galerie-lithique

The pebble culture: The very first stone tools were probably naturally broken, sharp-edged rocks that were casually picked up, used and discarded. There is probably no way that we will ever know how long this type of behavior persisted in hominid prehistory. At some point, however, early hominids began purposely selecting specific raw materials, and making their own sharp-edged stone tools. The earliest manifestation of this behavior has been called the Pebble Tool Tradition, because it entailed the sharpening of pebbles and small cobbles through the bifacial (two-sided) removal of flakes. Although it was thought for years that the sharpened pebbles were the desired end product; new evidence from the analysis of microscopic wear patterns on the flakes that had been considered waste products indicates that the flakes may actually have been the tools, used for general purpose cutting.

These tools were more sophisticated in their conception and construction and much more effective than the tools of the peeble industry they succeeded. Diverse materials and difficult techniques were involved in this industry which had not been seen before this period, and demonstrated that the hominids that innovated the tools were capable of a degree of forthought that can fairly be associated with the term, "human". These tools were made of stone with good fracture characteristics such as chalcedony, jasper, flint, and quartzite. Peeble tools were used by efficient scavengers, who were still preyed upon frequently by larger animals and often bewildered by their environment. Adversely, Acheulean tools gave their masters the ability to hunt and defend themselves successfully and gave them the distinction of being equally as deadly as the greatest predators of the prehistoric Earth.

Tayacian is a term sometimes used to describe Lower and Middle Palaeolithic flake industries which lack handaxes, bifaces, and carefully retouched implements(notched tools, scrapers...). Originally the term was coined for the industries from the lower levels at La Micoque (Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, the Dordogne, France), but it has subsequently been applied to industries over a wide geographical and chronological range. The layers which probably belong to the penultimate glacial period were assigned to a Tayacian culture. The culture is also described as a primitive flake-tool tradition of Israel, also, believed to be essentially a smaller edition of the Clactonian industry.

The mousterian is a name given by archaeologists to a style of predominantly flint tools(or industry) associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis and dating to the Middle Paleolithic, the middle part of the Old Stone Age. It was named after the type site of Le Moustier, a rock shelter in theDordogne region of France. Similar flintwork has been found all over unglaciated Europe and also theNear East and North Africa. Handaxes, racloirs and points constitute the industry; sometimes a Levallois technique or another prepared-core technique was employed in making the flint flakes.Mousterian tools were made by Neanderthals and date from between 300,000 BP and 30,000 BP. In Northern Africa and the Near East they were also produced by anatomically modern humans. In the Levant for example, assemblages produced by Neanderthals are indistinguishable from those produced by modern humans. Mousterian technology is important because it took over the job of teeth in the front, and also because there was a reduction of robustness of some of the facial features. The use of Mousterian technology minimized pressure on the teeth and as a result the front teeth were no longer needed for environmental manipulation.