Technology is the use of tools, which are objects that are not produced by the body of the animal that uses them. In a more restricted sense, tools are objects that have been modified from their natural state before use.

There are numerous examples of animal species using technology in the broad sense:

- Some birds use sticks to pry insects from holes in trees, and chimpanzees use sticks to remove termites from nests.

- Chimpanzees use rocks to crack nuts.

- Gorillas have been observed to use sticks to check the depth of water through which they wade.

Technology in the narrow sense has only developed within the human lineage.

The first evidence of the primate use of modified tools is the production of stone tools by Homo Habilis and/or related species. This was the beginning of the Paleolithic ("old stone") Age. The toolmakers, of the Oldowan technology phase (named for Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania), struck stones, removing flakes and creating sharp surfaces on one side of the remaining core (unifacial tools). These hominins may have used both the flakes and the cores as tools. Oldowan tools were also made by early Homo ergaster and by Asian Homo erectus. Later H. ergaster, and Homo Heidelbergensis, made tools by producing finer flakes, and cores that were modified on two sides (bifacial tools). The cores of the Acheulean technology phase (named after St. Achuel, in France) had much more cutting surface per weight of stone than did the older Oldowan tools. When H. heidelbergensis evolved into Neandertals, a more advanced technology phase, the Mousterian (named after Le Mouster in France) emerged. Mousterian tools had more cutting surface, and showed more diversity within a set of tools, than Acheulean tools. Mousterian tools were produced by the Levallois technique (named after yet another archaeological site in France) in which the toolmaker determined the general shape of the flake as soon as he or she removed it from the core, then modified the edge. Mousterian tools had very limited geographical variability.

Some advanced tools, such as an almost 90,000-year-old bone harpoon, were made in Africa. Most anthropologists consider that these inventions occurred only in H. sapiens. Until about 30,000 years ago, progress in tool technology occurred slowly. For almost 50,000 years, Neandertals and H. sapiens coexisted in what is now Israel and Palestine, and both used Mousterian tools.

Advances in toolmaking occurred in H. sapiens populations in all parts of the world. What is often called an explosion of technological invention occurred when H. sapiens reached Europe. Anthropologists speculate that H. sapiens developed these tools, along with more art and more complex social structure, in response to the most recent of the ice ages as well as to the Neandertals who were already present in Europe. H. sapiens in Europe went through a succession of technological phases that was rapid in comparison to the entire previous history of hominins. Finer tools, a much more diverse toolkit, and geographical differences in toolkits resulted. The last Neandertals used a toolkit that was similar to the Aurignacian tools of H. sapiens. These Chatelperronian tools may have been copied from H. sapiens, or stolen from them. The possibility that H. sapiens derived the ideas for Aurignacian tools from Neandertals cannot be discounted. . .

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