Tools and materials
What Technology Is and How Its History Can Be Studied
Technology is more than gadgets: it involves techniques, knowledge, and social organization. See how historians study it and where the evidence runs out.
Technology area
Tools and materials
All technical history begins with objects that extend the body: flakes of stone, braided fibers, pottery, cast metals. This area gathers the articles on tools and materials, the processes of extraction and transformation, and the way each new material opened possibilities the previous one could not offer.
Articles
Tools and materials
The First Tools and the Transformation of Human Life
The oldest known stone tools are more than 2.5 million years old and predate Homo sapiens. See how they were made and what the evidence can and cannot tell us.
Tools and materials
Metallurgy and the Mastery of New Materials
From copper smelting in southeastern Europe to iron furnaces on several continents, metallurgy gave tools, weapons and coins a material that could be melted and reshaped.
Milestones
- c. 2.6 million years ago
Chipped-stone tools
Sets of flakes and cores associated with the so-called Oldowan industry appear in East Africa. Even older finds are debated.
Read: First tools → - c. 5th millennium BCE
Smelted copper
Evidence of copper smelting appears at sites in the Near East and Europe. Dates and origins remain debated.
Read: Metallurgy →