Age· The columns of time

Palaeolithic

315 ka → 11.7 ka

The Palaeolithic is the age of chipped stone, from the first Homo sapiens 315,000 years ago to the end of the last ice age, 11,700 years ago.

Period defined by the working of chipped stone, that is, obtained by removing flakes and not by grinding, and covering from 315,000 to 11,726 years before present. It constitutes the longest band on the timeline and contains about 96 per cent of the existence of Homo sapiens, all periods subsequent to agriculture occupying the remaining 4 per cent.

What the evidence shows

The name, formed on Greek and meaning old stone, designates a technique before it designates a period. It carries an implicit limitation: across almost the whole of this span, stone is the principal material preserved, wood, fibre and hide having disappeared, so that a periodisation founded on ages of stone divides the past according to what has survived and not according to what structured the societies concerned. The nomenclature therefore informs on the state of the documentation. Considered as a proportion, the band constitutes the principal information the timeline supplies: from 315,000 to 11,726 years before the present it covers about 96% of the existence of Homo sapiens, agriculture, cities, writing and industry occupying the remaining 4%, which explains the crowding of the right-hand edge and the apparent emptiness of the rest.

Bounds and conventions

The term was coined in nineteenth-century Europe and applies badly elsewhere. African archaeologists divide the same span into Early, Middle and Later Stone Age, on criteria of their own, and the two nomenclatures overlap partially without coinciding. The timeline uses the European designations in order to have a continuous scale, a choice of representation and not a claim about the past.

96 per cent of the history of the species. The band opens with the oldest direct association of H. sapiens fossils and a Middle Stone Age industry.