Period of Paleolithic

Paleolithic mean comes from the English word paleo, meaning “of pre-historic times,” and the Greek word lithos, meaning “stone.”

During the Paleolithic period (pre-15000 BC), primitive men, such as those now identified as the Pithecanthropus erectus, were little more advanced than the anthropoid ape. Paleolithic Age is an “Old Stone Age”, period when humans lived in bands and were hunters and gatherers.

The earliest signs of human aggression, in the form of traumas, come from the Paleolithic, but they are few, scattered and often uncertain. The oldest recorded case suggestive of interpersonal violence is a skeleton from Israel, dated to the Upper Paleolithic, which has perimortem injuries probably inflicted by a spear. The earliest evidence of injuries possibly caused by warfare is from Jebel Sahaba in Sudan.

The manner of combat as such primitives must have largely depended on empty handed fighting tactics augmented by such natural objects as sticks and stones.

Most primitive societies used projectile weapons, such as spears or bows, in formal battles, while melee weapons were used only to dispatch a wounded or a fleeing enemy. Advanced tactics and manoeuvres require discipline, training and leaders, so a simple line was often the only formation used in primitive battles.

More highly developed Pleistocene men, too, have been found by archaeological efforts. All these settlers employed instruments, such as hand-axes, which were made of unpolished stone and slightly tapered at one end (by chipping) against another stones. 
Period of Paleolithic

Paleolithic Era

One of our most appealing and persistent myths is that of the Golden Age, a time before the discovery of good and evil, when death and disease were unknown.

But scientific evidence – meager fragmentary and tantalizing though it often is – proves that disease is older than the human race.

Thus, understanding the pattern of disease and injury that afflicted our earliest ancestors requires the perspective of the paleopathologist.

Si Marc Armand Ruffer (1859-1917), one of the founders of paleopathology, defined it as the science o the disease that can be demonstrated in human and animal remains of ancient times.

Evidence from the study of fossils, stratigraphy, and molecular biology suggest that separation of the human line from that of the apes place in Africa some 5 million years ago.

It took several million years before large-brained, tool making modern human beings evolved.

Homo sapiens, the oldest human beings of morphologically modern character, appeared approximately 50,000 years ago.

The Paleolithic Era, or Old Stone Age, when the most important steps in cultural evolution occurred, coincides with geological epoch known as the Pleistocene, or Great Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 years ago with the last retreat of the glaciers.

Early humans were hunter gatherers, that are opportunistic omnivores, who learned to make tools, build shelters carry and share food and create uniquely human social structures.

Although Paleolithic technology is characterized by the manufacture of crude tools made of bone and chipped stones and the absence of pottery and metal objects, the people of this era produced the dramatic cave painting at Lascaux, France and Altamira, Spain.

Presumably, they also produced useful inventions that were fully biodegradable and left no traces in the fossil record.

Indeed, during the 19603 feminist challenged prevailing about the importance of hunting as a source of food among gatherers; the vegetables an small animals gathered by women probably constituted the more reliable component of the Paleolithic diet.

Moreover because women were often burdened by carrying infants, they probably invented disposable digging sticks and biodegradable bags or basket in which to carry and store food.
Paleolithic Era