<Tr> <Td> ↓ Chalcolithic </Td> </Tr> <P> The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface . The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years and ended between 8700 BCE and 2000 BCE with the advent of metalworking . </P> <P> 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 . </P> <P> The Stone Age is the first of the three - age system of archaeology, which divides human technological prehistory into three periods: </P>

The age in which early humans made tools is called the