I've been getting fed up looking for material and especially conferences of the "Palaeolithic" only to discover that everything is extremely modern. So, I started wondering what the age before stone would be called. The greek equivalent of "lithic" for wood, appears to be "hulic". If we use this as a catch all for "non-lithic", rather than just wood, it shouldn't be too contentious.
But "lithic" is invariably used as a suffix, Neo-, Paleo-/Palaeo- and Meso-. So I began wondering what they might be.
Neohulic, would be the age just before stone, but as many apes use stone and some even break them, it cannot be defined purely in terms of use of stone. I would define it as the complex use of stone. This occurs at the transition point when stone tools are being made to a pattern using a series of well aimed flakes. That would make Lomekwi Neohulic and the transition would be around 2.7million BC.
However it is less obvious how the "Hulic" would be subdivided. All I can say, is that it ought ought not be specified by which "species" were about because that leads to all kinds of confusion instead, like the Neolithic or bronze age, it ought to be specified by technology or at least hard data. So, e.g. we could talk about one group entering/exiting the "Neohulic" at a different time just as the Neolithic occurs in different times in different places.