A very remote period indeed…

Around 45 million years ago, Earth was barely recognisable as the world we inhabit. South America was connected to Antarctica and Australia and was separate from North America. The Arabian subcontinent was a part of Africa, and Africa was separated from Eurasia by the Tethys Sea. The planet was largely free of ice, even at the poles, and tropical vegetation extended from the American Northwest to New Zealand. While temperatures in the tropics were comparable to today, those at higher latitudes were warmer by more than 10°C.

It was a period that geologists now refer to as the Eocene. Some twenty million years after the Chicxulub meteorite impact ended the reign of the dinosaurs, mammals had become Earth’s dominant lifeform. Among them were our distant primate ancestors, the anthropoids. They shared many features with present-day apes and monkeys, but they were substantially smaller. 

The possibility that such a world might once have existed would have been inconceivable just two hundred and fifty years ago. At that time, most people believed that the Bible and the works of Classical scholars contained everything there was to know about human origins. Few doubted that the Earth and every living thing upon it had been created by God, out of nothing. It was widely believed that this had happened in 4004 BCE, a date Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh computed in 1650 from purely Biblical sources. There was, by definition, no such thing as prehistory. This viewpoint began to unravel during the latter part of the eighteenth century when geologists began to understand the processes that had shaped the surface of the Earth. It also became clear that the fossil record contained evidence for life forms that no longer existed, implying a sequence of events more complex than could be explained by the Biblical account of a single great flood.

Scottish geologist James Hutton argued that geological principles do not change with time and have remained the same throughout Earth’s history. He suggested that changes in the Earth’s geology occurred gradually, and were driven by volcanic action, deposition of sediment, and erosion by wind and rain, rather than by floods and other biblical catastrophes. Hutton recognised that these processes would have required far longer than 6,000 years to shape the Earth as we know it. Unfortunately, his writing style was obscure at best, and his work attracted little interest in his lifetime. It was not until the 1830s that his theories were popularised by fellow Scot Sir Charles Lyell. Nevertheless, Hutton’s approach, for which Lyell coined the term ‘uniformitarian’, is now considered to be the foundation of modern geology.

Another man whose work was largely ignored at the time was Suffolk politician John Frere. In 1797, Frere presented evidence suggesting that humans had been contemporary with now-extinct animals. He wrote to the Society of Antiquaries of London, submitting some flint hand axes found at Hoxne, Suffolk. Similar stone artefacts had been known for centuries, but their significance was not widely appreciated. Indeed, many people believed they were thunderbolts or the work of elves rather than of human origin. The Hoxne artefacts,  which are now thought to be around 350,000 years old, had been found twelve feet below the ground and were associated with bones of extinct animals. Frere suggested that they were “weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world”. Although Frere was not the first to suggest a human origin for the stone artefacts, he was the first to use archaeological context to attest to their great antiquity and, by implication, that of humanity.

It would take more than sixty years for Frere’s radical suggestion to become widely accepted, as the majority of his contemporaries still preferred to hold on to Biblical explanations. Nevertheless, evidence continued to accumulate for greater human antiquity than that allowed by James Ussher’s chronology. In 1813, the Danish historian Lauritz Schebye Vedel-Simonsen noted that the earliest inhabitants of Scandinavia had used weapons and implements made from wood and stone. Later artefacts were made from copper, and only the latest were of iron. The overall picture seemed to be one of gradual technological advances over a long period. The idea was soon taken up by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, Curator of the Northern Museum of Antiquities (now the National Museum of Denmark). Thomsen faced the task of putting the museum’s large and growing collection into order, and he arranged exhibits by the now-familiar Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. The system was proposed by Thomsen in 1836, in a preface to his guidebook to the museum’s collection⁷. In January 1837, Thomson published a short essay in which he divided prehistory into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. This Three Age system was widely adopted, especially after the essay was translated into English in 1848.  Some years later, banker and politician Sir John Lubbock subdivided the Stone Age into two periods, an older period characterised by flaked tools and a later period of more sophisticated, polished artefacts. He termed the two periods the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, or the Old Stone Age and New Stone Age.

The decisive moment came in 1859, a year that saw two events pivotal in our understanding of human prehistory. The first came in April of that year when Joseph Prestwich and John Evans visited customs official Jacques Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville in northern France. Both were primarily businessmen rather than full-time scholars: Prestwich was a vintner, and Evans worked in his uncle’s papermaking business, John Dickinson Stationery Ltd. Nevertheless, the pair took an interest in scholarly matters, including geology, antiquities, and coins from the Classical era.

Some years earlier, Boucher de Perthes had begun collecting stone implements recovered from gravel pits in the Somme Valley, and he noted that these were sometimes associated with the remains of elephants and rhinoceros, long extinct in France. In 1847, he published his conclusions in a three-volume work titled Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (Antiquities of the Celtic and Antediluvian peoples). Antediluvian (literally ‘before the Flood’) refers to what we now term the Pleistocene – the geological epoch preceding the current Holocene. Unfortunately, the work’s mystical speculations about reincarnation detracted from its more valuable findings, and it attracted little interest from French academia. Darwin is reputed to have dismissed the work as ‘rubbish’.

One critic was Dr Marcel-Jérôme Rigollot, who lived a short distance away in Amiens. He nevertheless began to explore the river gravels in the suburb of Saint-Acheul and soon began to discover similar artefacts. Rigollot had a rather more pragmatic approach to his work, and his report, published in 1854, was straightforward and well-illustrated. Unfortunately, he died in 1854, soon after the publication of his report. The artefacts recovered by Boucher de Perthes and Rigollot included triangular hand axes of a type now known as ‘Acheulean’, named for Saint-Acheul. Encouraged by Rigollot’s findings and also concerned about a possible loss of priority, Boucher de Perthes published a second edition of his book in 1857, but it continued to attract little attention. 

Boucher de Perthes’ luck finally changed in 1858 when he met the Scottish palaeontologist Hugh Falconer, who in turn persuaded Prestwich and Evans to investigate the findings at Abbeville and Saint-Acheul. In April of the following year, the pair met with Boucher de Perthes, and though initially sceptical, they were soon convinced by the evidence presented to them. This included a hand axe lying in situ in the wall of a gravel pit at Saint-Acheul, which they were invited to photograph.

On returning to Britain, Prestwich and Evans gave a series of presentations at the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, in which they publicly supported Boucher de Perthes’ claim. The mainstream Victorian scientific establishment finally came to accept what was termed the Antiquity of Man. Ironically, before any of these lectures took place, Evans happened by chance to come upon one of John Frere’s hand axes on display at the headquarters of the Society of Antiquaries. He saw at once that it closely resembled the Acheulean hand axes that he and Prestwich had examined in France, and his enquiries revealed the missed opportunity of more than six decades earlier. Evans and Prestwich hastened to investigate further, and the Hoxne hand axes featured prominently in the papers they subsequently presented to the two learned societies. It was the final proof of the Antiquity of Man because it repeated the same set of discoveries that had been made on the Somme. Shortly thereafter, the pair arranged for Sir Charles Lyell, who was a longstanding sceptic of the Antiquity of Man, to visit the Somme. More hand axes were found at St Acheul, and Lyell was now convinced. At a full house session of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Aberdeen in September 1859, in the presence of Prince Albert, he added his support to Prestwich and Evans’ claims.

Just how this new perspective on the human past might have fared in isolation will never be known, because it was followed only months later by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Darwin was certainly not the first to think of evolution; the idea had been proposed decades earlier, most notably by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Indeed, early editions of Origin avoided the word ‘evolution’ altogether, using instead the term ‘descent with modification’. What Darwin proposed was ‘natural selection’, a process whereby differences between individuals of the same species mean that some will fare better than others. The more successful individuals are better able to evade predators and compete effectively for limited resources. Hence, they stand a better chance of reproducing and passing on their advantageous traits to their offspring.

Darwin developed the theory of natural selection between 1844 and 1858, but it was independently proposed by the Welsh naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, who wrote to Darwin with a short description of the same evolutionary mechanism he was himself working on. Darwin published a synopsis of his work, which was jointly presented with Wallace’s paper to the Linnaean Society of London. That neither Darwin nor Wallace wished to take sole credit for their work meant that there were none of the unseemly squabbles over priority that have bedevilled so many joint discoveries down the centuries. The Origin of Species was published a year later, and the first edition promptly sold out.

Evolution remained unpopular in clerical circles and controversial elsewhere. Darwin was regularly portrayed as an ape by satirical media. In fact, he was not the first to propose that humans evolved from apes, and The Origin of Species only hints that the theory may cast light on human origins. It was his friend and self-styled ‘bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, who first publicised the anatomical similarities between humans and apes. In 1863, Huxley presented anatomical and other evidence for the evolution of humans and apes from a common ancestor in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, the first book ever to be devoted to the topic of human evolution. It was not until eight years later that Darwin’s The Descent of Man appeared, in which he proposed that humans were most closely related to African apes. 

The transformation was complete: from chosen beings created in 4004 BCE in God’s image to an ape that had evolved in Africa at some unknown time in the distant past. Science had triumphed over superstition to reveal the existence of a forgotten world that lay far beyond the comforting reach of the Old Testament and the texts of ancient Greek and Roman historians.

Ever since the 1850s, anthropologists, archaeologists, and scientists from many other disciplines have all tried to piece together the events of this long, formative period. They have drawn together strands of evidence from many diverse sources. These include fossils, archaeological remains, indicators of ancient climate change, languages that have not been spoken for millennia, and even the molecules of which our bodies are composed. Their findings cover a period so vast that recorded history is but an instant in comparison.

You are invited to join me on a journey through the ages of humanity, from the first apes to the first cities. The From the Beginning series of eBook short reads and full-sized books explores human evolution, archaeology, and the prehistoric world.

The 50-chapter Prehistoric Investigations provides an accessible and engaging introduction to many of the most fascinating questions in prehistory and human evolution. It explores a wide range of topics, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, radiocarbon dating, ancient DNA, temples and settlements of the Early Neolithic period, how our ancestors domesticated cats and dogs, the origins of the Indo-European languages, the fate of Ötzi the Iceman, the enigmatic Nebra sky disc, and the invention of writing.

For readers seeking a comprehensive account of our human past, Humans: from the beginning traces the entire story of human evolution and prehistory, from the first apes to the origins of civilisation. Drawing on expert literature and cutting-edge research, Humans: from the beginning is a clear and engaging guide to the human story. Archaeological, fossil, genetic, and other lines of evidence are assembled to present a coherent, even-handed picture of humanity’s past.