The Ancient Stone Age

The term Paleolithic is composed of the Greek words' paleos', ancient, and 'lithos', stone, and designates the Ancient Stone Age. It is the chronologically oldest phase of human history, that is, the one in which the first certain attestations of artifacts produced by man appear.

The Paleolithic has in turn been divided into three periods: the Lower Paleolithic (in which, for the sake of simplicity, we also understand the Archaeolithic, the phase that covers the chronological arc that goes from 2.5 to 1 million years ago), the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic.

The actual beginning of the Lower Paleolithic is conventionally dated around 1 million years ago and is characterized by the appearance of a new species belonging to the genus' Homo ': 'Homo erectus'. The main findings took place in Asia, Africa and Europe.

Also in the Lower Paleolithic period, another species appears, fundamental in the evolutionary history of man: “Homo sapiens”, datable between 0.5 and 0.12 million years. A dual evolutionary development of “Homo sapiens” seems sustainable: the European one and the African one. From this second evolutionary branch, modern man would have been born.

However, it must be specified that “paleoanthropology”, the science that deals with the study of the oldest phases of human history (starting with the problem of the origin of man) is a discipline in continuous evolution. Not infrequently, the discovery of a single new fossil attributable to an “unknown” hominid (that is, not relevant to any of the species already known) may be sufficient to revolutionize the entire structure of the evolutionary tree developed up to that moment by scholars.

Update

24/10/2023 - 18:36