Progress thereafter was rapid, perhaps too rapid. Notable finds were soon followed by attempts to freeze knowledge into chronologic classifications. R. Rigollot, Gabriel de Mortillet, Edouard Lartet, Milne-Edwards, and Henry Christy found in the river terraces and the caves of France innumerable and varied evidences of man’s activity in the Great Ice Age. Mortillet named various cultures from the places where stone tools were found, and then, in 1869, he set them up in a chronological series.[5] Modified by later discoveries, the series ran as follows, beginning with the oldest: Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian. (Most prehistorians now use the word Abbevillian instead of Chellean because later research proved that the tools found originally at Chelles were Acheulean in type, while those found at Abbeville were earlier.) In the light of present knowledge, the list is much too simplified. It is based only on European finds, yet it is supposed to fit the world picture. For more than fifty years it has served as a scientific straitjacket, patched with new material here and there, but still gaping at the seams as the husky young giant of archaeological science grows in stature.
Time scale of early man in a limited area of Europe, as estimated by Robert J. Braidwood.
Enter the Eolith
One of the early difficulties that Mortillet’s list of cultures encountered was the discovery of implements that preceded his first culture, the Chellean—or Abbevillian—in time and type. Cruder axes from older levels had to be called Pre-Chellean (see illustration, [page 71]). In England scrapers and other crude tools cropped up in formations that go back more than 500,000 years.
Then eoliths—“dawn stones”—appeared. They were irregular-shaped pieces of flint with chips knocked off here and there. Often the chipping looked purposeful; the flakes made an edge or a point that could be used to scrape or drill.
These rudely shaped flints were first championed by Abbé Louis Bourgeois in 1863; but his finds were in strata far too old to win scientific recognition. This was not the case with Benjamin Harrison, who recognized eoliths in later formations almost one hundred years ago. Harrison was one of that variegated and comradely group of country “antiquaries”—noblemen and shopkeepers, vicars and village laborers—who founded and developed the study of the prehistory of England. Harrison left his old-fashioned general store and its cakes, fruits, and draperies, to walk the High Downs of Suffolk, searching with utter conviction for traces of early man in the glacial gravels. He began as a youth, when Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes had only just won his battle, and in 1865 he recognized his first eoliths. In 1889 the distinguished scientist Sir Joseph Prestwich gave them his backing. It took twenty more years, however, for the eolith to win anything like respectable recognition, and some still deny that these flints were worked by men.
THE “DAWN STONES” OF EARLY MAN
Upper left, a borer. Right, two sides of a scraper. Below, side view and bottom of a rostrocarinate. (After Peake and Fleure, 1927; Moir, 1927; and Lankester, 1912.)