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.

Acceptance

By the end of the decade the time revolution was a done deal. Moulin-Quignon still reverberated, but in 1865 Lubbock produced the first guided tour of the Old Stone Age, in which he accused Lyell of plagiarism. In Pre-Historic Times he filled the new space of deep history with stone tools to show an evolutionary pathway from St Acheul to the Neolithic monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge. Tracing history back was matched by the anthropologist Edward Tylor, who traced it up. Both men were interested in the evolution of racial groups and accounting for the world’s hunters and gatherers. In a typically upbeat assessment, Lubbock saw the lesson of the past as providing hope for the future. Victorian ‘savages’ at the uttermost ends of the earth had not degenerated from a civilized state. They had the potential to evolve, as his ancestors in Europe had done. Unwritten history was making universal history possible. The decade saw deaths and career changes. Prestwich largely abandoned the time revolution, married Falconer’s niece, Grace McCall, and became an Oxford professor. Falconer and Boucher de Perthes died, while Lubbock entered Parliament in 1870. Prestwich’s fixed notion of a single ice age was challenged by James Croll, who painstakingly worked out the changes in the elliptical orbit of the Earth, and from these proposed multiple ice ages. As a bookend to the decade Evans published his fact-rich volume on ancient stone implements. The path of deep history was now set in stone.

The Time Revolutionaries of 1859

The three principals, their partners, families, and networks are introduced. The chapter uses Darwin’s explanation of natural selection in 1857: ‘We have almost unlimited time; no-one but a practical geologist can fully appreciate this.’ Evans, Lubbock, and Prestwich were all practical geologists but with conflicting interests in managing London’s water supply for health and business. The chapter explores their geological passion and how they came to investigate the question of great human antiquity—the crux of the time revolution. The idea of using stone tools as a proxy for remote human ancestors is examined and the challenges which faced them set out. The characters of the principals are mapped onto the ideals in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, where zeal and perseverance sum up the qualities of success in all walks of life. George Eliot’s observations in Adam Bede on the men of New Leisure provides another fit for the three time revolutionaries. The preoccupation of the mid-nineteenth century with time is also examined using three inventions, the railways and railway time, shrinking distance—and hence time—by telegraphy, and freezing time with photographs. Examples range across literature and engineering.

Afterword

150 years after it was found the search began for the missing flint that was photographed and described on 27 April 1859. This chapter explores what other documentation was lost and, in particular, the two photographs taken on the day of discovery. The idea of archaeology as an experiment is also discussed. The historically important flint was re-discovered in the Prestwich collection that, after his death in 1896, went to the Natural History Museum. Until 2008 its importance was not recognised. It was possible to match the flint tool, identified by a well-glued label in Prestwich’s handwriting, with the close-up photograph taken in 1859. But when examined in detail a question emerged about its authenticity. Was it a genuine artefact or a forgery by one of the quarrymen that deceived both Evans and Prestwich?

Discovery

The narrative starts at breakfast in the northern French town of Abbeville on the River Somme. Prestwich and Evans are joined by the pioneering, but eccentric antiquary Jacques Boucher de Perthes. They are here to inspect his claims for stone tools found alongside the bones of extinct ice age animals. If they can verify his claim, then the time revolution has begun. The reasons why Boucher de Perthes has been ignored are touched on as the three visit the gravel pits of the town, looking at the evidence. Lunch allows them to study Boucher de Perthes’s huge collection of flints and antiquities, including his strange stone sculptures. They are interrupted by a telegram and leave for Amiens. The train journey from Abbeville to Amiens is used to reflect on how they built their scientific case from facts, not theories. Once in Amiens they are taken by Charles Pinsard to the gravel pits at St Acheul, where they find, and photograph, the evidence they came for. The circumstances of the discovery are described in their own words.

Presenting the Evidence

The next month is a busy time for Evans and Prestwich, who are now back in London, as they fit writing their papers into a hectic business schedule. The importance of two learned societies—the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries—is explained, as is the craft of putting together a scientific argument. Prestwich’s original manuscript and the referees’ reports are used to show the process. Evans’s chance discovery of comparable implements to those they had found at St Acheul proves a game changer. They came from Hoxne in Suffolk and had been found, but forgotten, sixty years before. Revolutions rely on chance. Attention is paid to the case they made that stone tools were human rather than natural. Did Evans fall back on his knowledge of numismatics and his recent struggles with a patent law case to convince sceptics that the tools from the Somme were indeed evidence of ancient humans? The language of the flints is all important. As they prepare and present their evidence, the chapter picks up the story of Falconer and his niece, Grace McCall, who were introduced in Abbeville in Chapter 2. They are now in Italy, caught up in the latest phase of the Risorgimento war.

Reception

The timescale now stretches to the year following the presentation of the evidence. They are warned by Charles Kingsley to expect clerical opposition, but it is slow in coming. Instead, there is a lively debate in the papers about the status of the stone tools and how to account for them. These ideas are set against Herbert Spencer’s view that all life and culture proceeds from the simple to the complex. Are Evans and Prestwich tapping into his idea of progress rather than Darwin’s natural selection, which appears later in the year? The chapter explores when, in 1859, historians such as Buckle, Macaulay, and Freeman thought history began. Their views contrast with the Northern Antiquaries of Scandinavia, who had proposed an earlier prehistoric period before written records. The time revolution had to be fitted into this scheme, and Lubbock was instrumental in finding it room. The time revolution set out to correct bad geology. The timescale of Genesis was simply wrong, although further confrontation with religious beliefs troubled Prestwich. The time revolutionaries were supported by the furore surrounding Essays and Reviews, published in 1860, where clerics challenged the Church’s authority on these matters. The question of how old the artefacts were is examined. They had no means of scientifically measuring age and remained sceptical of conjecture. Their suggestions are compared with those adopted by geologists such as Lyell and Phillips for physical changes in the earth.

Consolidation

The year 1863 saw the consolidation of the time revolution. Evans and Prestwich presented further weighty papers on the Somme, but the major contributions came that year in books by Lyell and Huxley. Lyell’s book outraged Falconer, and a bitter argument ensued about intellectual property. Both authors chart the developmental process by which ‘primitive’ skulls became ‘advanced’ ones. Critical to this was Huxley’s use of the Neanderthal skull that became the first ice age human. Evans, in the meantime, was excavating the ‘missing link’ fossil Archaeopteryx in the British Museum. Falconer’s ire was diverted by Boucher de Perthes’s discovery in 1863 of human remains at Moulin Quignon, outside Abbeville. If authentic, these would be the oldest fossil ancestors. What followed was a lengthy examination of the evidence, with English scientists disagreeing with their French counterparts. In 1859 the quarrymen had been treated as a source of knowledge. Now they were branded by the English as forgers. The climate of claim and counterclaim contrasts with the clarity of the 1859 protocols that proved human antiquity.