The Lower Paleolithic or Palaeolithic refers to the earliest period of human existence, the first of the three Paleolithic (Stone Age) periods. It spans the time from around 4 million years ago when the first hominids appear in the archaeological record, to around 120,000 years ago when important evolutionary and technological changes ushered in the Middle Palaeolithic.
The earliest hominids, known as australopithecines personified by the famous find of Lucy in Ethiopia were not advanced tool users and were likely to have been common prey for larger animals. Sometime before 3,000,000 years ago the first fossils that can be called Homo appear in the archaeological record. They may have evolved from the australopithecines or come from another genetic branch of the primates
Homo habilis remains, such as those from at Olduvai Gorge, are much more recognisable as humans. Stone tool use was developed by these people around 2.5 million years ago before they were replaced by homo erectus about 1.5 million years ago. Homo habilis used Oldowan tools and had learnt to control fire to support the hunter gatherer method of subsistence.
Throughout the Palaeolithic, humans were hunters, fishers, and gatherers; in fact for the greater part of the LowerPalaeolithic, early humans (Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus) were probably scavengers rather than hunters.
In the LowerPalaeolithic, simple windbreaks or crude huts (as in the sand dunes at Terra Amata in Nice, southern France) were erected, but by the Upper Palaeolithic there is evidence for light tents, and—in central and eastern Europe—for sophisticated huts made of hundreds of mammoth bones.
It is in the Upper Palaeolithic that burial becomes more elaborate (the world's oldest known cremation, at Lake Mungo, Australia, dates back to 26,000 years ago), with red ochre, grave goods, and in some cases hundreds of beads which were probably attached to clothing, as well as other forms of ornamentation, and tools.
A large number of the artifacts were assigned to the Palaeolithic, specifically to the Middle Palaeolithic (MP), and are broadly similar to the artifacts found elsewhere in Albania, for instance at Xara near Butrint (Korkuti 1983).
The LowerPalaeolithic from Southwest Asia to Europe is represented both by assemblages with bifaces (handaxes) and by core-chopper groups.
The reason or reasons for the lack of human use of Mallakastra in the periods before the Middle Palaeolithic, between the MP and the Mesolithic, and after the Mesolithic period are at this stage of our research entirely unknown, and will be the principal object of our continuing study of the lithics from the region.
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