Description
Origin : North-West Sahara
Geological era : Neolithic
Age : 10,000 years ago
Size : 0.5 gr - mm 13 x 12 x 3
Arrowhead Flint Stone Bifacial 13 x 12 x 3 gr 0.5 Human Prehistoric Lithic Artifacts Neolithic Neozoic Quaternary Holocene Tools Worked Stones Polished Pebbles Stone Age Collecting Paleoethnology Museum.
Only a piece, as in photo.
Anthropic evidence of the Lithic Industry dating back to the earliest traces of ancient human settlements on the border between Morocco and Algeria, with artifacts such as arrowheads and cave drawings, before the appearance of the region would change abruptly about 10,000 years ago, when the Sahara began to advance, making these areas uninhabitable.
You can find in our Equipment Catalog plasticine, cardboard containers and various transparent plexiglas boxes to fiss or insert your fossils.
Lithic Industry (from the ancient Greek lithos, «stone») is an expression used in paleethnology, in the strict sense, to indicate the set of stone objects made by man, starting from intentionally modified pebbles, such as tools finished weapons, weapons and all the by-products linked to their manufacture.
In a broader sense, it is used to collectively indicate the type of tools, the way in which they were made and the materials used.
The lithic industries were used to define the different periods that marked Prehistory. For the most ancient periods (Lower and Middle Paleolithic) the lithic artefacts constitute the essential defining elements for the chronological position of the various periodisations and for possible datings, while for more recent periods, the creations of the stone industry are accompanied, starting from the Upper Paleolithic, the bone artefacts, and from the Neolithic, the ceramic ones.
Due to the difficulty of preserving organic materials (such as bones, wood, leather) over time, lithic artefacts are often the only evidence of prehistoric material culture to have survived into modern times.
Flint is a sedimentary rock composed almost exclusively of silica.
Silica (or even silicic anhydride, IUPAC silicon dioxide), in turn, is a compound of Silicon (Symbol: Si, one of the 92 elements of the universe) whose chemical formula is SiO2.
This rock is formed in two ways:
- for the accumulation of remains of shell-like or siliceous skeleton organisms such as radiolarians, diatoms, silicoflagellates and sponges, taking the name of radiolarite or diatomite.
- by segregation and accumulation of silica, coming from terrigenous and carbonate rocks.
Flint tends to concentrate on extremely compact lenses that are almost impervious to atmospheric agents, peculiarities which, together with the relative abundance, hardness and concoid fracture made it the main material of the first lithic industries.
The flints worked are a fundamental testimony of the first human settlements, the working techniques used to create them (chipping) allow to identify different periods of prehistory. Use continued, then, until relatively recently. In the XVII century, knives with the blade of this material, which was also used for the tips of the arrows, were still used, especially among the peoples of the Americas.
However, it is necessary to distinguish worked flint from its natural splinters, called eolites.
Flint was also fundamental for the functioning of the manual flintlocks (in Europe and in the Mediterranean basin at least since the early Middle Ages) and, from the XVII to the XIX century, also to spark the accusing mechanisms of fire, until the advent of "percussion" weapons.