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Paleolithic Tools
The Paleolithic age of man stretches far into the past. Paleolithic in Greek means "old stone" and the chipped or flaked stone tools from this era represent some of man's earliest technology. According to Dr. R. Quinlan of Washington State University, chipped stone tool technology took a new direction about 1.5 million years ago.
At this time a new kind of tool began to be used. Homo ergaster and Homo erectus started making bifacial hand axes. These pear-shaped tools were chipped on both sides to produce sharp edges for chopping and slicing.
These tools are made by holding a flint or other silicate stone cobble and using a hammer stone to chip off flakes in one direction on one side and in the opposite direction on the other. This tool would endure basically unchanged for nearly a million years.
Middle and Upper Stone Age Tools
Around three hundred thousand years ago, early man had developed an array of chipped stone tools used in many different ways. Small scrapers were used to remove fat and smooth animal hides.
According to University of Oslo, Norway, Middle Paleolithic man carefully shaped stone cores to produce different tools. Stone borer drills, burins for shaping wood, bone and stone and sharp stone knives joined the hand axes and spear points in man's tool kit during this age.
These tools and others similar to them were utilized by Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens' people. The Mousterian people of Europe 40,000 years ago were masterful stone tool craftsmen.
Neolithic Stone Tools
In the North America of 13,000 years ago as the great ice sheets retreated, visitors from Siberia came to take up residence in a new world. These nomadic hunters soon filled the continent and they needed better tools to hunt the giant animals they found here.
The Clovis people made chipped stone points like none ever seen before. Long fluted spear points and chipped stone knives were flaked from chert, quartz and obsidian and used to hunt mammoth, mastodons and other giant prey. Mammoth fossils have been found with Clovis tools and points indicating places where the Clovis killed and butchered the animals.
By 12,000 years ago most of the giant animals in North America were gone and evidence of the Clovis people disappears as well. University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear is studying evidence at Clovis sites in South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia that indicates that the mammoth and their Clovis hunters may have all died from a comet that impacted over North America.