Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

Fig. 3. Three great types of flint implements.

A. An eolith of accidental shape.

B. A palæolith of Chellean type, partly fashioned.

C. A Neolithic axe head, partly polished.

After MacCurdy.

The work of the caveman, gradually revealed between 1828 and 1840, is now known to belong to the closing period of the Old Stone Age, and it is very remarkable that the next discovery related to the very dawn of the Old Stone Age, namely, to the life of the 'river-drift' man of the Lower Palæolithic.

This discovery of what is now known as Chellean and Acheulean industry came through the explorations of Boucher de Perthes, between 1839 and 1846, in the valley of the River Somme, which flows through Amiens and Abbeville and empties into the English Channel half-way between Dieppe and Boulogne. In 1841 this founder of modern archæology unearthed near Abbeville a single flint, rudely fashioned into a cutting instrument, buried in river sand and associated with mammalian remains. This was followed by the collection of many other ancient weapons and implements, and in the year 1846 Boucher de Perthes published his first work, entitled De l'Industrie primitive, ou des Arts à leur Origine,[(23)] in which he announced that he had found human implements in beds unmistakably belonging to the age of the 'river-drift.' This work and the succeeding (1857), Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes,[(24)] were received with great scepticism until confirmed in 1853 by Rigollot's[(25)] discovery of the now famous 'river-drift' beds of St. Acheul, near Amiens. In the succeeding years the epoch-making work of Boucher de Perthes was welcomed and confirmed by leading British geologists and archæologists, Falconer, Prestwich, Evans, and others who visited the Somme. Lubbock's[(26)] article of 1862, on the Evidence of the Antiquity of Man Afforded by the Physical Structure of the Somme Valley, pointing out the great geologic age of the river sands and gravels and of the mammals which they contained, was followed by the discovery of similar flints in the 'river-drifts' of Suffolk and Kent, England, in the valley of the Thames near Dartford. Thus came the first positive proofs that certain types of stone implements were wide-spread geographically, and thus was afforded the means of comparing the age of one deposit with another.

This led Sir John Lubbock[(27)] to divide the prehistoric period into four great epochs, in descending order as follows:

The Iron Age, in which iron had superseded bronze for arms, axes, knives, etc., while bronze remained in common use for ornaments.