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The Neolithic, (Greek neos=new, lithos=stone, or "New Stone Age") is traditionally the last part of the stone age. The term was invented by John Lubbock in 1865 as a refinement of the three-age system. It followed Pleistocene epipalaeolithic and early Holocene Mesolithic cultures with the start of farming and ended when metal tools came into widespread use in the Copper Age (chalcolithic), Bronze Age or Iron Age, depending on geographical region. Thus "Neolithic" is not a time-frame, but a state of culture. The term "Neolithic" is associated with a suite of specific behavioural characteristics including the growing of crops and the use of domesticated animals. From ca. 9000 to 7000 BC this was limited to keeping sheep and goats, but by ca. 7000 BC it included cattle, cultivation of domesticated plants, permanently or semi-permanently inhabited settlements and the use of pottery and ground-stone tools rather than flaked ones. Again, the adoption of these technologies was not uniform and varied from region to region. Japanese societies used pottery in the Mesolithic for example. |
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Neolithic" |
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