Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

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

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 François 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. Édouard 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 Peyrère 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