Discovering the age of the first human is one facet of
anthropogeny, the study of human origins, and a term dated by the
Oxford English Dictionary to 1839 and the
Medical Dictionary of
Robert Hooper. Given the
history of evolutionary thought, and the
history of paleontology, the question of the antiquity of man became quite natural to ask at around this period. It was by no means a new question, but it was being asked in a new context of knowledge, particularly in
comparative anatomy and
palaeontology. The development of
relative dating as a principled method allowed deductions of chronology relative to events tied to
fossils and
strata. This meant, though, that the issue of the antiquity of man was not separable from other debates of the period, on
geology and foundations of scientific archaeology. The first strong scientific arguments for the antiquity of man as very different from accepted
biblical chronology were certainly also strongly controverted. Those who found the conclusion unacceptable could be expected to examine the whole train of reasoning for weak points. This can be seen, for example, in the
Systematic Theology of
Charles Hodge (1871–3). For a period, once the scale of
geological time had become clear in the 19th century, the "antiquity of man" stood for a theory opposed to the "modern origin of man", for which arguments of other kinds were put forward. The choice was logically independent of monogenism versus polygenism; but monogenism with the modern origin implied time scales on the basis of the geographical spread, physical differences and
cultural diversity of humans. The choice was also logically independent of the notion of
transmutation of species, but that was considered to be a slow process.
William Benjamin Carpenter wrote in 1872 of a fixed conviction of the "modern origin" as the only reason for resisting the human creation of
flint implements.
Henry Williamson Haynes writing in 1880 could call the antiquity of man "an established fact".
Theological debates The Biblical account included • the story of the
Garden of Eden and the descent of humans from a single couple; • the story of the universal
biblical Flood, after which all humans descended from Noah and his wife, and all animals from those saved in the Ark; • genealogies providing in theory a way of dating events in the Old Testament (see
Genealogy of the Bible). These points were debated by scholars as well as theologians.
Biblical literalism was not a given in the medieval and early modern periods, for Christians or Jews.
Human origins and the "universal deluge" debated The Flood could explain extinctions of species at that date, on the hypothesis that the Ark had not contained all species of animal. A Flood that was not universal, on the other hand, had implications for the biblical theory of races and Noah's sons. The theory of
catastrophism, which was as much secular as theological in attitude, could be used in analogous ways. , a
stained glass window of the earlier 17th century, Church of
Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, in Paris. There was interest in matters arising from modification of the biblical narrative, therefore, and it was fuelled by the new knowledge of the world in
early modern Europe, and then by the growth of the sciences. One hypothesis was of people not descended from Adam. This hypothesis of polygenism (no unique origin of humans) implied nothing on the antiquity of man, but the issue was implicated in counter-arguments, for monogenism.
La Peyrère and the completeness of the Biblical account Isaac La Peyrère appealed in formulating his
Preadamite theory of polygenism to Jewish tradition; it was intended to be compatible with the biblical
creation of man. It was rejected by many contemporary theologians. This idea of humans before Adam had been current in earlier Christian scholars and those of unorthodox and heretical beliefs; La Peyrère's significance was his synthesis of the dissent. Influentially, he revived the classical idea of
Marcus Terentius Varro, preserved in
Censorinus, of a three-fold division of historical time into "uncertain" (to a universal flood), "mythical", and "historical" (with certain chronology).
Debate on race The biblical narrative had implications for
ethnology (division into
Hamitic,
Japhetic and
Semitic peoples), and had its defenders, as well as those who felt it made significant omissions.
Matthew Hale wrote his
Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677) against La Peyrère, it has been suggested, in order to defend the propositions of a young human race and universal Flood, and the
Native Americans as descended from Noah.
Anthony John Maas writing in the 1913
Catholic Encyclopedia commented that
pro-slavery sentiment indirectly supported the Preadamite theories of the middle of the 19th century. By his use of a form of
natural selection to argue for change of
human skin colour as a historical process, he also implied a time scale long enough for such a process to have produced the observed differences. One of La Peyrère's propositions, that
China was at least 10,000 years old, gained wider currency;
Martino Martini had provided details of traditional Chinese chronology, from which it was deduced by
Isaac Vossius that Noah's Flood was local rather than universal. One of the considerations detected in La Peyrère by
Otto Zöckler was concern with the
Antipodes and their people: were they pre-Adamites, or indeed had there been a second "Adam of the Antipodes"? In a 19th-century sequel, Alfred Russel Wallace in an 1867 book review pointed to the
Pacific Islanders as posing a problem for those holding both to monogenism and a recent date for human origins. In other words, he took migration from an original location to remote islands that are now populated to imply a long time scale. A significant consequence of the recognition of the antiquity of man was the greater scope for
conjectural history, in particular for all aspects of
diffusionism and
social evolutionism.
Creation of man in a world not ready While extinction of species came with the development of geology to be widely accepted in the early 19th century, there was resistance on theological grounds to extinctions after the creation of man. It was argued, in particular in the 1820s and 1830s, that man would not be created into an "imperfect" world as far as design of its collection of species was concerned. This reasoning cut across that which was conclusive for the science of the antiquity of man, a generation later.
Archaeological context The late 18th century was a period in which French and German caves were explored, and remains taken for study:
caving was in fashion, if
speleology was only in its infancy, and the
St. Beatus Caves, for example, attracted many visitors. Caves were a theme of the art of the time, also., Switzerland; engraving of the later 18th century. Cave remains proved of great importance to the science of the antiquity of man.
Stalagmite formation was a clearcut mechanism of formation of fossils, and its stratigraphy could be understood. Other sites of importance were associated with
alluvial deposits of gravel and clay, or
peat. The early example of the
Gray's Inn Lane Hand Axe was from gravel in a bed of a tributary of the
River Thames, but remained isolated for about a century.
spear thrower from Kesslerloch cave,
Thayngen, Switzerland. The
three-age system was in place from about 1820, in the form given to it by
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in his work on the collections that became the
National Museum of Denmark. He published his ideas in 1836. Postulating cultural change, in itself and without explaining a rate of change, did not generate reasons to revise traditional chronology. But the concept of
Stone Age artifacts became current. Thomsen's book in Danish,
Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed, was translated into German (
Leitfaden zur Nordischen Alterthumskunde, 1837), and English (
Guide to Northern Archæology, 1848).
John Frere's 1797 discovery of the
Hoxne handaxe helped to initiate the 19th century debate, but it started in earnest around 1810. There were then a number of false starts relating to different European sites.
William Buckland misjudged what he had found in 1823 with the misnamed
Red Lady of Paviland, and explained away the
mammoth remains with the find. He also was dismissive of the
Kent's Cavern findings of
John MacEnery in the later 1820s. In 1829
Philippe-Charles Schmerling discovered a
Neanderthal fossil skull (at
Engis). At that point, however, its significance was not recognised, and
Rudolf Virchow consistently opposed the theory that it was very old. The 1847 book
Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes by Boucher de Perthes about
Saint-Acheul was found unconvincing in its presentation, until it was reconsidered about a decade later. from
Guide to Northern Archæology (1848), English translation by
Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, from the Danish
Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836) of
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. The debate moved on only in the context of • further
stone tools that were admitted to be made by Stone Age man, found • on sites where the stratigraphy could be argued to be clear and undisturbed, with • remains of animals that were (in the consensus of palaeontologists) now extinct. It was this combination, "extinct faunal remains" + "human artifacts", that provided the evidence that came to be seen as crucial. A sudden acceleration of research was seen from mid-1858, when the
Geological Society set up a "cave committee". Besides
Hugh Falconer who had pressed for it, the committee comprised
Charles Lyell,
Richard Owen,
William Pengelly,
Joseph Prestwich, and
Andrew Ramsay.
Debate on uniformity and change On the one hand, lack of uniformity in
prehistory is what gave science traction on the question of the antiquity of man; and, on the other hand, there were at the time theories that tended to rule out certain types of lack of regularity.
John Lubbock outlined in 1890 the way the antiquity of man had in his time been established as derived from change in prehistory: in
fauna,
geography and
climate. The hypotheses required to establish that these changes were facts of prehistory were themselves in tension with the
uniformitarianism that was held to by some scientists; therefore the protean concept "uniformitarianism" was adjusted to accommodate the past changes that could be established. Zoological uniformity on earth was debated already in the early eighteenth century.
George Berkeley argued in
Alciphron that the lack of human artifacts in deeper excavations suggested a recent origin of man.
Evidence of absence was, of course, seen as problematic to establish.
Gottfried Leibniz in his
Protogaea produced arguments against identification of a species via
morphology, without evidence of descent (having in mind a characterisation of humans by possession of
reason); and against the discreteness of species and their extinction. Uniformitarianism held the field against the competitor theories of
Neptunism and
catastrophism, which partook of
Romantic science and theological cosmogony; it established itself as the successor of
Plutonism, and became the foundation of modern geology. Its tenets were correspondingly firmly held.
Charles Lyell put forward at one point views on what were called "uniformity of kind" and "uniformity of degree" that were incompatible with what was argued later. Lyell's theory, in fact, was of a "steady state" geology, which he deduced from his principles. This went too far in restricting actual geological processes, to a predictable
closed system, if it ruled out
ice ages (see ice ages#Causes of ice ages), as became clearer not long after Lyell's
Principles of Geology appeared (1830–3). Of Lubbock's three types of change, the geographical included the theory of migration over
land bridges in
biogeography, which in general acted as an explanatory stopgap, rather than in most cases being one supported by science.
Sea level changes were easier to justify.
Glacial conditions in Switzerland, 1774 painting by
Caspar Wolf. The identification of ice ages was important context for the antiquity of man because it was accepted that certain mammals had died out with the last of the ice ages which were clearly marked in the geological record.
Georges Cuvier's
Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (1812) had accepted facts of the extinctions of mammals that were to be relevant to human antiquity. The concept of an ice age was proposed in 1837 by Louis Agassiz, and it opened the way to the study of
glacial history of the Quaternary. William Buckland came to see evidence of
glaciers in what he had taken to be remains of the biblical Flood. It seemed adequately proved that the
woolly mammoth and
woolly rhinoceros were mammals of the ice ages, and had ceased to exist with the ice ages: they inhabited Europe when it was
tundra, and not afterwards. In fact such extinct mammals were typically found in
diluvium as it was then called (distinctive gravel or
boulder clay). and
interglacial cycles as represented by atmospheric
CO2, measured from ice core samples going back 800,000 years. Given that the animals were associated with these strata, establishing the date of the strata could be by geological arguments, based on uniformity of stratigraphy; and so the animals' extinction was dated. An extinction can still strictly only be dated on assumptions, as evidence of absence; for a particular site, however, the argument can be from
local extinction. Neither Agassiz nor Buckland adopted the new views on the antiquity of man.
Acceptance of human association with extinct animal species Boucher de Perthes had written up discoveries in the
Somme valley in 1847. Joseph Prestwich and
John Evans in April 1859, and Charles Lyell with others also in 1859, made field trips to the sites, and returned convinced that humans had coexisted with
extinct mammals. In general and qualitative terms, Lyell felt the evidence established the "antiquity of man": that humans were much older than the traditional assumptions had made them. His conclusions were shared by the
Royal Society and other British learned institutions, as well as in France. It was this recognition of the early date of
Acheulean handaxes that first established the scientific credibility of the
deep antiquity of humans. in the French Pyrénées by
Édouard Lartet. This debate was concurrent with that over the book
On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and was evidently related; but was not one in which
Charles Darwin initially made his own views public. Consolidation of the "antiquity of man" required more work, with stricter methods; and this proved possible over the next two decades. The discoveries of Boucher de Perthes therefore motivated further researches to try to repeat and confirm the findings at other sites. Significant in this were excavations by
William Pengelly at
Brixham Cavern, and with a systematic approach at
Kents Cavern (1865–1880). Another major project, which produced quicker findings, was that of
Henry Christy and
Édouard Lartet. Lartet in 1860 had published results from a cave near
Massat (
Ariège) claiming stone tool cuts on bones of extinct mammals, made when the bones were fresh. ==List of key sites for the 19th century debate==