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 thousand 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.