Knowra Paleolithic Paleolithic The Paleolithic is the prehistoric era from the earliest known stone-toolmaking to the spread of agriculture and settled life. Its people generally lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering.
Stone tool : A tool made by shaping or using stone, often to cut, scrape, pound, or dig. Stone tools give the Paleolithic its name and provide its main archaeological evidence.
Oldowan : An early stone-tool industry marked by simple flakes and cores, known from Africa and beyond. Oldowan tools represent an early technological tradition within the Paleolithic.
Lomekwi 3 : An archaeological site in Kenya with stone tools dated to about 3.3 million years ago. Its tools are among the oldest known and push back evidence for stone-toolmaking.
Chauvet Cave : A cave in southern France containing figurative paintings made roughly 36,000 years ago. Its paintings preserve a striking example of Upper Paleolithic image-making.
Cognitive revolution : A proposed rapid emergence of complex symbolic behavior and modern cognition in human prehistory. The hypothesis offers one explanation for late Paleolithic artistic and symbolic evidence.
Hunter-gatherer : A person or community that obtains food by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild resources. For most of the era, subsistence depended on wild foods rather than farming.
Acheulean : A stone-tool industry known especially for bifacial hand axes and cleavers. Acheulean hand axes show the long-running development of Paleolithic toolmaking.
Gona, Ethiopia : An Ethiopian archaeological area with stone tools dated to about 2.6 million years ago. Gona preserves some of the earliest widely accepted evidence of stone-tool production.
Lascaux : A cave complex in southwestern France famous for its Upper Paleolithic paintings. Its animal images show the sophistication of late Paleolithic visual art.
Out of Africa theory : The theory that modern humans originated in Africa and later dispersed across the world. Paleolithic migrations are central to reconstructing how humans populated other regions.
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