The identification of the history of technology with the history of humanlike species does not help in fixing a precise point for its origin, because the estimates of prehistorians and anthropologists concerning the emergence of human species vary so widely. Animals occasionally use natural tools such as sticks or stones, and the creatures that became human doubtless did the same for hundreds of millennia before the first giant step of fashioning their own tools. Even then it was an interminable time before they put such toolmaking on a regular basis, and still more aeons passed as they arrived at the ...(100 of 38754 words)