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The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 6000 BCE and 2000 BCE with the advent of metalworking.〔http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/august/oldest-tool-use-and-meat-eating-revealed75831.html〕 Stone Age artifacts include tools used by modern humans and by their predecessor species in the genus ''Homo'', and possibly by the earlier partly contemporaneous genera ''Australopithecus'' and ''Paranthropus''. Bone tools were used during this period as well but are rarely preserved in the archaeological record. The Stone Age is further subdivided by the types of stone tools in use. The Stone Age is the first of the three-age system of archaeology, which divides human technological prehistory into three periods: * The Stone Age * The Bronze Age * The Iron Age ==Historical significance== The Stone Age is contemporaneous with the evolution of the genus ''Homo'', the only exception possibly being at the very beginning, when species prior to ''Homo'' may have manufactured tools. According to the age and location of the current evidence, the cradle of the genus is the East African Rift System, especially toward the north in Ethiopia, where it is bordered by grasslands. The closest relative among the other living Primates, the genus ''Pan'', represents a branch that continued on in the deep forest, where the primates evolved. The rift served as a conduit for movement into southern Africa and also north down the Nile into North Africa and through the continuation of the rift in the Levant to the vast grasslands of Asia. Starting from about 3 million years ago (mya) a single biome established itself from South Africa through the rift, North Africa, and across Asia to modern China, which has been called "transcontinental 'savannahstan'" recently. Starting in the grasslands of the rift, ''Homo erectus'', the predecessor of modern humans, found an ecological niche as a tool-maker and developed a dependence on it, becoming a "tool equipped savanna dweller." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Stone Age」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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