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 Jurgensen 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. At much the same time, scholars such as Francois de Jouannet became aware of a difference in stone tools, between chipped implements found associated with extinct animals, and more polished examples, found in more recent local barrows, well after the age of extinct animals. These observations eventually gave rise to the four-age chronology: old Stone Age, new Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. And so, by May 1859, when Evans and Prestwich returned from their visit with Boucher de Perthes in Abbeville, the purpose, importance and relevance of stone hand-axes could no longer be denied, or misinterpreted. Palaeontologists, archaeologists and geologists across Europe had helped build up this picture. There was still much confusion, however. Edouard Lartet, Cuvier's successor in Paris, was convinced about the antiquity of man, as was Prestwich. But Lyell, as we have seen, opposed the idea for years (he sent a famous letter to Charles Darwin in which he apologised for his unwillingness 'to go the whole orang'). And Darwin's main aim, when he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , in the same year that Prestwich and Evans returned from France, was not to prove the antiquity of man: it was to show how one species could transform into another, thus building on Chambers and destroying the need for a Creator. But, in completing the revolution in evolutionary thinking that had begun with Peyrere and de Maillet, and had been popularised so much by Chambers, the Origin confirmed how slowly natural selection worked. Therefore, though it wasn't Darwin's main aim, his book underlined the fact that man must be much older than it said in the Bible. Among the many things natural selection explained were the changes in the palaeontological record. The very great antiquity of man was established. Once this was accepted, ideas moved forward rapidly. In 1864, an Anglo-French team led by Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy, a London banker-antiquary, excavated a number of rock shelters in Perigord in France, and this led, among other things, to the discovery of an engraved mammoth tusk at La Madeleine, showing a drawing of a woolly mammoth. This piece 'served to remove any lingering doubts that humankind had coexisted with extinct Pleistocene animals'.19 What was now the four-age system served as the basis for organising the great archaeological exhibition at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867, where visitors could promenade room by room through the pre-history of Europe. Scientific archaeology had replaced the antiquarian tradition. 'One could now envisage a cultural history independent of the written record, reaching back to Palaeolithic times by way of the iron-age cemeteries of France and Britain, the Bronze-Age lake dwellings of Switzerland, and the Neolithic kitchen middens of Denmark...'20 When Charles Lyell finally came round to the new view, in his Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man (1863), his book sold 4,000 copies in the first weeks and two new editions appeared in the same year. Since then, as we shall see in Chapter 1, ancient stone tools have been found all over the world, and their distribution and variation enable us to recreate a great deal about our distant past and the first ideas and thoughts of ancient humankind. In the century and a half since Prestwich and Evans confirmed de Perthes' discoveries, the dating of the original manufacture of stone tools has been pushed back further and further, to the point where this book properly starts: the Gona river in Ethiopia 2.7 million years ago.