professor of anthropology at Yale University. The fragment dates to the late Mayan period, between 1400 and 1500. The new fragment reveals that the Mayans viewed all four phases of the Venus cycle as threatening. Previously, only the first phase was thought to have been considered sinister.
All four cycles of Venus as seen from the earth were measured by Mayan priests, who calculated that each cycle took 584 days to be completed. Modern astronomers calculate 583.92 days for each complete cycle. The complete 20-page codex would have covered 65 Venus cycles.
Coe believes the fragment to be authentic "because it is on bark cloth, [because of] the condition of the fragment, the fact that none of the pictorial material duplicates or imitates anything we know about the Venus calendar, and, lastly, because no forger could be clever enough to invent material displaying so much knowledge of Mayan life."
Early Slavic tribes formed an organized state in the fourth to sixth centuries, about 500 years earlier than was believed, according to evidence reported in Tass, the Soviet press agency. Arkady Bugai, the Ukrainian archaeologist credited with the discovery, based his conclusion on radiocarbon dating of charred wood found in the remains of the so-called Serpentine Wall, a 500-mile complex of defensive earthenworks that once ringed the present site of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. The charred wood used in the radiocarbon tests was from what is believed to be the remains of trees burned to clear ground for the wall. Bugai reasoned that a highly organized state was required to move the seven billion cubic feet of earth that made up the wall, which rises to a height of 30 to 35 feet and is 50 feet wide at its base.
The Serpentine Wall, which enclosed a roughly triangular area, was assumed to have been built to defend the Kiev area from hostile tribes. Ukrainian scholars now believe that the area must have had a population of approximately one million people during the time of the construction. It was formerly believed that the first consolidation of Russian tribes occurred around the tenth century, during the rise of Kievan Russia.
An expedition bent on disproving the theory that the American man came to North America by crossing a land bridge over what is now the Bering Strait began in September. Gene Savoy, the American explorer who is known for his 1964 discovery of the ruined Inca city of Vilcabamba in Peru, believes that American man originated in the jungles east of the Andes Mountains in South America, where he thinks advanced civilizations flourished as long ago as 1500 BC. The discovery of a new species of human ancestors and of fossils of the oldest human beings yet to be found in Europe dominated the news in anthropology in 1995.
The discovery of fossils of a new species of human ancestors — Australopithecus anamensis - at sites near Lake Turkana in Kenya was announced in August. Anamensis, a small-brained upright walker resembling the famous Lucy skeleton (identified with the species’ Australopithecus afarensis), weighed about 110 pounds. The complete upper and lower jaws, a set of lower teeth, a skull fragment, the teeth of several individuals, and a shinbone were dated to between 4.1 million and 3.9 million years ago, according to Meave Leakey (wife of Richard Leakey), one of the lead researchers.
Anamensis, the researchers indicated, may be directly ancestral to later afarensis (dated at 3.6 million years old). The shinbone is the oldest direct evidence yet discovered for upright, a bipedal locomotion (the ability to walk upright on two legs), a defining trait of humans. The earliest known evidence before this was the tracks (3.7 million years old) of three humanlike individuals, probably australopithecines, who strolled across a bed of fresh volcanic ash in what is now Laetoli, Tanzania.
The relationship between anamensis (from anam, a native Kenyan term for "lake") and an even older species whose discovery was announced in 1994 was unclear. The older species, found in the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia, was first named Australopithecus ramidus. The genus name was later changed to Ardipithecus ("ground apes"). The teeth and scanty bone fragments of Ardipithecus ramidus were dated at 4.4 million years old.
Fragmentary fossil remains of at least four humans thought to be intermediate between Homo erectus and archaic forms of The Homo sapiens, the later species to which all modern humans belong, were found in caves in Atapuerca in northern Spain, according to a report published in August. Dated as at least 780,000 years old by means of a Paleomagnetic dating technique, the stone tools and skeletal fragments - including some from an adolescent and some from a child - of skulls, hands, and feet represent the oldest humans yet discovered in Europe. The researchers who found the fossils said they could possibly be distant ancestors of the Neanderthals who appeared in Europe hundreds of thousands of years later.
The Spanish fossils partly fill a gap in the history of human evolution and expansion around the world. Previously, the oldest human fossils found in Europe, dating back 500,000 years, belonged to Heidelberg man, a likely ancestor of the Neanderthals, found at the Mauer site in Germany near the French border. It is known, however, that descendants of the earliest humans had spread from Africa to Asia well more than a million years ago. Among reasons given by anthropologists for the late occupation of Europe by Homo is the harshness of Europe's Ice Age climate.
Finds of Neanderthaloid skulls and skeletons continue to be reported from widely separated areas. Digging in a cave at Mount Circeo on the Tyrrhenian sea, 50 miles south of Rome, Italy, Alberto Carlo Blanc uncovered an almost perfectly preserved Neanderthal skull, perfect except for a fracture in the right temporal region. It is the third of this type found in Italy. The two skulls previously reported were found in 1929 and 1935 in the Sacopastore region, near Rome, but in not nearly so well preserved a condition as the present find. No other human bones were found here, but the skull was accompanied by fossilized bones of elephants, rhinoceri, and giant horses, all fractured, thus giving some evidence of the mode of life of Neanderthal man. Professor Sergio Sergi, of the Institute of Anthropology at the Royal University of Rome, who has studied this skull in detail believes it to be 70,000 to 80,000 years old. He concludes also that Neanderthal man walked almost as erect as modern man and not with head thrust forward as had hitherto been assumed.
Another Neanderthal skeleton is reported to have been found in a cave in Middle Asia by A. P. Okladnikoff of the Anthropological Institute of Moscow University and the Leningrad Institute of Anthropology. The bones of the skeleton were badly shattered, but the jaw and teeth of the skull, it crushed at the back, were almost complete
Hominids that were contemporary with Oldowan sites include two major lineages. One is the robust australopithecines (so called because their cheek teeth were larger than those of other australopithecines). These robust australopithecines - such as Australopithecus aethiopicus and Australopithecus boisei in East Africa, and Australopithecus robustus in South Africa - were bipedal and had small brains, large jaws, and large molars. The other lineage is made up of bipedal, larger-brained, and smaller-toothed early members of the genus Homo, such as an a Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and early Homo erectus. The oldest fossils of A Homo erectus (sometimes called Homo ergaster) found in Africa dates back to about 1.85 million years ago. This species is characterized by an even larger brain and smaller teeth than earlier hominids and by a larger body size. (In 1984 anthropologists in Kenya found a nearly complete skeleton of an adolescent Homo erectus who would have been 1.8 m (6 ft) tall as an adult.)
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