Almost all human technology time was the Old Stone Age
From the first stone tools about 3.3 million years ago to roughly 12,000 years ago, the Paleolithic covers nearly the whole of prehistoric technology. John Lubbock named it in 1865—old stone—while ice ages repeatedly redraw the map humans walked.
Hominins lived in small bands, gathering plants, fishing, hunting, or scavenging wild animals across vast timescales. About 50,000 years ago artefact diversity surged; African bone tools and first art appear in the record, and Blombos Cave in South Africa preserves early fishing gear. Later Paleolithic assemblages are finely typed by archaeologists into many tool categories. Humans evolved from early Homo such as habilis with simple stone tools toward anatomically and behaviourally modern forms by the Upper Paleolithic, when durable dwellings also begin to appear in camps.
By about 50,000 to 40,000 years ago people reached Australia; by 45,000 they lived at 61 degrees north in Europe; Japan by about 30,000; Siberia above the Arctic Circle by about 27,000; and by the Upper Paleolithic's end they had crossed Beringia into the Americas. The period overlaps the Pleistocene geologic epoch, which opened 2.6 million years ago, some 700 millennia after Paleolithic beginnings—and both end about 12,000 years ago amid major geographic and climatic swings that reshaped coasts and ranges.
Pliocene cooling, Antarctic ice growth, and an Arctic ice cap around three million years ago set the stage; Pleistocene glacials pushed continental ice toward the 40th parallel in some places, with four major glacial events and many lesser intervening ones. Patagonian ice capped the southern Andes; glaciers sat on New Zealand, Tasmania, and African peaks such as Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and the Ruwenzori Range. Paleolithic life was endless adaptation under a sky of advancing and retreating ice.
Source: Paleolithic
