Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, Frere described the
implements as “evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a
people who had not the use of metals.” The situation under which they
had been found led him to believe that they must be extremely old,
having been buried under ten feet of well-stratified vegetable earth and
“Argill” clay. Frere concluded that this particular manner of burial, plus
their association with the bones of animals no longer found in England,
meant that these artifacts must date from “a very remote period indeed;
even beyond that of the present world.”
13
Historians have often commented on the failure of Frere's contem-
poraries to recognize the antiquity of human artifacts: his paper went
essentially unnoticed for more than fifty years, until the prehistoric rev-
olution of 1859, when from diverse angles—and fairly suddenly—it was
recognized that humans have a profound antiquity.
14
Paleontologists in
Frere's time had already by and large abandoned Archbishop James
Ussher's oft-cited estimate of six thousand years since creation (Georges-
Louis Buffon in 1775 had calculated an age of seventy-five thousand
years for the earth, based on experiments with cooling bodies), but the
absence of human remains in geologic deposits had made it unfashion-
able to argue for the existence of humanity beyond the more miserly bib-
lical chronology. Paleontological time markers were introduced in the
early decades of the nineteenth century, but even Georges Cuvier, the
primary architect of such markers, died in 1832 believing that there was
no such thing as fossil humans.
15
It was not until the late 1850s that
human antiquity was widely recognized, the key event being the accept-
ance by English and French geologists of the authenticity of the
Acheulean “hand axes” found by Jacques Boucher de Perthes in the
gravels south of St. Acheul, near Amien, northwest of Paris.
16
The dis-
covery was interestingly coincident with the publication of Charles
Darwin's
Origin of Species
, though the latter topic seems actually to have
had little or no immediate impact on the question of human antiquity.
The leading architect of the revolution, Boucher de Perthes, was in fact
a biblical catastrophist and antitransformationist who argued that
humans were probably created and destroyed several times before Adam
was called into being.
Acheulean tools are remarkable in several different respects—quite
apart from their stunning beauty and symmetry, qualities that have
earned for them recognition as the first traces of a primate (human?)
