Paleolithic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Relating to the earliest period of the Stone Age, characterized by the use of crude chipped stone tools and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle
2. the earliest division of the Stone Age marked by the development and use of chipped stone implements and nomadic hunting-and-gathering societies
3. the ancient cultural period preceding the Neolithic, distinguished by unpolished stone tools and subsistence through foraging and hunting rather than agriculture

Etymology: The term was coined in the 1860s by the English archaeologist John Lubbock, who needed a name for the earliest stone-tool era that had been discovered beneath the Neolithic layers. "Paleolithic" fuses two Greek elements: "palaios," meaning "old" or "ancient," and "lithos," meaning "stone." The "paleo-" part traces back to an Ancient Greek word "palai," meaning "long ago," which itself belongs to a much older Indo-European family of words for the distant past. The construction is a simple compound. The Greek adjective "palaiós" was joined to "-lithic," the English adjective ending that describes things made of or relating to stone, so the word literally means "of old stone." That plainness is what makes it useful: the name describes the material record rather than any culture's own label for itself, which is why archaeologists could apply it to people who never had a word for their own era.

Synonyms: prehistoric, ancient, stone age, old, primitive

Antonyms: modern, contemporary, recent, new, current