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