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Stone Age Facts for Kids

Table of Contents

• People in the Stone Age used stone tools.
• This age lasted for about 2.5 million years.
• It ended when humans began to work with metal and bronze.

During the last ice age, glaciers came down from mountains. They covered the land. Glaciers are ice that comes down from the mountains. Keep reading to learn more Stone Age facts.

The glaciers blocked off rivers, and they formed terraces when they retreated. The present coastlines were made when ice sheets retreated four times in the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago. The environment influenced the Paleolithic culture in the Pleistocene Epoch. Humans started to get different from other animals. They began being able to make things out of rocks.

This evolution journey covers 2.5 million years, and it involves improvements in physical aspects like walking on two legs and in the brain. It also has cultural changes, like making tools from natural materials such as stone or wood.

During the Stone Age, humans shared the planet with another kind of human. The Neanderthals and Denisovans are now extinct.

Humans weren’t the first to make or use stone tools. 3.3 million years ago, an ancient species on Lake Turkana made stone tools and used them 700,000 years before humans existed.

Read about Ice Age Facts

Human Evolution

Evolution is not a straight line. It’s more complicated. A group may have become isolated due to some change in the weather, which made it, so they needed different things to eat or survive. Over time, this might have led them to change their genetic makeup, and eventually, they turned into something new that we would recognize as a new species or subspecies.

A long time ago, a species of people called Australopithecus afarensis evolved in eastern Africa. The bones of Lucy, a famous Australopithecus afarensis fossil found in Africa, were of a species that walked on two feet and ate fruit and roots.

Around 2 million years ago, another notable species of this genus emerged called Homo erectus. This was the first species to control fire. It is said that these people lived in Africa.

Neanderthals were well-suited for life in cold climates. They were also good hunters. But they became extinct around 40,000 years ago because there were changes to the weather, and they competed with other groups for resources.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens and then Homo sapiens sapiens) came into East Africa around 200,000 years ago. Then they spread to Eurasia.

We are the only living human species that has not become extinct. We may believe we are prosperous, but it is worth bearing in mind that humans have been on Earth for a little over 200,000 years. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t long.

The Division of the Stone Age

The Stone Age had three different periods. The first one was the Paleolithic Period when people first found stone tools and started making them. The Mesolithic Period was when people made better tools than they did before. The Neolithic Period started farming and growing plants on land to eat, like corn, beans, squash, and potatoes.

Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age)

The Palaeolithic era was the most complicated of the Stone Age periods. This is because it contained multiple human species and a series of climate changes.

Throughout the Paleolithic, humans were food collectors. This means they collected wild animals and fish to eat. They also collected fruit, nuts, and berries.

People were nomadic. This means they were always moving with their families. They got food, firewood, materials for tools, clothes, and shelter from where they lived.

The people in that time ate lots of different animals. They had wild horses, red deer, arctic hares, reindeer, wild cattle, and lynxes. They killed these animals to eat them and use their parts for things like clothes and glue. People in the Stone Age also hunted large mammals like wooly mammoths and giant bison.

The Palaeolithic people practiced hunting magic. They took care of disabled people too. People found out how to start a fire. They used this fire for warmth, cooking, and scaring away animals.

The earliest stage of the Lower Palaeolithic culture is represented by stone tools found in Ethiopia’s Kadar Gona and Hadar regions. The tools are 2.5 million years old.

The Middle Palaeolithic culture is a time when people made tools from flakes such as scrapers, points, borers, and awls. They also had fine workmanship with miniature handaxes and cleavers.

The Upper Palaeolithic had advancements in stone tool making. They made blades that were finished in many ways. People also retouched the blades.

In the Upper Palaeolithic period, there were a lot of kinds of art. People painted pictures on cave walls and ceilings and drew pictures on the rocks. The paintings are called “cave art,” but some drawings are called “petroglyphs.”

Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age)

Mesolithic people traveled around the country with animal herds. They were looking for good flint to make tools.

Living in groups of about 10 to 40 people, they hunted animals in woodlands. A Mesolithic hunter-gatherer might start a fire on the forest floor to attract deer. This is just a small step away from farming.

As a result of the climate getting warmer, the sea level rose, leading to Britain becoming an island. Before that, there was no sea between Europe and Britain.

These new farmers, who came from mainland Europe, made up roughly 20% of the population in Great Britain. These new farmers brought with them a whole slew of burial customs, including barrows or mounds. These tombs were made of big stones. We call them megaliths.

Food was not always available in every location throughout the Mesolithic period. People were frequently compelled to become nomadic hunters or to take up residence in rock shelters.

The type of tool used is different among these cultures. Mesolithic tools were made from small stone chips, and Paleolithic tools were made from more primitive stones. Neolithic tools were mainly polished and not chipped.

In this time, people made art that was different from before. It was easier to make art in a warmer climate and because there were more people.

A few rock art sites were created during the Mesolithic period, and they are in Spain. The art consists of small painted figures of humans or animals.

In 2015, a pendant from the Mesolithic period was found in England. It is believed to be the earliest art in England. It may imply the use of jewelry during this period.

Neolithic Period (New Stone Age)

People began to stop moving around and stay in one place permanently. People started to farm crops like spelt and wheat. They also kept animals, like goats and sheep.

Farmers needed more land. They cut down forests to make space. Flint was used to making tools, so mines were made to find the best flint deep underground.

In the early Neolithic, communities were made up of 50-100 people, and their clans and family organized them. Some people in the community raised animals, and some farmed. This didn’t create any economic or social differences.

From the Late Neolithic, the number of settlements increased, and there were more different types of homes. The community reached up to 300 people. Nuclear families were the social unit of the Neolithic people.

People in Britain started using pottery during the Neolithic. Pottery has been used for 2,500 years in Greece. People used pottery for cooking and storing food.

Pottery became a way of showing art. You can put many colors on it and designs too. The best pottery was made in the Neolithic Period because they had better ideas about making the clay and how to fire it or paint with color on it.

The pottery contained dairy products, according to examinations. This implies farmers would have milked their cattle, much as we do today.

The culture of the Neolithic society impressed its achievements on things that we have today. Buildings, burials, tools, pottery, figurines, and jewelry were all made by the Neolithic society’s culture. Basketry and weaving also encouraged artistic production, as did pottery.

Burial practices from the Neolithic show a belief in life after death. They include the offering of funerary items. The three types of burials include:

• The dead could be buried in a simple hole. The body is in a fetal position.
• Cremation is when people’s bodies are burned. In some cases, the cremated were put in vases.
• Collecting the bones of a dead person and burying them under the floor in a house.

At first, people did not make their things. Soon, people made and traded goods with other communities. The new conditions and values that arose during the Neolithic period were reflected in objects that only a select few members of society had during the Late Neolithic period.

These objects were symbols of social prestige. They are leaf-shaped arrowheads made out of obsidian from Melian, jewelry of gold or silver, and jewelry strips.

Read more about Neolithic Period

• https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/stone-age
• https://www.britannica.com/event/Stone-Age
• https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/the-stone-age/
• https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/stone-tools/early-stone-age-tools
• https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/arts-and-humanities/school-of-humanities/docs/Stone-Age-for-Key-Stage-2-Teaching-resource.pdf
• https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/226132/Downloadable-Resource-2-Stone-Age_compressed.pdf

P.S. If you enjoyed what you read and are a teacher or tutor needing resources for your students from kindergarten all the way up to high school senior (or even adults!), check out our partner sites KidsKonnect , SchoolHistory , and HelpTeaching for hundreds of facts, worksheets, activities, quizzes, courses, and more!

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Stone Age People Survived a Supervolcano Eruption by Adapting to Dry Periods, Archaeologists Suggest

Humans living in northwest Ethiopia around 74,000 years ago switched to eating more fish following the eruption, a behavior that might have enabled migration out of Africa

Will Sullivan

Daily Correspondent

Around 74,000 years ago, a massive supervolcano called Toba erupted in Indonesia, creating the largest known natural disaster in the last 2.5 million years.

Now, an archaeological site in northwest Ethiopia, called Shinfa-Metema 1, may point to how humans adapted to the widespread changes in climate induced by the catastrophic eruption. People at this site shifted to eating more fish during dry periods that seem to be linked to the volcano, according to a study published last week in the journal Nature .

“This points to how sophisticated people were in this time period,” John Kappelman , first author of the new study and a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, tells the New York Times ’ Carl Zimmer.

“This on-the-ground evidence contradicts the popular model that the ‘volcanic winter’ caused by the Toba eruption almost drove humans and our closely related ancestors to extinction,” Michael Petraglia , an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who did not contribute to the findings, tells the Washington Post ’s Carolyn Y. Johnson.

“Instead, all evidence from Shinfa-Metema and elsewhere now indicates that human populations were flexible enough in their adaptations to overcome environmental challenges, even those introduced by the Toba volcanic super-eruption of 74,000 years ago,” he adds.

Kappelman’s team first came across the Shinfa-Metema 1 site in 2002. Excavations revealed fossil mammoth teeth and ostrich eggshells, as well as bones with cut marks, writes  New Scientist ’s Michael Le Page. Archaeologists estimate humans populated the site for five to ten years, during a time with seasonal dry periods.

The researchers dated the pieces of ostrich eggshell to around 74,000 years ago, the time of the Toba eruption. And the same layers of sediment contained rocks with tiny fragments of volcanic glass, suggesting people lived there both before and after the blast in Indonesia, writes CNN ’s Katie Hunt.

The site had an unusually high abundance of fish compared to other Stone Age sites, suggesting that people captured more fish as waterholes shrank during the dry season.

“People start to increase the percentage of fish in the diet when Toba comes in. They’re capturing and processing almost four times as much fish [as before the eruption],” Kappelman says to CNN.

“It is sophisticated behavior… to fish, instead of hunting terrestrial mammals,” Kappelman tells the Washington Post . “That kind of behavioral flexibility is kind of a hallmark of modern humans today.”

The researchers also uncovered 16,000 chipped rocks that could be arrowheads, suggesting the site’s inhabitants used bows and arrows to hunt. If confirmed, these artifacts would be the earliest evidence of archery , per the New York Times .

Humans’ apparent adaptability at this site might shed light on early migrations, some researchers say. Modern humans spread out from Africa on multiple occasions more than 100,000 years ago, but people without African ancestry are tied genetically to a dispersal that occurred within the last 100,000 years. Previous research had suggested that early humans migrated during humid periods that offered more plants and food sources.

Instead, the finding that Stone Age people adjusted to arid conditions suggests humans may have ventured out of Africa during dry periods. They could have followed “blue highways” created by seasonal rivers, moving between small waterholes as they depleted each one, according to a statement from the University of Texas at Austin.

Rachel Lupien , a geoscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark who did not contribute to the findings, tells the Washington Post that she isn’t convinced by this theory yet. Comparing the short-term climate at Shinfa-Metema 1 to the climate in other locations, or across thousands of years, overlooks other variables that contribute to climate and rainfall, she says to the publication.

“Of course this new work doesn’t mean that humid corridors were not still important conduits for dispersals out of Africa, but this work adds credible additional possibilities during more arid phases,” Chris Stringer , a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the research, tells CNN.

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Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next .

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How was Stonehenge built?

Stonehenge's unmistakable silhouette is the result of construction around 4,500 years ago and damage, decay and collapse into the 20th century. Photo by Mike Pitts.

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By Mike Pitts, Archaeologist and journalist

Archaeologist Mike Pitts takes a closer look at how Stonehenge was constructed, and how people transported its huge stones to the famous site. 

The world of Stonehenge

If ever there was a construction that prompts questions, it is Stonehenge. Who built it? Why? When? How?

We get a glimpse of The world of Stonehenge at the British Museum exhibition, a fabulous opportunity to think about the people who created this globally famous monument. We can wander through the gallery, surrounded by treasures and everyday objects of the time from across northern Europe, and feel how different things were from our own times. Knowing the exhibition was coming, I decided I should finally write the book I'd been telling myself I should for nearly 40 years – ever since my first excavation at Stonehenge, and the discovery that there were so many untold stories. But what to say?

There are many, many books about Stonehenge, and most of them do the same thing. They tell us about archaeology and archaeologists – they describe what we know about the landscape and the people four or five thousand years ago, and all the different constructions that came and went on the site. They also explain, especially and often with great confidence, why Stonehenge was built. It seemed to me that the last question, apparently the hardest to answer, is actually the easiest. Within the limitations of ordinary human endeavour and stone age times, almost anything could have been possible – and so long as we properly represent the site's archaeology, whatever we come up with can never be proved wrong. That makes it, for me, the least interesting question.

But how ? Now there was a subject! How were the stones brought to Salisbury Plain from different parts of Britain? As Stonehenge may be the only megalithic monument with jointed stones in the world, apart from a small, and totally unconnected structure in Tonga in the South Pacific, how were the stones shaped? And how were stones weighing many tons raised into the air with nothing but ropes and timbers, by people who had never done anything like it before? These are not easy questions to answer, but there is plenty of hard evidence, including new research and much that has been done over the past century, often to be found in obscure reports. No one had published a book just about the stones since 1924. In this blog I'm going to share with you some of the things I learnt as I wrote mine.

Why Stonehenge is absolutely wonderful

For archaeologists like me engaged with Stonehenge, it's easy to get drawn into debates about the small details – puzzling over exactly what happened at a monument that changed and grew, poring over century-old excavation diaries and lifting the lids on dusty museum boxes – and lose sight of the stones. The great, weathered blocks that have been there for thousands of years, once fresh in their new arrangements and now a familiar ruin, have been studied more by artists than archaeologists – the first proper analysis of their shapes and surfaces was made as recently as 2012.

Thanks to that study, we know there to be more signs of original surface dressing, and more Bronze Age carvings into those Neolithic surfaces, than any of us had realised. The stones themselves have much to tell. They also have an emotive power that comes partly from their lost stories, and partly from their sheer presence as forms. Every stone is different, from small shapeless boulders to massive, variously dressed slabs. Carved joints and natural hollows and wrinkles are unique to every megalith and lintel. All are covered with lichens which, in the four decades since daily visitors have been excluded from the central part of the monument, have grown into delicate and fragile gardens, pouring in streaks down faces and painting them with splashes of translucent pale greens, spattered with purple and dark brown. And every sight is different, as rain darkens and emphasises, sun animates, and times of day and seasons bring their own distinctive light and shade.

Where did the stones come from?

Stonehenge is very unusual in the ancient world for the distances over which its materials were transported to the site, especially those megaliths we know as bluestones. Most of these, made from different types of igneous rock, were quarried in south west Wales – I estimate their journey at 220 miles. However, the really big stones, and the ones that give Stonehenge its distinctive silhouette, were found in southern England. These are the sarsens, made from hard sandstone, and none had to travel further than from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles to the north.

After mapping precise routes for these different stones, and calculating weights for them all, I now believe the distinction between bluestones and sarsens is even more important than I had originally thought. If we were to think about the total amount of weight moved for each distance, in pure ton-miles the bluestones (35,000–40,000) sound more impressive than the sarsens (25,000). But that ignores two significant factors.

First, we think the original bluestone structure was a large circle of 56 stones, raised five centuries before anything else. People could, if they'd wanted to (who knows?), have brought one stone to Wiltshire every year for 56 years - raising one could have been done entirely independently of any others. By contrast, the sarsens were carved and engineered to work together, with a variety of joints and shapes. Moving and dressing one stone would have been part of a larger project, needing more people to work together. And then there's size.

An average bluestone weighed two tons, an average sarsen 20 tons – and the largest approached twice that. Bluestones could have been carried across streams (people carried stones of similar size, in a wooden frame, on the border of Myanmar and India in the last century). Sarsens would have needed strong sledges, adding to the weight – as would the fact that some of the dressing would have been done at Stonehenge after arrival. A large sarsen on an oak sledge, following a route taken by over 70 other stones, would have broken the soft ground, making a wooden track necessary. A route of 15 to 20 miles from the Marlborough Downs to the north would alone have been a monumental undertaking. For generations, people would have known that the bluestones came from - far away over the horizon to the west. But the really memorable feat would have been the journeys, not the distance, made by the sarsens.

As a postscript, archaeologists in the last century found lumps they called Chilmark ragstone in some of the pits holding up the megaliths. The nearest source for this is 12 miles to the south-west, but no modern geologist has yet been able to find a specimen to examine, and the stone's presence remains a mystery.

How were the stones raised?

Behind almost every believable proposal for how the large Stonehenge stones were raised from laying on the ground, is the image of crowds hauling on long ropes, aided by the leverage of sheerlegs – a tall A-frame of oak poles. You can see it in the English Heritage guidebook, and the BBC featured it in a 1990s film in a spectacular re-enactment with full-scale concrete 'megaliths'. The trouble is, it couldn't have worked.

Models, diagrams and experiments have all imagined one or two stones in an empty field. But the would-be Stonehenge was a building site. The largest stones, known as trilithons (two uprights, one horizontal lintel) must have been erected before the circle that was to surround them, as they were too big to pass through gaps in the ring. This made it impossible to raise circle stones using long ropes, whether you wanted to lay stones down on the inside and pull outwards (there would have been no room for the stones) or outside and pull in (with no room for sheerlegs, ropes and pullers). So it's clear most of the upright stones at Stonehenge could not have been erected this way.

I found inspiration for a solution on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), in a demonstration islanders put on for Thor Heyerdahl in the 1950s. They raised a fallen statue, similar in weight to a large Stonehenge megalith, by repeatedly rocking it from side to side with levers, each time carefully placing small stones underneath the lifted side. Slowly a rubble mound grew beneath one end of the rising head, until, when it was nearly upright, a gentle tug on some ropes finished the job. The same thing could have been done on Salisbury Plain – not with stones, but wood, slowly adding tied and perhaps jointed timbers to a growing tower as 30 tons of megalith gently and safely rose to an upright position.

How it nearly all fell down…

By the early 20th century, five large stones had recently fallen and 10 were propped up with wooden poles. Another fell in 1963. Such dilapidation was stopped by major restoration work in the 1920s and, the 1950s and '60s – without which there would now be few stones standing. Unfortunately during these works considerable disturbance was done to archaeological layers underground which was not always well recorded. Nonetheless, there is still much to excavate at Stonehenge for the future, and more stories to learn.

How to Build Stonehenge by Mike Pitts is published by Thames & Hudson .

The world of Stonehenge was open ran from 17 February to July 2022.

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Was the Stone Age Actually the Wood Age?

Neanderthals were even better craftsmen than thought, a new analysis of 300,000-year-old wooden tools has revealed.

By Franz Lidz

In 1836, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, a Danish antiquarian, brought the first semblance of order to prehistory, suggesting that the early hominids of Europe had gone through three stages of technological development that were reflected in the production of tools. The basic chronology — Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age — now underpins the archaeology of most of the Old World (and cartoons like “The Flintstones” and “The Croods”).

Thomsen could well have substituted Wood Age for Stone Age, according to Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist and head of research at the Department of Cultural Heritage of Lower Saxony, in Germany.

“We can probably assume that wooden tools have been around just as long as stone ones, that is, two and a half or three million years,“ he said. “But since wood deteriorates and rarely survives, preservation bias distorts our view of antiquity.” Primitive stone implements have traditionally characterized the Lower Paleolithic period, which lasted from about 2.7 million years ago to 200,000 years ago. Of the thousands of archaeological sites that can be traced to the era, wood has been recovered from fewer than 10.

Dr. Terberger was team leader of a study published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that provided the first comprehensive report on the wooden objects excavated from 1994 to 2008 in the peat of an open-pit coal mine near Schöningen, in northern Germany. The rich haul included two dozen complete or fragmented spears (each about as tall as an N.B.A. center) and double-pointed throwing sticks (half the length of a pool cue) but no hominid bones. The objects date from the end of a warm interglacial period 300,000 years ago, about when early Neanderthals were supplanting Homo heidelbergensis, their immediate predecessors in Europe. The projectiles unearthed at the Schöningen site, known as Spear Horizon, are considered the oldest preserved hunting weapons.

In the mid-1990s, the discovery of three of the spears — along with stone tools and the butchered remains of 10 wild horses — upended prevailing ideas about the intelligence, social interaction and toolmaking skills of our extinct human ancestors. At the time, the scientific consensus was that humans were simple scavengers who lived hand-to-mouth until about 40,000 years ago.

“It turned out that these pre-Homo sapiens had fashioned tools and weapons to hunt big game,” Dr. Terberger said. “Not only did they communicate together to topple prey, but they were sophisticated enough to organize the butchering and roasting.”

The new study, which began in 2021, examined more than 700 pieces of wood from the Spear Horizon, many of which had spent the previous two decades stored in chilled tubs of distilled water to simulate the waterlogged sediment that had protected them from decay. With the aid of 3-D microscopy and micro-CT scanners that highlighted signs of wear or cut marks, researchers identified 187 pieces of wood that showed evidence of splitting, scraping or abrasion.

“Until now, splitting wood was thought to have been only practiced by modern humans,” said Dirk Leder, an archaeologist also at Lower Saxony and lead author of the paper.

Besides weapons, the assemblage included 35 pointed and rounded artifacts that were most likely used in domestic activities such as punching holes and smoothing hides. All were carved from spruce, pine or larch — “woods that are both hard and flexible,” said Annemieke Milks, an anthropologist from the University of Reading who collaborated on the project.

Since neither spruce nor pine would have been available at the lakeshore, where the site was located, the research team deduced that the trees had been felled on a mountain two or three miles away or perhaps even farther. Close inspection of the spears indicated that the Stone Agers planned their woodworking projects carefully, following a set order: strip the bark, remove the branches, sharpen the spear head, harden the wood in fire. “The wooden tools had a higher level of technological complexity than we usually see in stone tools from that age,” Dr. Leder said.

Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at University of Bordeaux who was not involved in the study, praised its insights into the methods and materials that Stone Age people used to solve practical Stone Age problems. “The paper opens a window into the almost unknown world of the Lower Paleolithic,” he said. “In spite of the paucity of data, the authors make a courageous attempt to propose a scenario for the evolution of such technology that needs to be tested in the future against new discoveries.”

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that some of the spear points were resharpened after earlier breakage or dulling, and that some of the broken weapons had been whittled down, polished and repurposed. “The wood that we identified as working debris suggested that tools were repaired and recycled into new tools for other tasks,” Dr. Milks said.

All but one of the spears were hewed from the trunks of slow-growing spruce trees and shaped and balanced like modern javelins, with the center of gravity in the middle of the shaf. But were they meant for throwing, or for thrusting? “The spears were made from dense wood and with thick diameters,” Dr. Milks said. “To me, that suggests the hominids manufacturing them may have intentionally designed at least some as flight weapons for hunting.”

She tested the spears’ external ballistics by enlisting six trained male javelin throwers, aged 18 to 34, to heave replicas at hay bales from various distances. “My point was to ask people who were a little bit better at doing this than archaeologists, because up until that point, we’d had experiments with lots of people who were … archaeologists,” Dr. Milks said, adding: “Anthropologists are not very good at that kind of thing, either.”

From 33 feet away, Team Neanderthals hit the target 25 percent of the time. The athletes were equally accurate at 50 feet, and only slightly less (17 percent) at 65 feet. “Still, that was double the range at which scientists had estimated a hand-thrown spear could be useful for hunting,” Dr. Milks said.

For her, the notion that our Stone Age forebears were artisans serves to humanize them. “Working wood is slow, even if you’re good at it,” she said. “There are lots of different steps in the process.” She imagines a bunch of Neanderthals clustered around an evening campfire, assembling and sanding and mending their wooden handicrafts. “It all seems very, very close, in a way,” she said, wistfully, “even though it was such a long, long time ago.”

The Bronze Age - A Spark That Changed the World

• Read Later  

The development of civilization was a long and complex process, and it always rested on industry and technology. As our ancestors stepped from one millennium to another, and the Stone Age evolved further and further, new things began appearing - a new vision and new skills. This gave rise to the Bronze Age.

As the use of stone tools became outdated and new metallurgic skills became known around the world, life became much different than before. Nomadic lifestyles were exchanged for permanent settlements and agriculture; societies were centered around powerful bronze-bearing chieftains, and trade networks became widespread and dominant. It was a new age.

Bronze Age metalwork, circa 2,000 BC. Source: Archivist / Adobe Stock.

The Origins of the Bronze Age

To fully understand the gradual appearance of the Bronze Age, we need to look to the era that preceded it - and that is the Chalcolithic . Chalcolithic is more commonly known as the Copper Age, an archaeological period that is considered as the final phase of the Stone Age. It began at different stages in the world, but more or less around the 5th millennium BC.

It lasted for more than a thousand years, before the earliest discovery of smelting - a process in which molten copper and tin were mixed together to produce bronze, a tougher, more precious metal that brought on the Bronze Age. The earliest archaeological proof of copper smelting dates to 7,000 years ago, to a site called Belovode , on Rudnik Mountain in modern Serbia.

Metallurgical innovations during the Bronze Age - Late Vinča culture feature in trench 6 at Belovode excavated in 1997 that consisted of three ovens and a fireplace accompanied by 35 whole vessels and numerous pottery fragments as well as anthropomorphic and zoomorphic (bovine) figurines ( D. Šljivar )

It is the shift from stone to copper itself that instigated further developments in metallurgy, and further understanding of ores. Copper tools - most notably axe heads - were a sought after item in the Copper Age, and they even instigated new technological advancements in the creation of stone tools. Distinctly shaped copper axe heads were copied in stone by smaller cultures which didn’t possess the technique of copper smelting.

But as the centuries progressed, and the knowledge of mining and ores became more advanced, the appearance of bronze was inevitable. To create bronze, our ancestors had to combine two key ingredients - copper and tin. Both of these ingredients have quite a low melting point, but they need to be smelted separately.

Tin had to be mined, and once melted and combined with copper, the resulting alloy was bronze - much more valuable and durable. The earliest known use of tin alloy to create bronze dates to the 5th millennium BC, once more in today’s Serbia, and connected with one of the world’s earliest civilizations - the Vinča culture.

But we need to remember that the appearance of bronze was not synchronized - different parts of the world began using it in varied periods. The appearance of bronze did a lot to thoroughly change the world and the societies that possessed it.

Even though it generally lasted for 2,000 years at most, it brought serious advancements and penetrated deep into the natural order of things. It connected new lands and people through trade routes and placed great emphasis on mining . Places which were scarce in copper and tin had to import it from afar.

Trade and Travel to Secure Resources

Regular trade and communication routes were established between Denmark and the Eastern Alps, between Sumer, Zagros, and Caucasus, Egypt, and Sinai. Moreover, tin and copper ores are rarely close to one another and had to be mined separately then transported to regional centers where they would be smelted.

Chalcolithic copper mine in Timna Valley, Negev Desert, Israel. (Soerfm / Public Domain )

One interesting piece of evidence shows us that bronze workers of Central Europe and Scandinavia obtained their copper from the region of today’s Eastern Alps and Slovakia, and the tin from the Bohemia region or sometimes even England. Where Neolithic communities were wholly self-sufficient and acquired stone materials without having to resort to trade or travel, the Bronze Age communities were the opposite. That tells us how much bronze items were sought after.

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Bronze weapons quickly became symbols of power and this gave rise to chieftains and leaders, and tribal communities - a change from mostly nomadic hunter gatherer societies of the previous age. 

The Bronze Age Around the World

One of the regions that saw the earliest use of bronze was ancient Egypt. It began around 3,150 BC in the so-called Protodynastic Period of Egypt. It lasted until roughly 2,686 BC, and it was the period in which some of the greatest works of art from Egypt were made and the Egyptian culture gained its distinct character in both religious and architectural aspects.

Art from Egypt 3,100 BC from the Protodynastic Period of the Bronze Age. (Joyofmuseums / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

In East Asia - mainly China - the Bronze Age appeared as early as 3,000 BC and was distinctly different from the rest of the world. The ancient Chinese civilization was always one step ahead and was characterized by the intricate and advanced creations in every aspect of their society.

During this period, bronze was mainly used for items of ritual and religious significance, and for weapons. Interestingly, the Bronze Age never properly ended in China and overlapped with the coming of the Iron Age.

In Europe too, the spread of the use of bronze was not immediate but rather gradual. In the British Isles and Ireland, the use of bronze dates to around 2,100 BC where it lasted to 750 BC. This period saw the emergence of a more distinct culture and new peoples arriving to the islands from continental Europe.

New cultures mingled and assimilated one another, and this gave rise to new customs and new beliefs. We can observe the rising pattern of single burials in stone cists and barrows, and elaborate stone megalithic creations.

A great insight into the Bronze Age in Britain was shown with the discover of the Isleham Hoard, a massive collection of more than 6,500 bronze items buried in the vicinity of the village of Isleham in England. 

One of the more interesting Bronze Age cultures in Europe is the Nordic one. The so-called Nordic Bronze Age began in around 1,700 BC and lasted up to the emergence of the Iron Age in Scandinavia - 500 BC. The reason why the North European regions - namely Denmark , Sweden , Norway coasts, and Pomerania - were so late to enter the Bronze Age is because they only learned about it through trade, and they weren’t trading societies. Their lives were never completely communal and often consisted of only single longhouses - aka farms - where a family would raise cattle and work the land.

This means that today we can see a lot of Central European imported bronze items. There are even finds of bronze axes made from Cypriot copper. This is just another important insight into the far-reaching trade networks of the era. But the Northerners soon mastered bronze and developed their own unique style of weaponry and votive items that paved the way for future development in the north.

The remnants from their Bronze Age show a great emphasis on seafaring and ships. During this time the unique ‘ship burial’ custom was developed, in which the dead were buried in stone ships. Also, numerous stone carvings depict crude longboats which are surely the early forms of what would come later in the Iron Age. 

Bronze weapons. Credit: Dmytro / Adobe Stock

The Industry That Brought War: Learning From the Tollense Battlefield

But the technological advancements of that age, and the appearance of bronze and all that it entailed, makes us ask a very important question - was it for better or for worse?

Because modern archaeology gave us a very important insight into the earliest beginnings of organized, mass warfare and large scale battles - and they date to the Bronze Age. With the appearance of superior weapons and wealthy, powerful tribes, the human nature itself shifted to a different, macabre level. War came.

The Tollense Valley Battlefield is a Bronze Age archaeological site and the place of the largest and most significant conflict of the entire Bronze Age, and it shows us some important details of the warfare in this age. Located in historical Slavic Pomerania region, today in Germany’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state, the battlefield is located along the small Tollense River. 

There is ample evidence that the plain was once a very important route with a long wooden causeway across the marshy valley, and perhaps a crucial approach for both traders and invading peoples. Since the initial discovery, extensive excavations were conducted at the site, and they yielded an immense amount of human bones and weapons.

Over 140 male individuals were discovered, all with extensive wounds, and over 13,000 bone fragments. Experts can safely say that this battle involved some 4,000 warriors - which once we consider the population density of the Bronze Age, was an immense amount of men. This makes the battle that happened here, the single largest conflict of the entire Bronze Age.

Excavation of an ancient battlefield from the Bronze Age in northern Germany revealed signs of an immense battle, such as closely packed bones, as seen in this 2013 photo of the site. One area of 12 square meters is said to have held 1478 bones, including 20 skulls. ( Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalpflege Mecklenburg-Vorpommern/Landesarchäologie/C. Harte-Reiter )

There is ample evidence that shows us that the two opposing armies were not armed in the same way. The battlefield is a mix of flint, dated, crude weapons and the more refined bronze ones.

Likewise, the arrowheads discovered are different - they are either made from flint or bronze. This can tell us that perhaps a bronze-wielding army invaded the territory of a weaker culture that was still relying on stone weapons.

Further research shows that some men were not from the region and had traveled from far away, proven by the difference in diet. With all these things considered, the Tollense Valley Battlefield could very well be the earliest example of a large, superior, bronze-wielding culture attempting to conquer a weaker stone-wielding culture of northern Europe.

But it is also a perfect example of how metallurgic technological advancement woke the worst attributes of humans. It gradually gave rise to wealth, power and influence, conquest and war, greed and suffering. 

Vinča - Europe’s Cradle of Civilization

One particular research became a breakthrough in the studies about the Bronze Age and its emergence. For years, researchers have been studying the captivating and revolutionary discoveries of the Vinča culture - one of the world’s earliest civilizations.

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Late Neolithic Vinča fired clay figurine. (User-duck / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

This civilization flourished in the Neolithic, mostly on the territory of modern Serbia. And now, a discovery on the Pločnik archeological site sheds new light on the Bronze Age.

The leading academic journal Antiquity , edited by Robert Witcher, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Durham, and published by Cambridge University Press, published the stunning finds from that site - tin bronze foils that were accurately dated to 4,650 BC. Further 14 bronze artifacts were discovered and dated to before 4,000 BC. This tells us that the use of bronze in Europe emerged independently from the civilizations of the Near East and roughly 1,500 years before the earliest presumed use of bronze.

The production of bronze on the Balkans lasted for 500 years, but there is a strong possibility that it eventually faded out with the collapse of large cultural complexes of the region. It is most likely that it emerged again only 1,500 years later, all over again.

But either way, this revolutionary discovery gives us important clues about the past of Europe and sheds new light on the highly unique Vinča civilization that could very well be the oldest one in the world - with the earliest writing system as well. Even today, we can understand that there is still a lot to be learned about our past and the deep layers of European history.

Fading Out Into a Greater Age

The Bronze Age in the Near East ended violently, with the Late Bronze Age collapse that saw many of the developed kingdoms and civilizations crumble and disappear. It was followed with the Iron Age soon after, and that too brought profound new changes on the world civilizations and plunged the world into an entirely different direction - one that would ultimately scar the face of the earth. Either way, there is a lot to be learned from the Bronze Age and its appearance, and the way in which our earliest ancestors managed to learn more from the world around them and use what was offered freely. 

Top image: Details of an ancient Roman bronze statue. Credit: giorgio / Adobe Stock

By Aleksa Vučković

Updated on January 15, 2021.

Childe, G. 2011. The Bronze Age . Cambridge University Press. 

Fokkens, H. and Harding, A. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of the European Bronze Age . Oxford University Press.

Harding, A. 2000. European Societies in the Bronze Age . Cambridge University Press.

Mark, J. 2019. Bronze Age Collapse . Ancient History Encyclopedia. [Online] Available at: https://www.ancient.eu/Bronze_Age_Collapse/

Dating mistake? Stating a date of 2686 BC for the end of the bronze age in Egypt is incredibly early. Whilst there have been early finds such as a smelted iron dagger blade found in a Hattic tomb in Anatolia, dating from 2500 BC. These aren't the norm. The end of the bronze age is dated to the time of the 'bronze age collapse.' around 1200 BC. So maybe the number used in this article is simply a mistake, and was meant to be 1686 BC. Which while still quite early, is actually more probable. Anyway, thanks for a very interesting article on the bronze age.

The image noted to be Egyptian looks suspiciously Mesopotamian to my eye. Especially the long length garment worn by the partial figure in the middle of the tablet. Could it have been a message sent regarding a battle victory? 

I am a published author of over ten historical fiction novels, and I specialize in Slavic linguistics. Always pursuing my passions for writing, history and literature, I strive to deliver a thrilling and captivating read that touches upon history's most... Read More

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How Early Humans Survived the Ice Age

By: Dave Roos

Updated: June 29, 2023 | Original: July 15, 2021

The most recent ice age peaked between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets covered North America and northern Europe, and mountain ranges like Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro and South America's Andes were encased in glaciers.

At that point, our Homo sapiens ancestors had migrated from the warm African heartland into northern European and Eurasian latitudes severely impacted by the sinking temperatures. Armed with big, creative brains and sophisticated tools, though, these early modern humans—nearly identical to ourselves physically—not only survived but thrived in their harsh surroundings.

Language, Art and Storytelling Helped Survival

For our Homo sapien s forebears living during the last ice age, there were several critical advantages to having a large brain, explains Brian Fagan, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of many books, including Cro Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans and Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from our Ancestors .

"One of the most important things about Homo sapiens is that we had fluent speech," says Fagan, "plus the ability to conceptualize and plan ahead."

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With the advent of language, knowledge about the natural world and new technologies could be shared between neighboring bands of humans and also passed down from generation to generation via storytellers.

"They had institutional memory through symbolic storytelling, which gave them a relationship with the forces of the environment, the supernatural forces which governed their world."

Also through music, dance and art, our ancestors collected and transmitted vast amounts of information about the seasons, edible plants, animal migrations, weather patterns and more. The elaborate cave paintings at sites like Lascaux and Chauvet in France display the intimate understanding that late ice age humans possessed about the natural world, especially the prey animals they depended on for survival.

"When wildlife biologists look at those paintings of reindeer and bison, they can tell you what time of year it was painted just from the appearance of the animals' hides and skins," says Fagan. "The way these people knew their environment was absolutely incredible by our standards."

Tools Used by Ice Age Humans

The last ice age corresponds with the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000 to 10,000 years ago), in which humans made great leaps forward in toolmaking and weaponry, including the first tools used exclusively for making other tools.

One of the most important of these was called a burin, a humble-looking rock chisel that was used to cut grooves and notches into bone and antler, lightweight material that was also hard and durable. The intricate spearheads and harpoon tips made from that bone and antler were small and light enough to be carried on foot by hunters over long distances, and were also detachable and interchangeable, creating the first compound tools.

"Think of the Swiss army knife—it’s the same thing," says Fagan. "The weaponry they made covered an extraordinary range of specialized tools, most of which were made from grooving antler and bone."

But even these sophisticated hunting weapons were useless outside of close-range attacks, which sometimes required the hunter to leap on the back of his massive prey. Once again, our human ancestors used their intelligence and planning skills to take some of the danger and guesswork out of hunting.

In one famed hunting ground in eastern France, ice-age hunters built fires every fall and spring to corral migrating herds of wild horses and reindeer into a narrow valley marked by a limestone tower known as the Roche de Salutré.

Once in the corral, the animals could safely and easily be killed at close quarters, harvesting an abundance of meat that was then dried for the summer and winter months. Archeological evidence shows that this well-coordinated slaughter went on for tens of thousands of years.

The Invention of the Needle Brings Tailored Clothing

When the first humans migrated to northern climates about 45,000 years ago, they devised rudimentary clothing to protect themselves from the cold. They draped themselves with loose-fitting hides that doubled as sleeping bags, baby carriers and hand protection for chiseling stone.

But everything changed around 30,000 years ago with what Fagan argues is the most important invention in human history: the needle.

"If you saw a needle from 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, you'd know what it was in an instant, a very fine-pointed tool with a hole in one end to put thread through," says Fagan. "The miracle of the needle was that it enabled humans to make tight-fitting clothing that was tailored to the individual, and that's vital."

Like modern mountaineering clothing, clothes from the late ice age were meant to be worn in layers. An ice-age tailor would carefully select different animal skins—reindeer, arctic foxes, hares, even birds like ptarmigans—and sew together three or four layers, from moisture-wicking underwear to waterproof pants and parkas.

Thread was made from wild flax and other vegetable fibers and even dyed different colors like turquoise and pink. The result was a fitted, versatile wardrobe that fully protected its wearer from sub-freezing temperatures.

Rock Shelters Provided Protection From Weather

For shelter in the coldest months, our ice age ancestors didn't live deep in caves as Victorian archeologists once believed, but they did make homes in natural rock shelters. These were usually roomy depressions cut into the walls of riverbeds beneath a protective overhang.

Fagan says there's strong evidence that ice age humans made extensive modifications to weatherproof their rock shelters. They draped large hides from the overhangs to protect themselves from piercing winds and built internal tent-like structures made of wooden poles covered with sewn hides. All of this was situated around a blazing hearth, which reflected heat and light off the rock walls.

In the brief summer months, the hunters would move out into the open plains that stretched from the Atlantic coast of Europe all the way to Siberia. With cold temperatures persisting at night, shelter was taken in dome-shaped huts partially dug into the earth.

“The framework was built from a latticework of mammoth bones, either hunted or raided from carcasses,” says Fagan. “On top of it they'd lay sod or animal hides to make a house that was occupied for months on end.” 

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Paleo diet study reveals new insight on what stone age humans really ate.

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What did people in the Stone Age eat before the advent of farming around 10,000 years ago? A long-held stereotype — one that's influenced modern fad diets — is that ancient humans hunted large animals and chowed down on mammoth steak.

But new research on a Paleolithic group called the Iberomaurusians, hunter-gatherers who buried their dead in Taforalt cave in what's now Morocco between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, is adding to a growing body of evidence that challenges the notion human ancestors predominantly relied on meat, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution .

Scientists analyzed chemical signatures preserved in bones and teeth belonging to at least seven different Iberomaurusians and found that plants, not meat, were their primary source of dietary protein.

"Our analysis showed that these hunter-gatherer groups, they included an important amount of plant matter, wild plants to their diet, which changed our understanding of the diet of pre-agricultural populations," said lead study author Zineb Moubtahij, a doctoral student at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, a research institute in France, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The share of plant resources as a source of dietary protein in the humans whose remains were studied was similar to that seen in early farmers from the Levant, the present-day Eastern Mediterranean countries where plant domestication and farming were first documented.

Researchers also spotted a higher number of tooth cavities among the Taforalt specimens than is typically seen with hunter-gatherer remains of that period. The evidence suggested that the Iberomaurusians consumed "fermentable starchy plants" such as wild cereals or acorns, according to the study. The findings raise some intriguing questions about how agriculture spread across different regions and populations.

"While not all individuals primarily obtained their proteins from plants at Taforalt, it is unusual to document such a high proportion of plants in the diet of a pre-agricultural population," said coauthor Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, in an email.

"This is likely the first time such a significant plant-based component in a Paleolithic diet has been documented using isotope techniques," Jaouen added.

Deciphering ancient diets

The researchers used a technique called stable isotope analysis to learn about the diet of each of the Iberomaurusians studied.

Nitrogen and zinc isotopes (variants of an element) contained in collagen and teeth enamel can reveal the amount of meat ancient diets once contained, while carbon isotopes can shed light on whether the main source of protein was meat or fish.

"Humans consume these foods and the isotope information is recorded in tissues like bones and teeth," Moubtahij said. "By analyzing this tissues that we find in archaeological records, we can know if a person ate more meat or they ate more plant-based food."

The isotope technique shows the amount of plants eaten but not the type. However, botanical remains of charred sweet acorns, pistachio, pine nuts, wild oats and pulses discovered at the site support the information gleaned from the human remains. Grinding stones unearthed at the site also suggest plant processing took place nearby.

However, the Iberomaurusians weren't strict vegetarians, the study noted. Cut marks on the remains of Barbary sheep and gazelles, as well as ancient horselike and cowlike mammals, suggested that some animals had been butchered and processed for food.

The increased reliance on plant food was probably driven by several factors — including a wider range of edible plants and perhaps a depletion of large game species, according to the study.

Early weaning clues

The isotope analysis also detected evidence of one case of early weaning, with starchy plant foods introduced into an infant's diet before its death at between 6 and 12 months old.

"This contrasts with hunter-gatherer societies where extended breast-feeding periods are the norm due to the limited availability of weaning foods," according to the study.

The research only investigated the diets among one group of Stone Age hunter-gatherers. However, a similar study published in January — which analyzed the remains of 24 early humans from two burial sites in Peru dating from 9,000 to 6,500 years ago — revealed that ancient diets in the Andes were composed of 80% percent plant matter and 20% meat.

A November 2022 study revealed that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens were sophisticated cooks, combining plant-based ingredients such as wild nuts, peas, vetch, lentils and wild mustard.

"I don't think that there is a standard diet for everyone (in this period), but it depends on the environment. Humans are resilient and flexible in their diet habits," Moubtahij said.

The work undermines the idea that a Stone Age diet was meat heavy — a rigid assumption perpetuated by present-day dietary trends like the Paleo diet. But the stereotype likely has its roots in past research, and there are a few possible reasons why.

Evidence for meat-eating, in the form of butchered animal bones, is often more "archaeologically visible" than the evidence for plant eating, said Briana Pobiner, a research scientist and museum educator at the Human Origins Program in the department of anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She wasn't involved in the study.

Another reason for the idea that meat was central to early human diets is "the perception that hunting was a key behavioral innovation that occurred early in our evolutionary history — rooted in part in early hunter-gatherer studies carried out by male scholars that primarily focused on big game hunting by men and did not document, discounted, or downplayed the important dietary role of women gathering smaller game and plant resources," she said via email.

Agricultural transition revelations

Jaouen said that in the Levant region, archaeologists had documented a similar plant-based diet among another group that practiced a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle just before the development of agriculture, raising questions as to why the transition to farming did not simultaneously occur among the Iberomaurusian population.

"These findings indicate that several populations at the end of the Paleolithic adopted a diet similar in terms of plant content to that of farmers," she said.

The transition to agriculture was a complex process that occurred at different times and proceeded at different rates, in different ways with different foods, in different places, Pobiner said.

"In other words, it was largely a local phenomenon that could involve transitional forms of subsistence — not a single, sharp, simultaneous worldwide shift," she added.

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Bernard Hill, ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Titanic’ Actor, Dead at 79

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Bernard Hill , the British actor who starred as a king in Lord of the Rings and the captain in Titanic , has died at the age of 79.

Hill’s family confirmed the actor’s death Sunday in a statement, “It is with the greatest sadness that we must announce that Bernard Hill, renowned actor known for his roles in ‘Titanic’ and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ passed away in the early hours of this morning at the age of 79. He was with his fiancée Alison and his son Gabriel.” No cause of death was provided.

Over a career that spanned seven decades — much of it in his native England — Hill was best known to American audiences thanks to roles in two of the biggest films of all time: In 1997, Hill portrayed Edward Smith, captain of the ill-fated Titanic, in James Cameron’s epic about the disaster.

Hill also has the distinction of being the only actor to appear in two films that won 11 Oscars, which both Titanic and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King accomplished; 1959’s Ben Hur is the only other film to win 11 Academy Awards.

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