Kebaran culture (Levant and Sinai) microliths 22,000 – 18,000 years ago (public domain image)
TOP 10 STONE AGES / STONE AGE ICEBERG (SPECIAL MENTION)
But wait – there’s more!
There are my twenty special mentions I have for my Top 10 Stone Ages
You know the drill – just like the top ten itself, it’s one of my mostly tongue-in-cheek top ten lists where I look at a subject which has a fundamental continuity or unity, but which can also be broken up into distinct parts or perspectives. Alternatively, it’s just more and deeper layers in my Stone Age iceberg meme.
It’s also one of my shallow dip top ten lists– with a few lines or so for each entry – than my deep dive top ten lists on other subjects.
So here goes…
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
(1) HOMININ STONE AGE
It’s striking to think that most of the period usually identified as the Stone Age – 3 million years or so – is not for our own hominin species of homo sapiens but for preceding or other hominin species. And by most, I mean 90% – anatomically modern homo sapiens only pops up in the last 10% or so and behaviourally modern homo sapiens even more recently.
You know, there’s enough hominins for their own top ten…
(2) NEANDERTHAL STONE AGE
Everyone’s favorite hominin other than homo sapiens – and viicon of the Stone Age, so they deserve their own Stone Age
(3) HOMO SAPIENS STONE AGE – BEHAVIOURAL MODERNITY
There we are.
Behavioural modernity has its own Wikipedia article, but no settled range of time for it – anywhere from 40-50,000 years ago to 150,000 years ago
(4) INDUSTRIAL STONE AGE – LITHIC TECHNOLOGY
No, we’re not talking Fred Flintstone’s job at Slate Rock and Gravel Company (as a bronto crane operator)…but surprisingly not far from it. Apparently, you didn’t just pick up any stone to make it the Stone Age – some stones are better than others and there were “industrial” sites for stone tools at locations of ideal stones, although quarry is probably a better term than factory.
Lithic technology has its own Wikipedia article
(5) SPEAR STONE AGE
Paleolithic salesman: (Slaps tip of spear) “This baby can fit so many megafauna extinctions into it”.
Although spears go way back, probably at least in the form of sharpened sticks – apparently chimpanzees have been observed to use sticks as spears – the development and use of spears with stone heads or points – always seemed something of a game changer to me, particularly when thrown (and when spear throwers like an atlatl were developed and used to add range and speed).
You know, like the Paleolithic equivalent of gunpowder empires, except against megafauna. Just think – we hunted the mammoth to extinction with spears.
I mean, I wouldn’t want to face off a sabertooth tiger or cave bear with a few chipped rocks, unless, you know, there was like a hundred of us pelting it with rocks or ideally dropping rocks on it from above. Add in a spear (and perhaps something like fire) and…oh, who am I kidding, I’d still want a hundred of us hurling spears from a safe distance. Or better yet, a spear gun.
(6) BOW STONE AGE
Like the spear but even more so as a Stone Age game-changing ranged projectile weapon. Apparently the first evidence of bows or arrows goes back to 60-70,000 years ago or so – and their use had spread everywhere but Australia and most of Oceania by the end of the Paleolithic.
(7) CLOTHED STONE AGE
I’d like to see a demarcation between the Naked Stone Age and the Clothed Stone Age.
Interestingly, such a demarcation is not too different from that between the Paleolithic and Neolithic, although the Naked Stone Age doesn’t quite go so long as the full Paleolithic, wrapping up (heh) towards the end of the Middle Paleolithic.
It always strikes me how recently humans developed and used clothing, with the weight of opinion seeming to be approximately 100,000 years ago, and before that the Stone Age was gloriously naked, albeit hairier.
This was the intuitive truth behind the Biblical Garden of Eden. How far we have fallen from our nude Eden!
(8) DOG STONE AGE
I like dogs so why not have a Dog Stone Age?
But seriously, the domestication of dogs is something of a key transition in the Stone Age, particularly towards the domestication of animals for agriculture. The dog was the first animal and only large carnivore to be domesticated, occurring at some time towards the end of the Paleolithic (usually opined at an upper limit of 20-40,000 years ago), reflecting its usefulness for human hunter-gatherers prior to agriculture.
(9) CERAMIC STONE AGE
The development and use of pottery was another key transition in the Stone Age, usually associated with the Neolithic but occurring as early as the Upper Paleolithic. Pottery is also iconic of archaeology – I tend to quip archaeology is mostly dusting off broken pieces of pottery as opposed to Indiana Jones.
Of course, from our modern perspective, we tend to see pottery as decorative or a novelty, because we have since moved on to other materials for storage and cookware (even where the importance of it persists in the surname Potter).
(10) WHEELED STONE AGE
The iconic invention of prehistoric humanity, so much so that the phrase reinventing the wheel has become proverbial – albeit the Wheeled Stone Age is pretty much a few seconds before midnight of the Stone Age and perhaps more accurately as part of the transition to the Bronze Age, if not indeed in the Bronze Age itself.
We tend to think of the wheel for wheeled vehicles, but it also overlaps with the previous entry in the development and use of the potter’s wheel.
(11) MEGAFAUNA EXTINCTION STONE AGE
The mammoth is dead – and we killed it!
Well, the jury’s still out on the cause of mass megafauna extinction – also termed the late Pleistocene extinctions – between human impact and climate change, although the consensus seems to support “at least a contributory role of humans in the extinctions”.
I mean, they do tend to coincide with the patterns of early human migration, particularly in the Americas and Australasia, but it was like that when we got here, honest!
(12) ROCK & CAVE ART STONE AGE
Yes, I’m an Altamira and Lascaux cave art fanboy – as I am of the Sorcerer in the Cave of the Trois-Freres, particularly as drawn by Henri Breuil. All hail the Horned God!
Cave and rock art comprise perhaps the most vivid visual icons of the Stone Age – and our best glimpses into the minds of our Stone Age forebears.
Speaking of the Sorcerer…
(13) SHAMANIC STONE AGE
There are different viewpoints of Stone Age religion or religious beliefs, but one of the two predominant viewpoints is that the Stone Age was fundamentally shamanic. That viewpoint underlies Weston La Barre’s The Ghost Dance, as well as Peter Watson’s The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New. The latter essentially proposes that the native Americans remained locked into the shamanic beliefs and mindset they brought with them from Siberia – reinforced by the rigors of American geography and the larger number of psychedelic plants.
As for the other predominant viewpoint of Stone Age religion…
Photograph by Matthias Kabel for Wikipedia “Venus von Willendorf” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(14) MATRIARCHAL STONE AGE
Stone Age Venus! She is the goddess and this is her body!
You don’t get much more of a visual icon of prehistoric matriarchy and mother goddess worship than the famed Venus of Willendorf. Paleolithic – more like Paleolithicc, amirite?
Ironically, despite the prolific nature of Paleolithic Venus figurines, it is the Neolithic that tends to be associated with mother goddess worship or goddess-centric religions, typically overlapping with agricultural fertility, at least in popular culture – albeit an association highly contested within archaeology and anthropology.
Which brings me to…
(15) LONGHOUSE STONE AGE
The idea of the communal dwelling or longhouse, originating in the Neolithic albeit with a long history after that – and coopted in contemporary online discourse to signify oppressive matriarchal or gynocentric social conformity.
X-TIER (WILD TIER)
(16) STONED AGE
And now, as usual towards the end of special mentions, we come to my weirder and wilder entries – well, weirder and wilder than the Matriarchal Stone Age and the longhouse.
I just couldn’t resist the obvious gag of the Stoned Age, but it’s more than just a gag – it’s a reference to the Stoned Ape theory of Terrence McKenna, which indeed involved human prehistory in the Stone Age. Hence – the Stoned Age.
(17) PALEO DIET
“Meat’s back on the menu, boys!”
Another obvious entry suggested by the contemporary paleo diet, which purports to be a diet based on the model of our Paleolithic ancestors as the ideal diet for health – so no Neolithic grains or milk but sadly seems to opt out of the cannibalism theorized to occur during the Paleolithic. Not to mention all the other crap that we turn up our noses at or throw out today…
(18) STONEPUNK
Yabba dabba doo!
Yes, it’s the Flintstones – meet the Flintstones, they’re your modern Stone Age family…
But seriously, the Flintstones is classic stonepunk – one of the many ‘punk’ variants of fantasy or SF named after cyberpunk, albeit the version most likely to be played for laughs. Not to mention comedic anachronism, not least humans living alongside dinosaurs. Which I suppose would make some versions of Young Earth Creationism….stonepunk?
Stonepunk focuses on pre-technological developments in prehistoric times, its juxtapositions of the modern world with the primitive, and the effects of an early form of “advanced” technology on society
More broadly, I would extend this entry to more serious (or seriously researched) works set in prehistory, such as the Clan of the Cave Bear books (and film).
(19) STONE AGE HERBALIST
Well, I can’t have Stone Age special mentions without a shout-out to the Stone Age Herbalist account on X – bringing the Stone Age to our own age.
(20) EROTIC STONE AGE
Bow-chicka-wow-wow – my usual preference is to reserve my final or twentieth special mention for a kinkier or kinkiest entry. Well, there wasn’t much else to do at night in the Stone Age…you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals.
But seriously, the Stone Age s€x is pretty much the focus of study for evolutionary psychology.
