Stone tools: Did you mean...?

A board showing the tools commonly used by stone masons in the Middle Ages in Europe. On display at Guédelon castle in Treigny, Burgundy, France.

The Palaeolithic ('Old Stone Age') makes up the earliest chunk of the Stone Age – the large swathe of time during which hominins used stone to make tools – and ranges from the first known tool use roughly 2,6 million years ago to the end...

The Aztec Sun Stone (or Calendar Stone) depicts the five consecutive worlds of the sun from Aztec mythology. The stone is not, therefore, in any sense a functioning calendar, but rather it is an elaborately carved solar disk, which for the...

The Rosetta Stone is an incomplete grey and pink granodiorite stela dating from 196 BCE which presents a priestly decree concerning King Ptolemy V of Egypt. The text is in three different versions: Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, a fact...

Hunter-gatherer societies are – true to their astoundingly descriptive name – cultures in which human beings obtain their food by hunting, fishing, scavenging, and gathering wild plants and other edibles. Although there are still groups of...

Drawings of stone tools belonging to the Middle Palaeolithic (sometimes called 'Mousterian') industries, found from Europe and the Near East to Africa between approximately 250,000 and 30,000 years ago. It is associated with archaic homo...

Right outside the cities of Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg in South-East Norway, there are two archaeological, intriguing and beautiful sites, the Hunnfelt, a monument consisting of several stone circles and burial sites, and the Begbyfelt, a...

Homo rudolfensis is an early human species that lived in East Africa between c. 2.5 and 1.8 million years ago. It is known from a handful of skull, jaw and teeth fragments that remind alternatingly of Homo or of Australopithecus and that...

A board showing the carpentry tools commonly used in the Middle Ages in Europe. On display at Guédelon castle in Treigny, Burgundy, France.

These tool were probably used for cutting and chopping. Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass and is not local to Mesopotamia. It was most likely imported from modern Afghanistan. These tools were found at Tell Shemshara (modern...