Technology in the ancient world

The beginnings—Stone Age technology (to c. 3000 BC)

The identification of the history of technology with the history of manlike species does not help in fixing a precise point for its origin, because the estimates of prehistorians and anthropologists concerning the emergence of human species vary so widely. Animals occasionally use natural tools such as sticks or stones, and the creature that became man doubtless did the same for hundreds of millennia before the first giant step of fashioning his own tools. Even then it was an interminable time before he put such tool making on a regular basis, and still more eons passed as he arrived at the successive stages of standardizing his simple stone choppers and ponders and of manufacturing them—that is, providing sites and assigning specialists to the work. A degree of specialization in tool making was achieved by the time of Neanderthal man (70,000 BC); more advanced tools, requiring assemblage of head and haft, were produced by Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens (perhaps as early as 35,000 BC), while the application of mechanical principles was achieved by pottery-making Neolithic man (6000 BC) and by Metal Age man (about 3000 BC).