Ideas Read online

  Since 1835 workmen quarrying gravel from the river on the outskirts of Abbeville had been turning up ancient animal bones alongside different types of stone implements. These stone tools had convinced Boucher de Perthes that mankind was much more ancient than it said in the Bible. According to a number of ecclesiastical authorities, basing their calculations on the genealogies in Genesis, mankind was created between 6,000 and 4,000 years before Christ. Boucher de Perthes had been confirmed in his very different view when, in the course of excavations made for a new hospital in the Abbeville area, three stone hand-axes had been found alongside the molar tooth of a species of elephant long since extinct in France.

  Nonetheless, he had great difficulty convincing his fellow Frenchmen that his ‘evidence’ proved that man dated back hundreds of thousands of years. There was no shortage of expertise in France at that time–Laplace in astronomy, Cuvier, Lartet and Scrope in geology and natural history, Picard in palaeontology. But in the latter discipline the experts tended to be ‘amateurs’ in the true sense of the word, lovers of the subject who were scattered about the country, digging in their own localities only, and divorced from the high-profile publication outlets, such as the French Academy. Furthermore, in Boucher de Perthes’ case his credibility was a particular problem because he had taken up archaeology only in his fifties, and had before that authored several five-act plays, plus works on political, social and metaphysical subjects, filling no fewer than sixty-nine heavy volumes. He was seen in some circles as a jack-of-all-trades. It didn’t help either that he presented his discoveries as part of a fantastic theory that early man had been completely wiped out by a worldwide catastrophe and later on created anew. The British were more sympathetic, not because their scientists were better than the French–they were not–but because similar discoveries had been made north of the Channel–in Suffolk, in Devon, and in Yorkshire. In 1797, John Frere, a local antiquary, found at Hoxne, near Diss in Suffolk, a number of hand-axes associated with extinct animals in a natural stratum about eleven feet below the surface. In 1825, a Catholic priest, Father John MacEnery, excavating Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay in Devon, found ‘an unmistakeable flint implement’ in association with a tooth of an extinct rhinoceros–both lying in a level securely sealed beneath a layer of stalagmite.1 Then, in 1858, quarrying above Brixham harbour, not far away and also in Devon, exposed a number of small caves, and a distinguished committee was set up by the Royal Society and the Geographical Society to sponsor a scientific excavation. Fossilised bones of mammoth, lion, rhinoceros, reindeer and other extinct Pleistocene animals were found embedded in a layer of stalagmite and, beneath that, ‘flints unmistakably shaped by man’.2 That same year, Dr Hugh Falconer, a distinguished British palaeontologist, and a member of the committee which sponsored the Brixham excavations, happened to call on Boucher de Perthes on his way to Sicily. Struck by what he saw, Falconer persuaded Prestwich and Evans, as members of the professional disciplines most closely involved, to see for themselves what had been unearthed at Abbeville.

  The two Englishmen spent just a day and a half in France. On Thursday morning they looked at the gravel pits in Abbeville. There, according to the account in Evans’ diary: ‘We proceeded to the pit where sure enough the edge of an axe was visible in an entirely undisturbed bed of gravel and eleven feet from the surface…One of the most remarkable features of the case is that nearly all if not quite all of the animals whose bones are found in the same beds as the axes are extinct. There is the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the Urus–a tiger, etc. etc.’ Evans and Prestwich photographed a hand-axe in situ before returning to London. By the end of May Prestwich had addressed the Royal Society in London, explaining how the recent discoveries in both Britain and France had convinced him of the ‘immense antiquity’ of man and, in the following month, Evans addressed the Society of Antiquaries, advocating the same conclusion. Several other prominent academics also announced their conversion to this new view about the early origins of mankind.3

  It is from these events that the modern conception of time dates, with a sense of the hitherto unimagined antiquity of mankind gradually replacing the traditional chronology laid down in the Bible.4 That change was intimately bound up with the study of stone tools.

  This is not to say that Boucher de Perthes was the first person to doubt the picture painted in the Old Testament. Flint axes had been known since at least the fifth century BC, when a Thracian princess had formed a collection of them and had them buried with her, possibly for good luck.5 The widespread occurrence of these strange objects led to many fanciful explanations for stone tools. One popular theory, shared by Pliny among others, held them to be ‘petrified thunderbolts’, another had it that they were ‘fairy arrows’. Aldrovandus, in the mid-seventeenth century, argued that stone tools were due to ‘an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water) and subsequently indurated with heat, like a brick’.6

  Beginning in the age of exploration, however, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mariners began encountering hunter-gatherer tribes in America, Africa and the Pacific, and some of these still used stone tools. Mainly as a result of this, the Italian geologist Georgius Agricola (1490–1555) was one of the first to express the view that stone tools found in Europe were probably of human origin. So too did Michel Mercati (1541–1593) who, as superintendent of the Vatican botanical gardens and physician to Pope Clement VII, was familiar with stone tools from the New World that had been sent to Rome as gifts.7 Another was Isaac La Peyrère, a French Calvinist librarian who, in 1655, wrote one of the first books to challenge the biblical account of creation. Others, such as Edward Lhwyd, were beginning to say much the same, but Peyrère’s book proved very popular–an indication that he was saying something that ordinary people were willing to hear–and it was translated into several languages. In English it was called A Theological Systeme upon that presupposition that Men were before Adam. He identified ‘thunderstones’ as the weapons of what he called a ‘pre-Adamite’ race of humans, which he claimed had existed before the creation of the first Hebrews, in particular Assyrians and Egyptians. As a result, he said that Adam and Eve were the founding couple only of the Jews. Gentiles were older–pre-Adam. Peyrère’s book was denounced, as ‘profane and impious’, he himself was seized by the Inquisition, imprisoned, and his book burned on the streets of Paris. He was forced to renounce both his ‘pre-Adamite’ arguments and even his Calvinism, and died in a convent, ‘mentally battered’.8

  Despite this treatment of Peyrère, the idea of man’s great antiquity refused to die, reinforced–as we have seen–by fresh discoveries. However, none of these finds had quite the impact they deserved, for at the time geology, the discipline that formed the background to the discovery of stone implements, was itself deeply divided. The surprising fact remains that until the late eighteenth century the age of the earth was not the chief area of interest among geologists. What concerned them most was whether or not the geological record could be reconciled with the account of the earth’s history in Genesis. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 31, geologists were divided over this into catastrophists and uniformitarians. ‘Catastrophists’–or ‘Diluvialists’–were the traditionalists who, in sticking to the biblical view of creation, the oldest written record then available to Europeans, explained the past as a series of catastrophes (floods mainly, hence ‘Diluvialists’) that repeatedly wiped out all life forms, which were then recreated, in improved versions, by God. On this basis, the story of Noah’s Flood, in Genesis, is an historical record of the most recent of these destructions.9 The Diluvialists had the whole weight of the church behind them and resisted rival interpretations of the evidence for many decades. For example, it was believed at one stage that the first five days of the biblical account of the creation referred allegorically to geological epochs that each took a thous
and years or more to unfold. This meant that the creation of humans ‘on the sixth day’ occurred about 4000 BC, with the deluge of Noah following some 1,100 years later.

  The traditionalist argument was also supported–albeit indirectly–by the great achievements of nineteenth-century archaeology in the Middle East, in particular at Nineveh and at Ur-of-the-Chaldees, the mythical home of Abraham. The discoveries of the actual names in cuneiform of biblical kings like Sennacherib, and kings of Judah, like Hezekiah, fitted with the Old Testament chronology and added greatly to the credibility of the Bible as a historical document. As the museums of London and Paris began to fill with these relics, people started to refer to ‘scriptural geology’.10

  Against this view, the arguments of the so-called uniformitarians began to gain support. They argued the opposing notion, that the geological record was continuous and continuing, that there had been no great catastrophes, and that the earth we see about us was formed by natural processes that are exactly the same now as in the past and that we can still observe: rivers cutting valleys and gorges through rocks, carrying silt to the sea and laying it down as sediment, occasional volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. But these processes were and are very slow and so for the uniformitarians the earth had to be much older than it said in the Bible. Rather more important in this regard than Peyrère was Benoît de Maillet. His Telliamed, published in 1748 but very likely written around the turn of the century, outlined a history of the earth that made no attempt to reconcile its narrative with Genesis. (Because of this, de Maillet presented his book as a fantastic tale and as the work of an Indian philosopher, Telliamed, his own name spelled backwards.) De Maillet argued that the world was originally covered to a great depth by water. Mountains were formed by powerful currents in the water and as the waters receded they were exposed by erosion and laid down debris on the seabed to form sedimentary rocks.11 De Maillet thought that the oceans were still retreating in his day, by small amounts every year, but his most significant points were the absence of a recent flood in his chronology, and his argument that, with the earth starting in the way that he said it did, vast tracts of time must have elapsed before human civilisation appeared. He thought that life must have begun in the oceans and that each terrestrial form of being had its equivalent marine form (dogs, for example, were the terrestrial form of seals). Like Peyrère, he thought that humans existed before Adam.

  Later, but still in France, the comte de Buffon, the great naturalist, calculated (in 1779) that the age of the earth was 75,000 years, which he later amended to 168,000 years, though his private opinion, never published in his lifetime, was that it was nearer half a million years old. He too sweetened his radical views by arguing that there had been seven ‘epochs’ in the formation of the earth–this allowed more orthodox Christians to imagine that these seven epochs were analogous to the seven days of creation in Genesis.

  Such views were less fanciful at the time than they seem now. The classic summing up of the ‘uniformitarian’ argument was published by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, three volumes released between 1830 and 1833. This used many of Lyell’s own observations made on Mount Etna in Sicily, but also drew on the work of other geologists he had met on mainland Europe, such people as Étienne Serres and Paul Tournal. In Principles, Lyell set out, in great detail, his conclusion that the past was one long uninterrupted period, the result of the same geological processes acting at roughly the same rate that they act today. This new view of the geological past also suggested that the question about man’s own antiquity was capable of an empirical answer.12 Among the avid readers of Lyell’s book, and much influenced by it, was Charles Darwin.

  If the gradual triumph of uniformitarianism proved the very great antiquity of the earth, it still did not necessarily mean that man was particularly old. Lyell himself was just one who for many years accepted the antiquity of the earth but not of man. Genesis might be wrong but in what way and by how much? Here the work of the French anatomist and palaeontologist Georges Cuvier was seminal. His study of the comparative anatomy of living animals, especially vertebrates, taught him to reconstruct the form of entire creatures based on just a few bones. When fossil bones came to be much studied in the late eighteenth century, Cuvier’s technique turned out to be very useful. When this new knowledge was put together with the way the fossil bones were spread through the rocks, it emerged that the animals at deeper levels were (a) very different from anything alive today and (b) no longer extant. For a time it was believed that these unusual creatures might still be found, alive, in undiscovered parts of the world, but such a hope soon faded and the view gained ground that there has been a series of creations and extinctions throughout history. This was uniformitarianism applied to biology as well as geology and, once again, it was nothing like Genesis. The evidence of the rocks showed that these creations and extinctions took place over very long periods of time, and when the mummified bodies of Egyptian pharaohs were brought back to France as part of the Napoleonic conquests, and showed humans to have been unchanged for thousands of years, the great antiquity of man seemed more and more likely.

  Then, in 1844, Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher and polymath, released (anonymously) his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. As James Secord has recently shown, this book produced a sensation in Victorian Britain because it was Chambers (and not Darwin) who introduced the general idea of evolution to the wider public. Chambers had no idea how evolution worked, how natural selection caused new species to arise, but his book argued in great and convincing detail for an ancient solar system which had begun in a ‘fire-mist’, coalesced under gravity and cooled, with geological processes, tremendous and violent to begin with, gradually getting smaller but still taking aeons to produce their effects. Chambers envisaged an entirely natural and material origin of life and argued openly that human nature ‘did not stem from a spiritual quality marking him off from the animals but was a direct extension of faculties that had been developing throughout the evolutionary process’.13 And this was the single most important sentence in the book: ‘The idea, then, which I form of the progress of organic life upon the globe–and the hypothesis is applicable to all similar theatres of vital being–is, that the simplest and most primitive type, under a law to which that of like production is subordinate, gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced the next higher, and so on to the very highest, the stages of advance being in all cases very small–namely, from one species to another; so that the phenomenon has always been of a simple and modest character.’14

  By this time too there had been parallel developments in another new discipline, archaeology. Although the early nineteenth century saw some spectacular excavations, mainly in the Middle East, antiquarianism, an interest in the past, had remained strong since the Renaissance, especially in the seventeenth century.15 In particular there had been the introduction of the tripartite classification scheme–Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age–that we now take so much for granted. It occurred first in Scandinavia, owing to an unusual set of historical factors.

  In 1622, Christian IV of Denmark issued an edict protecting antiquities, while in Sweden a ‘State Office of Antiquities’ was founded in 1630. Sweden established a College of Antiquities in that year and Ole Worm, in Denmark, founded the Museum Wormianum in Copenhagen.16 At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a period of growing nationalism in Denmark. This owed a lot to its battles with Germany over Schleswig-Holstein, and to the fact that the British–fighting Napoleon and his reluctant continental allies–annihilated most of the Danish navy in Copenhagen harbour in 1801, and attacked the Danish capital again in 1807. One effect of these confrontations, and the surge in nationalism which followed, was to encourage the study of the kingdom’s own past ‘as a source of consolation and encouragement to face the future’.17 It so happens that Denmark is rich in prehistoric sites, in particular megalithic monuments, so the country was particularly well suited
to the exploration of its more remote national past.

  The key figure here was Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, who originally trained as a numismatist. Antiquarianism had first been stimulated by the Renaissance rediscovery of classical Greece and Rome and one aspect of it, collecting coins, had become particularly popular in the eighteenth century. From their inscriptions and dates it was possible to arrange coins into sequence, showing the sweep of history, and stylistic changes could be matched with specific dates. In 1806, Rasmus Nyerup, librarian at the University of Copenhagen, published a book advocating the setting up of a National Museum of Antiquity in Denmark modelled on the Museum of French Monuments established in Paris after the Revolution. The following year the Danish government announced a Royal Committee for the Preservation and Collection of National Antiquities which did indeed include provision for just such a national museum. Thomsen was the first curator, and when its doors were opened to the public, in 1819, all the objects were assigned either to the Stone, Brass (Bronze) or Iron Age in an organised chronological sequence. This division had been used before–it went back to Lucretius–but this was the first time anyone had addressed the idea practically, by arranging objects accordingly. By then the Danish collection of antiquities was one of the largest in Europe, and Thomsen used this fact to produce not only a chronology but a procession of styles of decoration that enabled him to explore how one stage led to another.18

  Though the museum opened in 1819, Thomsen did not publish his research and theories until 1836, and then only in Danish. This, a Guide Book to Northern Antiquities, was translated into German the following year and appeared in English in 1848, four years after Chambers had published Vestiges. Thus the three-age system gradually spread across Europe, radiating out from Scandinavia. The idea of cultural evolution paralleled that of biological evolution.