Saturday, May 2, 2009

Man's most enduring technology: chipped flint [update]

When Homo sapiens appeared on the scene, the genus Homo had long been using stone tools... but I'll start with Homo sapiens anyway.

H. sapiens first appears about 250,000 years ago.
His tools were made of chipped flint.
Up until the Bronze Age (ca 6000 years ago), men's tools were made of chipped flint.

For 97.6% of our time on earth, our dominant technology was chipped flint.

update: commenter PM Prescott points out that chipped flint characterized the Paleolithic period which ended about 12,000 years ago.
So chipped flint was our dominant technology for only 95.2% of our time on earth.

1 comment:

  1. Sorry, that's the paleolithic era, the neolithic (or new stone age) use ground stone tools not chipped. With grinding you can re-sharpen the edge.

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