Antiquity Of Man Research Articles

Héroe por un día. Jules Reboux en el crisol de la prehistoria en el Paris de 1860

The historiography of prehistoric archaeology, smoothly leading from the establishment of human antiquity by Boucher de Perthes in the late 1850s to the disciplinary and classificatory framework set up by Gabriel de Mortillet in the 1870s, still leaves considerable gaps in our understanding of the practical and conceptual developments of the field. The forgotten figure of the amateur Jules Reboux, who explored from the mid 1860s to the mid 1870s the quarry sites of Levallois, on the northern outskirts of Paris, proves in this respect salutary. Given the nature and scope of the controversies he raised, understanding Reboux’s various claims should help us reach beyond the usual front-rankers and the scripted scenarios. With his terminological and graphic innovations, Reboux’s contribution to nineteenth-century prehistoric archaeology was in fact quite fundamental, touching on such paradigmatic issues as the recognition of stratigraphic superposition, the study of stone implement manufacture and use, and the recourse to implement types for chronological classification.

Boucher de Perthes and the Discovery of Human Antiquity

<p class="p1">Why did Boucher de Perthes’ discoveries of handaxes in the Somme River’s gravels need to be verified by English geologist Joseph Prestwich, and antiquarian John Evans, before members of the French Academy of Sciences changed their minds about evidence for the antiquity of humanity? The problem was not with the evidence itself, but with the way Boucher de Perthes interpreted and published it. Teetotal, but an over-imaginative Romantic, a provincial bureaucrat and an antiquarian scholar, an autodidact, and a generous provider of charity to local workers and early advocate for women’s education, Boucher de Perthes was not only eccentric and remarkable, but also his own worst enemy. He was easily dismissed by the scientific elite of Paris until more handaxes were found at other sites and in different countries, and were recognised as being similar to those found at Abbeville.

British Pioneers of the Geology of Gibraltar, Part 2: Cave Archaeology and Geological Survey of the Rock, 1863 to 1878

The 1860s marked a period of intense early interest in the antiquity of man, and so cave archaeology, in England and elsewhere. Systematic cave archaeology was initiated on Gibraltar in 1863 by a former infantry officer, Frederick Brome, the governor of the military prison, and his discoveries prompted cave exploration and local geological interest by two young British Army officers stationed on the Rock: Alexander Burton-Brown of the Royal Artillery and the subsequently more famous Charles (later Sir Charles) Warren of the Royal Engineers. On the recommendation of Sir Charles Lyell, President of the Geological Society of London, Brome's excavated material was sent to England for study by George Busk and Hugh Falconer: both palaeontologists of considerable distinction. The new discoveries drew attention to the ‘Gibraltar Skull’, presented to the Gibraltar Scientific Society by Lieutenant Edmund Flint of the Royal Artillery in 1848 but recognized only after description of Homo neanderthalensis from Germany in 1864 as a relic of that extinct species—one of the most complete Neanderthal skulls known. Detailed topographical mapping of the Gibraltar peninsula by Charles Warren and interest in Gibraltar geology generated by cave studies led to the first geological survey of the Rock—by Andrew (later Sir Andrew) Crombie Ramsay and James Geikie of the ‘British’ Geological Survey, in 1876. The first ‘overseas’ project to be undertaken by the Survey, this was historically significant because its purpose was primarily hydrogeological and it generated an atypically large-scale (1:2,500) geological map. The map and its 1877-1878 descriptive accounts, which featured Quaternary superficial sediments in more detail than the Jurassic limestone bedrock, were to guide development of Gibraltar's fortress infrastructure for the next sixty-five years.

A Model for the Division of Semiotic Labor in Scientific Argument: The Interaction of Words and Images

ArgumentA growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell'sThe Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science.

L'archéologie dans les sciences humaines

Since archaeology is fundamentally the study of the human past, which is what the word “archaeology” connotes according to its Greek etymology, it is part of the humanities. However, archaeologists work in teams with scientists and employ quantitative techniques and comparative methods of the social sciences; archaeologists are thus an academic hybrid and are pleased to live in the interstices of many disciplines. In this article we review the history of archaeology in the humanities and explore some new directions in archaeological research. We discuss the enduring questions of origins of the antiquity of humanity, religion and art, the first agricultural villages, and the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. We also consider new agendas in archaeology: historical archaeology, landscapes in the past and present, material studies of the present, and how archaeologists are engaged in modern politics.

Archaeology in the Humanities

AbstractSince archaeology is fundamentally the study of the human past, which is what the word “archaeology” connotes according to its Greek etymology, it is part of the humanities. However, archaeologists work in teams with scientists and employ quantitative techniques and comparative methods of the social sciences; archaeologists are thus an academic hybrid and are pleased to live in the interstices of many disciplines. In this article we review the history of archaeology in the humanities and explore some new directions in archaeological research. We discuss the enduring questions of origins of the antiquity of humanity, religion and art, the first agricultural villages, and the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. We also consider new agendas in archaeology: historical archaeology, landscapes in the past and present, material studies of the present, and how archaeologists are engaged in modern politics.

The time revolution of 1859 and the stratification of the primeval mind

Archaeologists regard the demonstration of human antiquity in 1859 as a major breakthrough in the development of prehistoric studies. However, the significance of this event, although acknowledged by other disciplines, is largely passed over. We investigate why this is so by examining the procedures that the antiquary John Evans and the geologist Joseph Prestwich used to make their argument. We present previously unreported documents from the Royal Society's Library that show how they built their case for a prehistory without history. Instead it fell to two other antiquaries-archaeologists, John Lubbock and General Augustus Lane-Fox, to flesh out the discovery of deep time. Lubbock supplied a contemporary human face for the makers of Palaeolithic stone tools in the form of Tasmanian aborigines, and Lane-Fox, through his artefact-based ‘philosophy of progress’, presented a model of a stratified mind that contained primeval elements. These events, which took place between 1859 and 1875, set the pattern for research into human origins for the next century.

Old questions: new answers? Some thoughts on the origin and antiquity of man in Australia

Survey paper is presented to review the recent contributions to the questions concerning the origin and antiquity of man in Australia. The paper provides a synopsis and some new insights to the current debate.

Coins to Flint: John Evans and the Numismatic Moment in the History of Archaeology

John Evans was a key actor in the establishment of high human antiquity in 1859, and his pioneering role in launching the study of ancient stone implements is still celebrated today. However, scholars have overlooked the fact that Evans actually forged this contribution by shifting practices and preoccupations from coins to flint, from one well-established antiquarian domain in which he excelled, to another, new and as yet untested, domain. While providing relevant information on Evans' numismatics, this article shows how these transfers bear successively on the documentation of stone implements (terminology, descriptions, illustrations), their authentication (with regards to frauds and experimentation) and indeed their interpretation (the identification and explanation of their formal variability). Besides serving as an instructive historical case in ‘trans-disciplinarity’, the recognition of this initial numismatic imprint on the study of stone tools also has several consequences for current practices and interpretations in Palaeolithic archaeology.

The Curious History of the Talgai Skull

In the Australian winter of 1886 William Naish, a shearer in summer and a fencing contractor in the winter, erected a farm fence along Dalrymple Creek on East Talgai Station, c.125 km southwest of Brisbane. Work was interrupted by six days of torrential rain. On returning to the site Naish found that the rain had extended an erosion channel which he now had to cross walking to work, and from the extended section he retrieved a skull, heavily encrusted in carbonate, but clearly of human origin. Although it would take three decades to recognise and a further five to confirm, Naish had discovered the first direct proof of the Pleistocene antiquity of humans in Australia. Details of this history of Talgai are taken principally and extensively from Macintosh (1963, 1965, 1967a, 1967b, 1969), Elkin (1978), Gill (1978) and Langham (1978).

Classifying ‘Eoliths’: How Cultural Cognition Featured in Arguments Surrounding Claims for the Earliest Human Artefacts as these Developed Between 1880 and 1900

Abstract‘Eoliths’ were crude but purportedly humanly worked stones that exercised a great deal of scientific interest between about 1870 and 1930. They became a problem in the context of the debate surrounding the existence of pre-humans in Europe before the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, and are now mostly reckoned to be of non-human origin. This paper addresses the way in which a network of geologists and prehistorians associated with Benjamin Harrison, the celebrated collector of the first English eoliths, attempted to make sense of barely recognizable artefacts in the period immediately following the establishment of human antiquity in the face of orthodox creationist chronologies. Harrison and his associates did so by innovating a series of criteria, names, categories and crosscutting classifications drawn from their own cultural experience, and typologies available to them through the comparative ethnography of technology. Using concepts and insights developed in cognitive anthropology, we shall attempt to shed light on a controversy in the history of science that has implications for our understanding of the way in which scientists more generally employ ‘provisional classifications’, folk categories and vernacular terminology in order to make sense of domains of intractable data at the frontiers of knowledge.

The demonstration of human antiquity: three rediscovered illustrations from the 1825 and 1846 excavations in Kent's Cavern (Torquay, England)

The authors disentangle the fascinating tale of the investigations in Kent's Cavern, iconic site for the acceptance of early man. The drawings they have discovered in the archives of the Geological Society are the only ones known from the earliest excavations and they are published here for the first time. As this paper shows, it takes intellectual courage to be an archaeologist. Whatever the enormity of his challenge to contemporary religion, I like to think that MacEnery would have been fairly supported by Antiquity's reviewing system. But perhaps our doctrinal challenges are lesser ones.…

Human Tracks from Quaternary Tufa Deposits, Cuatro Cienegas, Coahuila, Mexico

In 1961, two human footprints were excavated from the Cuatro Cienegas region of Coahuila, Mexico, but for decades were not studied scientifically or deposited in any museum. Consequently, knowledge of the locality where they were found was lost. Once the two tracks were relocated they found their way to the Museo del Desierto, Saltillo (Coahuila) where they were placed on display with a tentative label suggesting an early Holocene age (10,000 B.C.). This inference was based only on the known antiquity of humans in the region determined from previous archaeological work and two dated sediment cores close to the footprint site. It was not until 2006 that the presumed footprint discovery site was rediscovered, revealing more than 20 additional well-preserved prints, in at least four trackways representing several different individuals with foot lengths ranging from about 23–27 cm. The tracks include one well-preserved trackway providing step and stride measurements. A poorly preserved cervid trackway and a possible duck footprint have also been identified. The footprints are preserved in hard tufa. Geochemical evidence suggests the tracks were made during periods of increased aridity.

Archibald Geikie on the Last Elevation of Scotland

Archibald Geikie announced in 1861 that Scotland had been elevated twenty-five feet since Roman times. In stratified sediments at Leith, he identified pottery fragments as Roman. Other observers promptly noted that the beds had not been deposited under water but were made ground, and that the pottery was recent. Geikie still insisted on the elevation of Scotland since Roman times, based on the terminations of the Antonine Wall. In 1871, David Milne Home showed that if in Roman times Scotland had been twenty-five feet lower than at present, Roman roads, fords, and buildings would have been submerged. In 1873, Milne Home showed further that the eastern end of the Antonine Wall would have been under water. In 1863, in Antiquity of Man, Sir Charles Lyell accepted Geikie's claims, but in the fourth edition of Antiquity in 1873 he presented Milne Home's evidence against them. Geikie never forgave Lyell for exposing his error and subsequently did his utmost to belittle him.

Cicero's brain and vibrating nerves

Few pairs of books about the history of the brain could be more discordant than this one. Daniel Lord Smail, a Harvard historian, makes a strong plea for integrating the general history of mankind with the evolutionary history of the brain. No mean task, certainly not for someone whose first book, published in 1999, examined changes in spatial designation in the notarial registries of medieval Marseille. The other book, edited by Whitaker, Smith and Finger, contains a collection of essays about 18th century advances in understanding of the nervous system. Despite their disparate vantage points, the pairing serves as a reminder that the organ of neuroscience is not immutable but evolving—however slowly. The first three chapters of Smail's book are a passionate vindication of ‘deep history’, that is, history beginning at least with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa, some 140 000 years ago. In his eyes, the ‘prehistoric’ era should not be left to geologists, anthropologists and archaeologists. When Palaeolithic tribes migrated to Europe and Asia, some 85 000 to 50 000 years ago, humans were still migrant hunters, with an economy ‘based on the calorie’. Probably it was by sheer necessity—prey having become scarce—that around 10 000 years ago the nomadic way of life gave way to a sedentary, agricultural society: the Neolithicum or late Stone Age. Remarkably, this transition took place at roughly the same time in different continents. Most historians, however, limit their narrative to history since the Bronze Age, 5500 years before our time, when also nation states developed. Smail chides his colleagues for their ‘myopic view’ and ‘sterile presentism’, hardly disturbed by the time revolution of the 1860s articulated in Darwin's ‘On the origin of species’ (1859), Lyell's ‘The geological evidences of the antiquity of man’ (1863) and Lubbock's ‘Pre-historic times’ (1865). …

Bones and ochre: the curious afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland

Introduction Part One: William Buckland (1784-1856), an Ancient British Witch, and the Question of Human Antiquity 1. William Buckland (1784-1856) 2. Man among the Cannibalistic Hyena? 3. The Romance of the Witch of Paviland 4. Buckland Accused 5. Man as a Crocodile Superior? 6. The Holy Order of Nature and Society Conclusion: The Red Is No Fossil Man Part Two: William Sollas (1849-1936), a Cro-Magnon Man, and Issues of Human Evolution 7. William Sollas (1849-1936) 8. Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives 9. The Red Is a Cro-Magnon Man 10. Human Evolution as Trunkless Tree 11. The Evolutionary Versus the Historical Model 12. The Moral Authority of Nature Conclusion: Turbulent Times for an Old Lady Part Three: An Interdisciplinary Team, an Early Upper Paleolithic Shaman, and a Definitive Report 13. The Paviland Project and Its Results 14. There is Magic at Work 15. Visualizing Paviland Cave 16. The End of the Red Lady's Story--A Definitive Report? Conclusion: An Unfinished Life Postscript Appendix A: Archaeological and Geological Series Appendix B: Schematized Views of Human Evolution Notes References Index

The archaeology of Australia's tropical rainforests

Archaeological research in the Australia's northeast Queensland rainforest and margins has revealed a human antiquity of at least 8000 cal year BP within the rainforest and at least 30,000 years on the western edge. Rainforest occupation before 2000 cal year BP was at generally very low levels, after which time settlement of this environment became intensive and probably permanent. Exploitation of toxic varieties of nuts began about 2500 cal year BP, peaking after 1500 cal year BP. This economic development appears crucial to successful human adaptation to rainforests in the area and was pivotal in facilitating the long-term permanent human settlement of the wet tropics. The role of fire, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) activity and shifting vegetation regimes were important catalysts in providing opportunities for permanent Australian rainforest Aboriginal occupation. The results have implications for global understandings of rainforest occupation by modern people. It demonstrates the wide temporal and spatial variability of human rainforest colonization processes worldwide.

Race and the odd history of human paleontology

Although the late 17th century witnessed the recognition of fossils as the remains of extinct organisms-because they could be incorporated into the creation story embodied in the Great Chain of Being-acceptance of human antiquity through the indisputable demonstration of the contemporaneity of human bones, stone tools, and accepted fossils was not forthcoming for nearly 2 centuries thereafter. When it did occur, however, ancient humans were not seen as presenting a pattern of diversity similar to that seen in the fossil records of nonhuman organisms. Instead, human evolution then, as now, has typically been interpreted as being unilinear. This belief can be traced to Huxley (1863), who argued that the Feldhofer Grotto Neanderthal skullcap was merely an extension into the past of morphology seen in the Australian Aborigine, whom he took to represent the primitive end of an extreme range of variation he thought characterized Homo sapiens. During the mid-20th century, Mayr and Dobzhansky (mis)used their clout as founders of the evolutionary synthesis to cement in paleoanthropology the idea that human evolutionary history was characterized by nonspeciation. As such, anything that could be interpreted as potentially representing taxic diversity was relegated to the status of individual variation. Lack of understanding of the history of human paleontology, and the biases that constrained its perspective on human evolution, continue to affect the ways in which most paleoanthropologists pigeonhole human fossils.

Skeletons in the cabinet: popular palaeontology and the Pleistocene extinction debate in historical perspective

How can historical examination of the Pleistocene extinction question in Australia shed light on ways that scientific debate is influenced by the cultures of science and extra-scientific concerns? In Europe, investigation of the antiquity of man occurred against the background of the invention of glaciology and its incorporation into Charles Lyell's gradualist paradigm, and speculation about fossil fauna. Broadly speaking, these three elements define the terms of a debate that continues today: climatic versus human causes for Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. This paper briefly considers four case studies which illuminate the often contingent nature of scientific knowledge. From nineteenth-century London to 1880s Adelaide to Melbourne in the first decade of the twentieth century to Australian Quaternists in the twenty-first, acceptance or otherwise of Aboriginal testimony and other more material evidence has been conditioned by scientific or political agenda as much as by its intrinsic reliability. These arguments are won in public forums by the weight of rhetoric more than the weight of evidence, perhaps one reason that less deterministic, multi-causal models are rarely debated in the popular media.

The Seventy-Year Itch: Controversies over Human Antiquity and Their Resolution

Several major turning points in the study of human prehistory have occurred at almost precisely 70 year intervals: from the initial establishment of a deep human antiquity in Europe in the late 1850s (at Brixham Cave and in the Somme River Valley) to the demonstration in the late 1920s at Folsom that American prehistory reached into the Pleistocene (albeit not very far) to the realization in the late 1990s, based on evidence from Monte Verde, that there was a still-earlier, pre-Clovis presence in the Americas. It is unlikely that the cyclical nature of these episodes is anything more than an odd coincidence. Still, there are patterns to those cycles of controversy and resolution beyond their timing that tell us a great deal about the evolution of and revolution in scientific knowledge. Moreover, in comparing these episodes, and the differences that emerge from that comparison, we can see clearly how much (and how little) archaeology has changed over the past two centuries.