Stone tools date early humans in North Africa to 2.4 million years ago. Those tools are made of limestone and flint that were most likely collected nearby from ancient stream beds. Africans Made Microliths 71,000 Years Ago, Earlier Than Thought. In 2012, paleontologists announced that they had found small blades in a South African cave proving that man was an advanced thinker making stone tools 71,000 years ago, thousands of years earlier than thought, and the capacity for complex thought and weapons production gave modern humans an evolutionary advantage over. All the early hominin fossil remains found in the Mediterranean area in association with Oldowan stone tools are significantly younger than Ain Boucherit, by at least 1 million years.
The making of stone tools is a characteristic that archaeologists use to define what is human. Simply using an object to assist with some task indicates a progression of conscious thought, but actually making a custom tool to perform that task is the 'great leap forward'. The tools that survive down to today were made of stone. There may have been tools made of bone or other organic materials before the appearance of stone tools--certainly, many primates use those today--but no evidence for that survives in the archaeological record.
The oldest stone tools that we have evidence for are from the earliest sites dated to the Lower Paleolithic--which shouldn't come as a surprise since the term 'Paleolithic' means 'Old Stone' and the definition of the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic period is 'when stone tools were first made'. Those tools are believed to have been made by Homo habilis, in Africa, about 2.6 million years ago, and are typically called Oldowan Tradition.
The next major leap forward originated in Africa about 1.4 million years ago, with the Acheulean tradition of biface reduction and the famous Acheulean handaxe spread out into the world with the movement of H. erectus.
Levallois and Stone Making
The next broad leap forward recognized in stone tool technology was the Levallois technique, a stone tool making process that involved a planned and sequenced pattern of removing stone flakes from a prepared core (called bifacial reduction sequence). Traditionally, Levallois was considered an invention of archaic modern humans about 300,000 years ago, thought to be spread outside of Africa with the spread of humans.
However, recent investigations at the site of Nor Geghi in Armenia (Adler et al. 2014) recovered evidence for an obsidian stone tool assemblage with Levallois characteristics firmly dated to Marine Isotope Stage 9e, about 330,000-350,000 years ago, earlier than the presumed human exit from Africa. This discovery, in combination with other similarly dated discoveries throughout Europe and Asia, suggests that the technological development of the Levallois technique was not a single invention, but rather a logical outgrowth of the well-established Acheulean biface tradition.
Grahame Clark's Lithic Modes
Scholars have wrestled with identifying a progression of stone tool technology since the 'Stone Age' was first proposed by C.J. Thomsen back in the early 19th century. Cambridge archaeologist Grahame Clark, [1907-1995] came up with a workable system in 1969, when he published a progressive 'mode' of tool types, a classification system that is still in use today.
- Mode 1: Pebble cores and flake tools, early Lower Paleolithic, Chellean, Tayacian, Clactonian, Oldowan
- Mode 2: Large bifacial cutting tools made from flakes and cores such as Acheulean handaxes, cleavers, and picks, later Lower Paleolithic, Abbevillian, Acheulean. Developed in Africa, ~1.75 million years ago and spread into Eurasia with H. erectus about 900,000 years ago.
- Mode 3: Flake tools struck from prepared cores, with an overlapping sequence of flake removal (sometimes referred to as façonnage) system - including the Levallois technology, Middle Paleolithic, Levallois, Mousterian, arose during the Late Acheulean at the onset of the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic, about 300,000 years ago.
- Mode 4: Punch-struck prismatic blades retouched into various specialized forms such as endscrapers, burins, backed blades and points, Upper Paleolithic, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean
- Mode 5: Retouched microliths and other retouched components of composite tools, Later Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic, Magdalenian, Azilian, Maglemosian, Sauveterrian, Tardenoisan
John Shea: Modes A through I
John J. Shea (2013, 2014, 2016), arguing that long-standing named stone tool industries are proving obstacles to understanding evolutionary relationships among Pleistocene hominids, has proposed a more nuanced set of lithic modes. Shea's matrix has yet to be broadly adopted, but in my opinion, it is an enlightening way to think about the progression of the complexity of stone tool making.
- Mode A: Stone percussors; pebbles, cobbles or rock fragments which have been damaged by repeated percussion. Hammerstones, pestles, anvils
- Mode B: Bipolar cores; rock fragments which have been broken by setting the core on a hard surface and striking it with a hammerstone
- Mode C: Pebble cores / non-hierarchical cores; rock fragments from which flakes have been removed by percussion
- Mode D: Retouched flakes; flakes that have had a series of cone and bending fractures removed from their edges; includes retouched cutting-edge flakes (D1), backed/truncated flakes (D2), burins (D3), and retouched microliths (D4)
- Mode E: Elongated core tools; roughly symmetrically worked objects that are longer than wide, known as 'bifaces', and include large cutting tools (<10 cm in length) such as Acheulean handaxes and picks (E1), thinned bifaces (E2); bifacial core tools with notches such as tanged points (E3), celts (E4)
- Mode F: Bifacial hierarchical cores; a clear relationship between the first and subsequent fractures, includes preferential bifacial hierarchical cores, with at least one flake detached (F1) and recurrent, which includes façonnage stoneworking (F2)
- Mode G: Unifacial hierarchical cores; with a roughly planar striking platform at a right angle to the flake release surface; including platform cores (G1) and blade cores (G2)
- Mode H: Edge-ground tools; tools in which the edge was created by grinding and polishing, celts, knives, adzes, etc
- Mode I: Groundstone tools; made by cycles of percussion and abrasion
Sources
Adler DS, Wilkinson KN, Blockley SM, Mark DF, Pinhasi R, Schmidt-Magee BA, Nahapetyan S, Mallol D, Berna F, Glauberman PJ et al. 2014. Early Levallois technology and the Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition in the Southern Caucasus. Science 345(6204):1609-1613.
Stone Tools Made By Early Manual
Clark, G. 1969. World Prehistory: A New Synthesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shea, John J. 'Lithic Modes A–I: A New Framework for Describing Global-Scale Variation in Stone Tool Technology Illustrated with Evidence from the East Mediterranean Levant.' Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Volume 20, Issue 1, SpringerLink, March 2013.
Shea JJ. 2014. Sink the Mousterian? Named stone tool industries (NASTIES) as obstacles to investigating hominin evolutionary relationships in the Later Middle Paleolithic Levant.Quaternary International 350(0):169-179.
Shea JJ. 2016. Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences among Technological Primates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.