Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

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