Palaeolithic Age and its Phases

The Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age, is the first or oldest prehistoric culture. The term is derived from the Greek words palaios, which means “ancient,” and lithos, which means “stone.” From roughly 30,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE, the Palaeolithic Age, also known as the Old Stone Age, produced the first achievements in human inventiveness. Our awareness about Palaeolithic human traditions and culture comes from archaeological and cultural analogies to modern hunter-gatherer communities due to a lack of written documents from this time. The Palaeolithic period lasted until the ice melted, at which point farming and the use of metals became widespread. There were three phases in the Palaeolithic age. Let us trace the different phases in the Palaeolithic age one by one.

Palaeolithic Age- part of the Stone Age:

The Prehistoric Period, or when human life existed before records chronicled human behaviour, lasted around three million years and ended around 1,200 B.C. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age are the three archaeological periods that are commonly recognised.

The stone age is divided into further three ages, they are as follows:

1. Palaeolithic Age – Old Stone Age
2. Monolithic Age – Middle Stone Age
3. Neolithic Age – New Stone Age

Three phases of the Palaeolithic Age:

The three subdivisions of the Palaeolithic Age are as follows:

• Lower Palaeolithic
• Middle Palaeolithic
• Upper Palaeolithic

Let us now trace the different phases in the Palaeolithic age separately:

1. Lower Palaeolithic:

• The Lower Palaeolithic Period is the first of these periods, as evidenced by the use of stone tools for the first time.
• These basic tools are part of a collection known as the Oldowan Tradition, named after the African location where they were unearthed.
• Choppers and scrapers are the only two major types of stone tools used during this period.
• Humans probably used hand axes to kill animals later in this time, indicating that they had not progressed to hunting and gathering.

Humans initially discovered and used fire during the Lower Palaeolithic Period, which was a significant discovery for all of humanity.

TOOLS:

• Acheulean handaxes and cleavers are Palaeolithic stone tools that indicate that most humans of the time were scavengers rather than hunters.
• The presence of extinct animal types from the Early or Middle Pleistocene is also a feature of Lower Palaeolithic sites. The regulated use of fire appears to have been worked out somewhere around the Lower Palaeolithic period, according to evidence.

2. Middle Palaeolithic:

• The Mousterian culture, which is typically connected with Neanderthal man, an early form of human who lived between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, belongs to the Middle Palaeolithic.
• Neanderthal remains with evidence of fire use are frequently discovered in caves. Neanderthals were prehistoric mammalian hunters, and their cultural relics have been discovered primarily in Europe, but also in North Africa, Palestine, and Siberia.
• The flake tradition is represented by stone tools from this period, and bone utensils such as needles suggest that coarsely sewed furs and skins were employed as body coverings. A prehistoric religion may have been practised since the deceased were decorated before burial.

LIVING:

• Scavenging was a common way of life for both Homo sapiens as well as our Ancient ancestors in the Middle Palaeolithic, but there is also evidence of hunting and collecting.

TOOLS:

• The most significant aspect of Middle Palaeolithic stone technologies to remember is that the focus moved from core tools like the Acheulean Handaxe to flake tools like the Levallois point.
• Sharp-edged flakes were undoubtedly used by hominids at Olduvai, and they were even modified for specialised activities. In the Middle Palaeolithic cores were meticulously shaped to produce flakes of a specific size and shape. After that, the flakes were transformed into both simple and complicated tools.

3. Upper Palaeolithic:

• The world was in a state of turmoil throughout the Upper Palaeolithic. By 33,000 years ago, the Neanderthals in Europe had been pushed out and had vanished, and modern humans had the globe to themselves.
• While the idea of a “creative explosion” has given way to knowledge of a lengthy history of human behaviour evolution long before we humans left Africa, there’s no denying that things heated up during the phase of the Upper Palaeolithic.

TOOLS:

• The Upper Palaeolithic stone tools were predominantly blade-based technology. Blades are stone objects that are twice as long as they are wide, with parallel sides in most cases.
• They were utilised to develop a staggering number of formal tools, many of which were designed to work with specific, widespread patterns and for specific objectives.

SHELTER:

• People lived in shelters with the semi-subterranean floor, huts, and windbreaks during the Upper Palaeolithic period, some of which were made of mammoth bone.
• Culling of animals, selected choices by season, and selective butchery: the first hunter-gatherer economy demonstrated that hunting became specialised and complex planning. Food storage may have been performed in some regions and at certain times, based on the occurrence of mass animal slaughter on occasion. Small groups of individuals may have gone on hunting trips and returned with flesh to the base camps, according to certain evidence.

Conclusion:

The Palaeolithic Age lasted from 500,000 years ago, when the first tool-making Homo erectus arrived, through 10,000 BC. The lower Palaeolithic, Middle Palaeolithic, and Upper Palaeolithic ages are separated into three periods. The transition from each of these phases to the next was gradual and characterised by finer stone tools and technology at the time. Furthermore, due to several circumstances such as time lag, weather vagaries, huge distances, different geographical and physical obstacles, and so on, this divide is not consistent around the planet. With the conclusion of the Ice Age around 10,000 BC, the Palaeolithic era came to an end.