The Antiquity of Man: The Intellectual Shock of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Terence Meaden
M.A., D. Phil. (Oxon), Oxford University
INTRODUCTION
It can be hard to imagine how two centuries ago erudite men
were so beguiled by the teachings of the Old Testament, and
fearful of the preachers who clung to ageing doctrines, that
few dared publicly challenge the orthodoxy. The mythologies
of Genesis were not recognised as the fabrication of
storytellers: God created Man and Woman�and the remainder of
mankind (and their archaeological traces) resulted. Noah�s
contribution seemed so pivotal that events in the
archaeological record were classified as antediluvian,
diluvian and postdiluvian. This essay explores how a uniform
acceptance of these fables, for so long held to be �truths�,
came to be disputed, and then so quickly overthrown that
learned opinion as to human antiquity switched polarity in
the space of a few years. It sets in historical context the
tremendous advances in understanding the origins of life and
humans that Charles Darwin�s erudition initiated.
PRELUDE
For centuries the renaissance of European scholarship
followed an encouraging but slow advance in the face of
religious conservatism. The doctrines of the Church were
unassailable. To disagree was heresy. Galileo was denounced,
but events proved that he and Copernicus were right: our
planet does revolve about the sun; Earth is not the centre
of the universe. The Church was unwilling to fit
disconcerting findings into its traditional framework. The
Bible was fact, Genesis was fact, the flood was fact. The
seventeenth-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher calculated
the year of the creation of man as 4004 BC, which he
achieved by analysing lines of descent from Adam. By the
same token the flood was assigned to the year 2501 BC and
for two centuries academics and philosophers believed this,
having been indoctrinated as children into believing the
fables. Although this did little harm to invention,
engineering, mathematics, physics and botany which
progressed steadily under leading figures like Leonardo,
Newton, Fourier and Linnaeus, the Church�s attitude neutered
astronomy, geology, medicine and prehistory. Some scientists
may have doubted, but outwardly they conformed. Outspoken
atheists, few in number, were ridiculed, persecuted or
tormented�or at best ignored.
PROGRESS
Against this background, by the end of the 18th century,
fitful beginnings, towards realising there had been a truly
long prehistoric period, were afoot. We may cite Johann
Esper who discovered in the German Jura in 1771 human bones
in association with extinct animals like cave bear. And John
Frere, in 1797, who found hand-axes alongside extinct animal
bones 12 feet below the ground in undisturbed strata at
Hoxne, Suffolk, and said they belonged to a remote
stone-using period �even beyond that of the present world�
(Daniels 1950). John MacEnery, excavating in Kent�s Cavern,
Torquay, in the 1820s, recognised the antiquity of hand-axes
found with ancient animal remains, but peer-group pressure
prevented publication. Godwin Austen continued this work in
1840 and soon wrote that �the bones of the cave-mammals and
the works of man must have been introduced into the cave
before the floor of the stalagmite had been formed� (Daniels
1950, Bibby 1957). Pierre Tournal, about 1826-1834, was
uncovering cave deposits that he claimed could not be linked
to any flood, and numerous discoveries and precocious ideas
by others can be given. In geology, there were parallel
developments, as William Smith (1769- 1839) and Charles
Lyell (1797-1875) led the way with concepts of superposition
of strata and the law of uniformitarianism initiated by
James Hutton (1726-1797). This culminated in Lyell�s 1830
classic The Principles of Geology, subtitled An attempt to
explain the former changes of the Earth�s surface by
reference to causes now in operation. Stratified deposits,
if due to processes that are even now continuing, imply an
age for Earth far greater than any that Biblical chronology
assured.
THE TURNING POINT
By the 1850s the dogged persistence of two men helped turn
the tide in favour of human antiquity: Jacques Boucher de
Perthes (1788-1868) in France and William Pengelly
(1812-1894) in England.
Boucher de Perthes found strong proof indicating a great age
for early man, in deep strata near Abbeville in 1832, and in
the course of 20 years made further discoveries which he
described and published against a tide of scepticism. A
turning point was 1854. An authoritative sceptic Dr Rigollet,
who had the aim of proving him wrong, excavated at the new
site of St Acheul near Amiens and found so many specimens of
stone axes and other tools in deep undisturbed strata that
he changed his views and announced that Boucher de Perthes
had been right after all. Antiquaries and geologists
descended on Acheul and Abbeville, including a team from
England in 1859.
In England William Pengelly set to work in Kent�s Cavern and
soon agreed that his conscientious predecessors had been
correct all the while, but his newly-published work of 1846
met with similar disdain. Nonetheless, despite continuing
scepticism there was rising interest in the extreme age
being argued for such remains. In 1858 a test became
possible at a virgin site, a cave near Brixham in South
Devon. Pengelly would excavate, and a committee chosen by
the Royal Society and Geological Society would supervise.
Soon a stalagmite floor was uncovered, and embedded within
and beneath it were bones of cave lion, cave bear, hyena,
mammoth, rhinoceros and reindeer, together with flint tools
of human workmanship. As for geological research, although
fossils in the rocks were now best explained as extinct life
forms from a hugely remote past, this meant nothing to
Biblical supporters. Either God was responsible, or the
flood carried them there. But scientists who carefully
documented facts, and hypothesised and tested by experiment,
were acquiring an independence of thought unimpaired by
ecclesiastical dogma.
Here is a fitting truth from a lecture I heard Professor
Thomas Gold, F.R.S. give in 1989: �It often takes a long
time for new ideas, new concepts, new explanations to gain
acceptance in science, even when they accord far better with
the facts as known and replace what is demonstrably wrong. A
long-established viewpoint�the orthodoxy�can maintain itself
against the clearest disproof. Support for the orthodoxy is
readily accepted, disproof is often ignored . . . and the
innovator shunned.� GOLD (1989). Abstract from Lecture
entitled �The Inertia of Scientific Thought�, part of a
two-day conference on Science and the Unexpected. IBM,
London. The context of this appraisal was science but it
applies to all scholarship past and present including
theology and archaeology, and thereby explains the
psychology of the �antiquity-of-man� critics.
By 1859 the
best-read scientists were mentally prepared for the
explosion that erupted in November that year with the
publication of Charles Darwin�s research. Others had
anticipated ideas regarding evolution but Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) catalysed an expectant atmosphere by explaining
in meticulous detail how evolution operated, and on such
vast time scales.
As a youth he was sent to Cambridge expecting to take holy
orders, but soon after getting his degree in 1831 he joined
the Beagle as ship�s naturalist. His five years of
collecting and 20 years of analysing would come to
revolutionise scientific judgement, and eventually religious
opinion. He was also influenced by Thomas Malthus� concept
of �competition through popular pressure� published in 1798
as An Essay on the Principle of Population. Later, Charles
Darwin�s son quoted his father�s changing views on
Christianity thus: �Disbelief crept over me at a very slow
rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I
felt no distress�. He had become a quiet agnostic or atheist
(Francis Darwin 1887). His convictions liberated, his
research ideas would free others, to the lasting benefit of
archaeological prehistory and the sciences. Encouraged by
recent progress in archaeology and geology it was time for
Darwin to announce his findings.
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection sold out its first edition of 1250 copies on the first day. In 1860 came the renowned confrontation at Oxford between Bishop Wilberforce and the Darwinian Thomas Huxley. Human culture was now seen as a progression, not just of biological evolution but of social and cultural evolution. C. J. Thomsen�s Three Age System, published in Danish in 1836 and in English in 1848, was proving to be a valuable resource for classifying artefacts into a chronological order (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age). Megalithic monuments, previously thought by some antiquaries as unworthy of study because they belonged to an unknown, conceivably evil, prehistoric culture, became as acceptable for research as the Biblically-historical classical sites had long been. When the first Neanderthal bones were recognised in 1856, in Neander Valley (Germany), Christian apologists claimed it was the special case of an idiot whose curved legs arose from excessive equestrianism, the eyebrow ridges thickened through the pain of rickets causing extreme puckering. Instead Charles Darwin and his supporters assigned Neanderthal Man his privileged place as a missing link between ape and man -- not as Homo Sapiens� ancestor but from a coexisting evolution, since extinct.
CONCLUDING
REMARKS
So much happened between 1854 and 1860 that unbiased
thinkers became convinced of the antiquity of man. The
discovery of Neanderthal Man, Darwin�s theory of natural
selection, and the evidence offered by Boucher de Perthes
and Pengelly were the compelling fresh elements. Ussher�s
diagnosis was false, and because evolution explained the
life sciences and human origins, Darwin held the key to
explaining the advent of man without recourse to divine
intervention. With it, archaeology came of age. The
Antiquity of Man by Charles Lyell was published in 1863 and
Charles Darwin�s The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex in 1871. The study of archaeology soared to
a high profile. A century later we know that human origins
go back 1.6 million years, of hominids four million years,
of the Earth 4.5 billion years and of the Universe almost 14
billion years. Few scholars in 1850 could have anticipated
this from the seeds then being sown, and we have reaped the
intellectual harvest ever since.�
REFERENCES
BIBBY, Geoffrey (1957). The testimony of the spade. Collins,
London.
DANIEL, Glyn (1950). A hundred years of archaeology. London,
Duckworth
DARWIN, Francis (editor) (1887). The life and letters of
Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter. 3
volumes. London.
GOLD (1989). Abstract from Lecture entitled �The Inertia of
Scientific Thought�, part of a two-day conference on Science
and the Unexpected. IBM, London
====
The author is Physicist, meteorologist and archaeologist of Oxford University. He contributed the article for Mukto-Mona on occasion of Darwin Day.
