A Legacy of Zeal and Perseverance
What happened to the surviving time revolutionaries and their legacy? Knighthoods, high office, a peerage, and bespoke mansions all followed. France preserved Boucher de Perthes’s legacy better than England that of its time revolutionaries, whom it forgot. War, however, destroyed Abbeville in 1940 and with it Boucher de Perthes’s collections and public statue. Lubbock was the last to die in 1913, having seen the Piltdown forgery. Then follows an excursion into the development of the modern synthesis of human origins with scientific dates, a detailed deep-sea record of climate change and the ages of the sites they found on the Somme and at Hoxne. Changing views of our remote ancestors are shown in artists’ imaginings and through bestselling authors. The reticence of Prestwich and Evans to speculate was forgotten as deep history was fleshed out to resonate with the present. The chapter ends by placing the time revolution at the start of an interest in universal and deep history. The time revolutionaries changed our relationship with time and set in motion a dialogue with the past that continues to challenge and enthral.