Bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutish prehistoric brothers. —WILLIAM JAMES
Archaeology, a New Science
Archaeology—digging up the ancient past—is a fairly young science. It is not so young, of course, as electronics or aerodynamics or radiology. It is not so old as astronomy or mathematics or metallurgy. Excavation began in 1748 with the uncovering of Pompeii; but it was hardly scientific, and it reached only a short distance into the past. The deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1819 and of cuneiform writing in 1837 pushed back history two or three thousand years. But deep explorations of man’s prehistoric past won no serious status until the middle of the nineteenth century. “In 1859 prehistoric archaeology,” says Gordon Childe, referring to the acceptance of finds at Abbeville, in France, “may be deemed to have become a science.”[1]
There were discoveries before that, but they were neglected and misinterpreted or despised and disputed. As early as 1690 a man named Conyers discovered “opposite Black Mary’s, near Gray’s Inn Lane,” London, a fossilized tooth which, we now know, belonged to an extinct elephant, and a crude hand ax of stone which, we now recognize, was made by man fairly early in the Great Ice Age; but it was long before they won an honored place in the British Museum. A friend of Conyers named Bagford thought that the elephant belonged to the Roman army of the Emperor Claudius, and that the flint was a weapon used by a Briton to slay it (see illustration below).
The first hand ax found and recognized, probably an Acheulean implement, discovered in London in 1690 together with the tooth of an extinct elephant. The tool is about six inches in length. Like almost all hand axes, it is thinner than it looks from this angle. (After Sottas, 1911.)
In 1797 John Frere reported to the Society of Antiquaries on the finding near Hoxne in Suffolk of “weapons of war ... in great numbers” together with “some extraordinary bones, particularly a jawbone of enormous size.” His discovery has been called as important, in its way, as the geographical discovery of a New World; by emphasizing “the situation in which these weapons were found,” he became the first man to apply modern archaeological methods to a prehistoric find. Frere boldly declared that the hand axes belonged to a “very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world.”[2] (See illustration, [page 71].)
Frere’s reasoning had little effect, however, on a certain type of mind. When in 1823 William Buckland, a teacher of geology who was to become Dean of Westminster, dug out of a cave near Paviland a female skeleton which was painted with red ocher—a peculiar habit of early man and of man not so early—and which lay beside some ivory rods and bracelets and the skull of a mammoth, Protestant prejudice got the better of science. Buckland wrote that the skeleton was “clearly not coeval with the antediluvian bones of the extinct species” with which it had been found. Like Bagford, he turned to the time of the Roman invasion. His “Red Lady of Paviland” became a camp follower, and thus he missed his chance to recognize the first Cro-Magnon skeleton of man from the last glaciation.[3] Yet religious dogma—which held back Victorian science for so many years—did not prevent Father John MacEnery from seeing the true significance of a flint tool and the tooth of a rhinoceros which he found under a layer of stalagmite in Kent’s Cavern, England, in 1825. Around 1830 Toumal, a French scientist, and Schmerling, a Belgian, saw the truth as clearly, and published their discoveries of man-made flints with the fossils of extinct animals.
The most important find, and the one that ultimately established Glacial man as a reality, was announced in 1838 at a meeting of the Société d’Emulation of Abbeville in northern France; but twenty years passed before it received scientific sanction. The discoverer was an inconspicuous tax collector, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, who matched his diversified name by writing tragedies, novels, and books on travel, economics, and philanthropy. He had explored caves as early as 1805 and had found fossils and man-made tools of flint, but no hand axes. The hand axes that he found in the river terraces were hardly as important as his theory that these terraces dated the tools, and that the terraces were formed far in the past when the rivers were swollen with water. His only mistake was that he went to the biblical flood to find the water instead of to the great glaciers. In 1849, after making other finds, Boucher published De l’Industrie primitive, ou Les Arts et leurs origines, dated 1847; more finds and other books followed. His hand axes and other discoveries were almost completely ignored until 1858 when the English geologist Hugh Falconer “happened to be passing through Abbeville and saw the collection.”[4] He brought British colleagues back to Abbeville, and in 1859 Falconer, Sir Joseph Prestwich, and Sir John Evans declared officially for the reality of glacial man. The finds of Boucher, they asserted, proved that human beings had existed at the same time as Pleistocene mammals now extinct. Significantly, it was the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.