Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

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