Stone Age
Stone Age names 4 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Stone Age or AGE OF STONE 101 sociated with the existing fauna
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or AGE OF STONE 101 sociated with the existing fauna. The included both inhumation and cremation, palæolithic stone implements are distinguished as a class from the neolithic by their greater rudeness of form, and by the facts that they are exclusively of flint and have been manufactured by chipping only. The neolithic stone implements on the other hand are of finer forms, often highly polished, and made of many varieties of stone besides flint. The palæolithic implements of flint are mostly so rude that it is impossible to apply to them names indicative of specific use. Those from the river gravels are chiefly flakes, trimmed and untrimmed, for cutting and scraping; pointed implements, some almond-shaped companying these burials, in Britain at or tongue-shaped; and more obtusely pointed implements, with rounded and often undressed butts. There is also a series of scraper-like implements, and another of oval sharp-rimmed implements, which are more carefully finished than most of the other varieties. The flint implements from the caves present a greater variety of form. They are generally characterized by secondary working, and are therefore much more carefully finished, often in many respects approaching closely to neolithic types. From the caves also come a series of implements of bone and of carvings on bone which have excited much astonishment on account of the extraordinary contrast between their artistic character and the extreme rudeness of many of the implements of stone with which they are associated. These bone implements consist of well-made needles, borers, javelin or harpoon points barbed on one or both sides, and implements of reindeer horn of unknown use, which are usually carved in relief or ornamented with incised representations of animals, and occasionally of human figures. The animals, as for instance a group of reindeer from the cave of La Madelaine, Dordogne, are drawn with wonderful faithfulness, freedom, and spirit. The neolithic stone implements consist of axes and axe hammers, knives, daggers, spear and arrow heads, saws, chisels, borers, and scrapers. The axes and axe hammers are made of many varieties of stone besides flint. Some of the finer polished axes are of jade and fibrolite. Most of the other implements were made only of flint and generally finished by chipping, without being ground or polished. Some of the long Danish knives and daggers are marvels of dexterous workmanship, on account of the thinness of the blade and the straightness and keenness of the edge. The burial customs of the stone age the former being, however, the earlier method. No burials of the river drift period have yet been discovered. The cave dwellers of the stone age buried their dead in cavities of the rocks. From a comparison of the remains from such cave cemeteries in different localities it has been concluded that even at this early period Europe was already occupied by more than one race of men. The populations of the neolithic time deposited their dead, with or without previous cremation, in or on the floors of the chambers of dolmens, or great-chambered cairns. The sepulchral pottery acleast, is generally of a hard-baked darkcolored paste, and the ornamentation entirely composed of straight lines placed at various angles to each other. The implements found with these interments are mostly of the commoner kind, such as flint knives, scrapers, or str strikelights (used with a nodule of pyrites of iron), arrowheads, and more rarely axes and axe hammers of flint or polished stone. The neolithic inhabitants of North and Central Europe were not merely nomadic tribes subsisting on the products of the chase; they practiced agriculture, and possessed the common domestic animals we now possess. The presence in the refuse heaps of their sea coast settlements of the remains of deep-sea fishes shows that they must have possessed boats and fishing lines, as was also the case with the stone age inhabitants of the lake dwellings. The estimates that have been made of the antiquity of the stone age in Europe are necessarily various, but it has been considered that the the close of the neolithic period or the time when the use of stone began to be superseded by that of bronze in North Europe cannot have been much later than from 1000 to 1500 B. C. See LAKE DWELLINGS; STONEHENGE; ARCHEOLOGY.
Stone Age or AGE OF STONE 100 STONE AGE
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or AGE OF STONE 100 STONE AGE, or AGE OF STONE mained in their stone age to the 20th century. On the other hand, the populations of the European area, in portions of which there were successive centers of high culture and civilization from a very early period, had all emerged from their stone age, through the use of bronze, many centuries before the Christian era. The progress of early culture in Europe seems to have been from the South and East, N. and W., so that the emergence of the different populations from their age of stone was accomplished shores of the Mediterranean, they were contemporary with animals which are now either wholly or locally extinct, such as the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion, cave bear, and hyæna, the reindeer, musk ox, and urus. It is an open question to what extent this change of fauna implies a change of climate, but from the geological conditions in which the flint implements of the earliest types are found it is evident that, though extensive changes must have taken place since they were deposited in the river basins, PALÆOLITHIC NEOLITHIC 4 IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE much earlier in Southern and Eastern Europe than in the North and West. But while the stone age of different areas is thus not necessarily synchronous, it seems to be true of all European areas that this is the earliest condition in which man has appeared upon them. There are no data by which the period of the early stone-using populations of Europe can be defined, even approximately. But in England, Belgium, and France, and across the Continent to the they belong exclusively to the later deposits of the Quaternary period. The stone age implements of Europe have been divided into two classes-the palæolithic or older stone implements and the neolithic or newer stone implements. This is equivalent to dividing the stone age of Europe into two periods, earlier and later, as the palæolithic implements are found associated with the extinct and locally extinct fauna, while the neolithic implements are found as-
Stone Age or AGE OF STONE
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or AGE OF STONE, is a term used in archæology to denote the condition of a people using stone as the material for the cutting tools and weapons which, in a higher condition of culture, were made of metals. The exculture, pression "age," when used in this connection, is not therefore significant of fixed period in chronology, but ima plies merely the time, longer or shorter, earlier or later, during which the condition subsisted. The duration of such a condition must necessarily have varied from various causes in different areas, and chiefly in consequence of contact with higher degrees of culture. Populations placed in remote situations, and on that account remaining uninfluenced by such contact-like the islanders of the South Pacific and the Eskimos of the extreme North for instance-have re-
Stone Age . See Archaeology
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
. See Archaeology ; Age , etc.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 could only guess at chronology, reckoning that stone gave way to bronze in northern Europe "not much later than from 1000 to 1500 B.C." Willard Libby's radiocarbon method, published in 1949, replaced such estimates with measured dates: farming reached northern Europe around 4000 BC and the Nordic Bronze Age began about 1700 BC, while the flaked tools of the "palaeolithic" now stretch back some 2.6 million years, with contested claims for stone tools at Lomekwi in Kenya at 3.3 million. A Mesolithic stage has since been inserted between the two ages Collier's describes, and the cave art it praised for its "wonderful faithfulness" has been dated directly, Chauvet's paintings to roughly 36,000 years ago. The article's guess that Europe was "already occupied by more than one race of men" has been borne out in an unexpected way: ancient DNA, from the Neanderthal genome of 2010 onward, shows repeated migrations and interbreeding, including with the previously unknown Denisovans.
Written for this edition, 2026.