explain a feature each of old age stone age , middle stone age and the new stone age
Answers
OLD STONE AGE:
The Old Stone Age (Paleolithic Era) -from the beginning of human existence until around 12,000 years ago.
Extraction: digging down through layers of earth, the deeper the object, the older it is.
Typology: studying the type of object. If the object is more complex, it is usually more recent, simple tools are usually older.
Carbon-14 Dating: this is the measure of the amount of a substance called carbon-14 present in an object. This only works for living objects. When a living organism dies, it begins to lose carbon-14 in a predictable way we can measure and then determine the time the object was alive. Objects with less carbon-14 lived longer ago. Eventually a once-living object looses all of its carbon-14, so very old objects can not be dated using this method.
MIDDLE STONE AGE:
The Middle Stone Age (or MSA) was a period of African prehistory between the Early Stone Age and the Later Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50–25,000 years ago.The beginnings of particular MSA stone tools have their origins as far back as 550–500,000 years ago and as such some researchers consider this to be the beginnings of the MSA. The MSA is often mistakenly understood to be synonymous with the Middle Paleolithic of Europe, especially due to their roughly contemporaneous time span, however, the Middle Paleolithic of Europe represents an entirely different hominin population, Homo neanderthalensis, than the MSA of Africa, which did not have Neanderthal populations. Additionally, current archaeological research in Africa has yielded much evidence to suggest that modern human behavior and cognition was beginning to develop much earlier in Africa during the MSA than it was in Europe during the Middle Paleolithic. The MSA is associated with both anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) as well as archaic Homo sapiens, sometimes referred to as Homo helmei. Early physical evidence comes from the Gademotta Formation in Ethiopia, the Kapthurin Formation in Kenya and Kathu Pan in South Africa.
The New Stone Age (Neolithic Era)
Like the Old Stone Age, the people of the New Stone Age used stone for tools. Neo is a root we use in the English language, it comes from the Greek word neos, which means new or recent. So, Neolithic means "New Stone".
Farmers in Neolithic times produced a surplus of food that they could share with other people in their community. This surplus of food meant that not everyone had to farm. People in the New Stone Age began to specialize in skills other than farming. Specialization means doing one thing well. Some made tools and homes, while others created jewelry and artwork. Catalhöyük is a Neolithic city rich with evidence of artwork. Archaeologists have found artifacts like figurines and jewelry. There are also frescoes on the walls of the homes of Catalhöyük.
We have evidence of trade between Neolithic cities. While excavating in Jericho, one of the world's oldest cities, archaeologists found obsidian knives and blades that originally came from Catalhöyük. Obsidian is volcanic glass that was abundant near Catalhöyük. Obsidian products made up a big part of Catalhöyükk's economy. There is no available obsidian any where near Jericho, located in modern Israel. Could the people of Jericho have traded their abundant salt from the nearby Dead Sea to the people of Catalhöyük in exchange for obsidian objects?
Toward the end of the Neolithic Era, people began to use tools made from metal. Copper was the first metal used for tools. Eventually copper replaced stone, leading to the Copper Age. We will talk in class about an amazing early Copper Age discovery in the mountains near the Italian and Austrian border.