It was a museum curator, C.J. Thomsen, who proposed the Three-Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron when faced with the challenge of making the first catalogue of the prehistoric collections of the Danish National Museum of Antiquities in Copenhagen. He based his scheme on the relative technological difficulty of fashioning stone, bronze and iron. Iron, of course, requires far greater heat – and controlled heat at that – to smelt and to work than does copper, the principal constituent (with tin) of bronze. Thomsen’s book, A Guide to Northern Antiquities, was published in 1836, with an English translation in 1848. Eleven years later (1859) Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species; by then Thomsen’s scheme had gained wide acceptance.
Although still a young subject, prehistory played an important role in the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas.1 Perhaps that’s why most English prehistorians, myself included, tend to approach our subject from an evolutionary perspective. We probably shouldn’t think in this way, but most of us are products of an education system that places great emphasis on structure, pattern and analytical discipline. Darwin’s views on evolution sit very happily within such a rigorous yet down-to-earth conceptual framework.
In the early and mid-nineteenth century archaeologists in both Britain and France were caught up in the great debate around Noah’s Flood. Working on material found in the gravels of the river Somme, the great French archaeologist Boucher de Perthes published evidence in 1841 that linked stone tools with the bones of extinct animals. He argued that these remains had to predate the biblical Flood by a very long time. It was revolutionary stuff a full eighteen years before the appearance of On the Origin of Species.
I said that Boucher de Perthes published evidence that linked stone tools with the bones of extinct animals. I should have said he published evidence that associated stone tools with the bones of extinct animals. ‘Associated’ is a very important word to archaeologists. It’s code for more than just a link; it can imply something altogether tighter and more intimate. An example might help.
A few years ago we built our house, and whenever I dig the vegetable garden I find pieces of brick and roof-tile in the topsoil. I also find sherds of Victorian willow-pattern plate and fragments of land-drainage pipe which date to the 1920s. Like most topsoils, that in my vegetable garden is a jumble of material that has accumulated over the past few centuries. In archaeological terms these things are only very loosely associated. However, when work eventually finished on the house, I used a digger to excavate a soakaway for a drain, and filled the hole with all manner of builders’ debris left over from the actual building of the house: bricks, tiles, mortar, bent nails and so on. In archaeological terms, my soakaway is a ‘closed group’, and the items found within it are therefore closely associated. To return to the Somme gravels, Boucher de Perthes was able to prove that the bones and the flint tools were from a closed group. This tight association gave his discoveries enormous importance.
It was not long before gravel deposits elsewhere in Europe, including Britain, were producing heavy flint implements like those found in the Somme. They are known as hand-axes, and are the most characteristic artefacts of the earliest age of mankind, the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age.
Initially, archaeologists, and many others too, were more interested in what these finds stood for – evidence for the true antiquity of mankind – than in the finds themselves. Alliances were formed with pioneering geologists such as Sir Charles Lyell, whose book Principles of Geology, published in 1833, had established the fundamentally important ‘doctrine of uniformity’. This sounds daunting, but isn’t. It’s a grand-sounding way of saying that the natural processes of geology were the same in the past as they are today. So, even ten million years ago rivers wore away at their banks, glaciers scoured out their valleys and every so often volcanoes erupted, covering the countryside around with thick layers of ash and pumice, just as they do today. Put another way, after Lyell nobody could argue that, for example, the highest mountains on earth were covered by the waters of a vast flood just because that accorded with their beliefs.
If one accepted Lyell’s idea of uniformity, it became impossible to deny that the extinct animal bones and the flint tools found by Boucher de Perthes were in existence at precisely the same time – and a very long time ago. By the mid-nineteenth century, Palaeolithic archaeology was on something of a popular roll. No educated household could afford to ignore it. John Lubbock’s book Pre-Historic Times (1865) became a best-seller. Indeed, it was so popular that it’s still possible to pick up a copy quite cheaply. Mine is the fifth edition of 1890, and it cost me a fiver in 1980. It introduced the word ‘prehistory’ to a general audience, albeit with a hyphen, and it didn’t stop short at the Palaeolithic (or Old Stone Age). Lubbock also discussed the later Ages with considerable learning and not a little gusto. I find his enthusiasm infectious, and it isn’t surprising that some of his other books had titles such as The Pleasures of Life (in two volumes, no less). Like many of his contemporaries, Lubbock was able to turn his hand to subjects other than archaeology: his other works include books on insects and flowers aimed at both popular and scientific readers. He was a diverse and extraordinary man.
The first three chapters of this book will be about the earliest archaeological period, the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age. The archaeologists and anthropologists who study the Old Stone Age are grappling with concepts of universal, or fundamental, importance. What, for example, are the characteristics that define us as human beings? When and how did we acquire culture, and with it language? Let’s start with the first question; we can deal with the next one in the chapters that follow. I’ll begin by restating it in more archaeological terms: when and where did humankind originate?
The study of genetics has been transformed by molecular biology, but it isn’t always realised just how profound that transformation has been.2 I studied these things in the 1960s, as an undergraduate at university, where I learned that human beings and the great apes were descended from a common ancestor over twenty million years ago. But molecular science has shown this to be wrong. For a start, the time-scale has been compressed, and it is now known that mankind and two of the African great apes, the chimpanzee and the bonobo (a species of pygmy chimp found in the Congo basin),3 share a common ancestor who lived around five million years ago. However, you have to go back thirteen million years to find a common ancestor for man and all the great apes, which include the orang and the gorilla.
There is now a growing body of evidence to suggest that recognisably human beings had evolved in Africa over two and a half million years ago. By ‘recognisably human’ I mean that if one dressed an early hominid, such as Homo rudolfensis (named after a site near Lake Rudolf in Kenya), in a suit and tie, and gave him a shave and a haircut he would, as the old saying goes, probably frighten the children, but not necessarily the horses, should he then decide to take a stroll along Oxford Street. His gait and facial appearance would certainly attract strange looks from those too ill-bred to conceal them; but such frightened sidelong glances aside, he might just be able to complete his shopping unmolested. His appearance in modern clothes would not be as undignified and inappropriate, for example, as that of those poor chimpanzees who until very recently were used to advertise teabags; he was no Frankenstein’s monster. He died out less than two million years ago, and his place was immediately taken by other hominids, including the remarkable Homo erectus, a late form of whose bones were found at a site in Italy dating to a mere 700,000 years ago.4 If Homo erectus took a stroll along Oxford Street, his appearance would attract far less attention than Homo rudolfensis, even if his size and stature would cause most men to step respectfully aside.
When I was a student, the descent of man (people were less twitchy then about using ‘man’ to mean ‘mankind’) was seen as essentially a smooth course, with one branch leading naturally to another. More recently it has become clear