Karen Bryan, age 12, of High Point, North Carolina, for her question:
When did the Stone Age begin?
Nowadays, archeologists are revising many of their previous ideas about our early ancestors. Apparently the old timers had to cope with a worldwide drought that lasted for ages. An up to the minute theory suggests that they spent this time along the margins of the seas. If further evidence supports this theory, then the first Stone Agers may have moved inland when the drought ended. One estimate puts man's first use of tools at between one and two million years ago.
The Paleolithic Age, or Old Stone Age, refers to the dawn of civilization. This point was reached when mankind learned to use and then to make tools from stones. Apparently our early ancestors were great tourists and travelers. For archeologists have unearthed their primitive stone implements in many far flung parts of the earth. No doubt they wandered because they depended upon seasonal wild plants and migrating animals for their food.
Modern science can date fossils, tools and other evidence of the Paleolithic period fairly accurately. The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, marked the next step forward. It can be dated more precisely because these people left more sophisticated artifacts and in most cases this period is more recent. However, a serious problem occurs when we consider the evidence we do not have. We know that several cultures of Northern Europe used stone implements more than half a million years ago.
The bewildering evidence of the remote past refuses to be dated precisely. Instead, it invites us to consider the enormous problems our early ancestors faced in their long struggle toward civilization. Their periods of pre history can best be dated by how, rather than when they solved their problems. Here a general pattern emerges. For although all early cultures learned to use stone implements, some learned sooner than others.
Pre history was a period of scattered groups and each group advanced at its own rate. Perhaps some advanced in a few thousand years from stone implements to pottery, basket making and other more sophisticated skills of the New Stone Age. Others reached the Old Stone Age much later and a few isolated cultures in the world still cling to this period of human culture. The recently discovered Tasaday people of Mindanao still live in the Old Stone Age culture of human history.
Most of the stone tools shaped by early man have been found in Europe, perhaps because this is where most of the digging has been done. The records go back through the warm periods between the ice ages that occurred during the past million years. In ancient Europe, the great advance to the New Stone Age seems to have occurred as the last of the ice ages began to retreat about 30,000 years ago.