To understand the beginnings of technology, it is thus necessary to survey developments from the Old Stone Age through the New Stone Age down to the emergence of the first urban civilizations about 3000 bce. It is sometimes referred to as the Neolithic Revolution because the speed of technological innovation increased so greatly and human social and political organization underwent a corresponding increase in complexity. This period of transition, the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age, led eventually to a marked rise in population, to a growth in the size of communities, and to the beginnings of town life. Toward the end of the last ice age, some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, a few of the communities that were most favoured by geography and climate began to make the transition from the long period of Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, lifestyles to a more settled way of life depending on animal husbandry and agriculture. It is also reasonable to suppose that tribes moved out thence into the subtropical regions and eventually into the landmass of Eurasia, although their colonization of this region must have been severely limited by the successive periods of glaciation, which rendered large parts of it inhospitable and even uninhabitable, even though humankind has shown remarkable versatility in adapting to such unfavourable conditions. It is reasonable to suppose that most of these communities developed in tropical latitudes, especially in Africa, where climatic conditions are most favourable to a creature with such poor bodily protection as humans have. Earliest communitiesįor all except approximately the past 10,000 years, humans lived almost entirely in small nomadic communities dependent for survival on their skills in gathering food, hunting and fishing, and avoiding predators. A degree of specialization in toolmaking was achieved by the time of the Neanderthals (70,000 bce) more-advanced tools, requiring assemblage of head and haft, were produced by Cro-Magnons (perhaps as early as 35,000 bce) while the application of mechanical principles was achieved by pottery-making Neolithic (New Stone Age 6000 bce) and Metal Age peoples (about 3000 bce). Even then it was an interminable time before they put such toolmaking on a regular basis, and still more aeons passed as they arrived at the successive stages of standardizing their simple stone choppers and pounders and of manufacturing them-that is, providing sites and assigning specialists to the work. Animals occasionally use natural tools such as sticks or stones, and the creatures that became human doubtless did the same for hundreds of millennia before the first giant step of fashioning their own tools. The identification of the history of technology with the history of humanlike 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.
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