Until the nineteenth century the main guide to the human past was the Old Testament description of events from the Creation until the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Babylonia and Persia. In his Annals of the World (1650) the Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher (1581-56), taking this account literally, calculated that the world was created on 23 October 4004 BC Julian, or 21 September 4004 BC Gregorian.
James Hutton (1726-97) in his Theory of the Earth (1785) claimed that the surface of Earth is being continually reformed by a cyclical geological process operating over immensely long periods of time. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in his Principles of Geology (1830-33, three volumes) developed the theory of uniformitarianism, which says that Earth was shaped entirely by the natural processes we can actually observe today, such as rivers depositing layers of silt, wind and water eroding landscapes, glaciers advancing or retreating, all acting over a very long period of time.
It was widely believed that God’s creation had been perfect and that after the Flood no species of animal had become extinct. Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) compared the remains of elephants and mammoths and concluded that mammoths were not the same species as elephants and therefore mammoths must be extinct. In 1797 John Frere (1740-1807) wrote a letter to the Society of Antiquaries about flint blades and bones of extinct animals found in a deep hole at Hoxne saying that ‘the situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed’.
In the early nineteenth century human physical remains and stone tools associated with the bones of extinct animals in stratified deposits began to be found in Western Europe. Important finds were made by Paul Tournal (1805-72) near Narbonne; by Jules de Christol (1802-61) northeast of Montpellier; and by John MacEnery (1796-1841) at Kent’s Cavern in southwest England. Excavation techniques, however, were not yet sufficiently developed to be able to rule out the possibility that the human material was intrusive on the older deposits rather than being contemporaneous.
In 1847 Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868) described stone tools found in association with bones of extinct animals at quarries near Abbeville in the Somme Valley as antediluvian, i.e. of the time before the biblical Flood. In 1858 William Pengelly (1812-94) excavating at Windmill Hill Cave in southwest England found stone tools and fossil animal bones under an unbroken stalagmite layer that was over seven centimetres thick, which implies considerable antiquity.
In 1858 palaeontologist Hugh Falconer (1808-65), geologists Joseph Prestwich (1812-96) and Charles Lyell, archaeologist John Evans (1823-1908) together with other British scientists, visited the Somme Valley. All of them became convinced of the validity of Perthes’ finds and the geologists also recognised that the strata in which the finds occurred must have been deposited long before 4000 BC.
In 1863 Edouard Lartet (1801-71) and Henry Christy (1810-65) working in the La Madeleine rockshelter, found a piece of ivory with a woolly mammoth clearly engraved upon it. Excluding forgery, there seemed to be no other explanation than that an animal of the ice age had coexisted with a human.
Lartet proposed a sequence for prehistoric times having periods marked by the periods of cave bear, mammoth, reindeer and auroch. Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-98) argued that there had been little variation in the mammals through Lartet’s four periods and he proposed that types of stone tools be used as a guide to prehistoric time.
Observing the glaciers of his native Switzerland, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-73) noted the marks that glaciers had left on Earth – great valleys, scratches and smoothing of rocks, and the mounds of debris called moraines pushed up by glacial advances. He knew that these features could be seen in many places where no glaciers existed. He integrated all these facts to formulate his theory that a great ice age had once gripped Earth and in 1840 published his theory in Etudes sur les glaciers (‘Study on Glaciers’). An investigation by Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) and Eduard Bruckner (1862-1927) of the glacial deposits in the Alps revealed that there had been a number of ice advances and retreats.
In his Philosophie Zoologique (1809), Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) suggests that animals in responding to their survival needs acquire characteristics that are passed onto their offspring. Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) elaborated this idea in his Origin of the Species (1859). Darwin had been strongly influenced by what he had seen during his voyage (1831-36) as a naturalist on the survey ship HMS Beagle.
On his return he had noticed from his records that the birds and tortoises on their particular island were slightly different from those on other islands, suggesting that the animals had adapted to life peculiar to their respective islands.
Sven Nilsson (1787-1883) on the basis of comparative studies, proposed a socio-economic evolvement of savagery, pastoralism, agriculture and civilisation. Sir Edward Tylor (1832-1917) suggested savagery, barbarism and civilisation.
Tylor’s hypothesis was expanded by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81), who postulated a sevenfold division in his book Ancient Society (1877): three stages of savagery (fire, bow, pottery); three stages of barbarism (domestication of animals, the discovery of agriculture and metalworking) and one stage of literate civilisation. Morgan thus introduced a link between social and technological processes. In his view all human societies had passed through his seven successive stages of development, but not all through each phase at the same time.
Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937) pronounced the hyper-diffusionist view that world civilisation had originated in ancient Egypt then spread out and in some places never taking hold because the natives were incapable of assimilation. Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957) in The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925) argued that the prehistoric societies of Europe were independent, adapting developments and inventions that had spread from the Near East.
Early Man
In 1887 Eugene Dubois (1858-1941) went to Sumatra in the hope of finding ‘ape-man’ fossils. In 1891/2 near the town of Trinil along the Solo River in Java he uncovered two teeth, a femur and a skullcap of a large primate. Its brain capacity (c.900cc) was much greater than the anthropoid (‘man-like’) apes but smaller than that of modern man. He named his discovery Pithecanthropus erectus (‘erect ape-man’) but it soon became known as ‘Java Man’. In 1920, near to the village of Choukoutien, Johan Andersson noticed some cave deposits rich in fossil bones. The following year he returned and began excavating. Along with many fossils of extinct animals, he found a molar belonging to an extinct anthropoid. In 1926 a closer study of the molar indicated that it was human. Andersson passed the tooth to anatomist Davidson Black (1884-1934) who persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation (est.1913) to finance an excavation of the Choukoutien site. In 1927 another molar turned up and he proclaimed the discovery of a new prehistoric human genus Sinanthropus pekinensis. Today it is agreed that Peking Man and Java Man belong to the species, Homo erectus.
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