---
title: "Discovery of human antiquity"
chunk: 4/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:10:51.332676+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Acceptance of human association with extinct animal species ===
Boucher de Perthes had written up discoveries in the Somme valley in 1847. Joseph Prestwich and John Evans in April 1859, and Charles Lyell with others also in 1859, made field trips to the sites, and returned convinced that humans had coexisted with extinct mammals. In general and qualitative terms, Lyell felt the evidence established the "antiquity of man": that humans were much older than the traditional assumptions had made them. His conclusions were shared by the Royal Society and other British learned institutions, as well as in France. It was this recognition of the early date of Acheulean handaxes that first established the scientific credibility of the deep antiquity of humans.

This debate was concurrent with that over the book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and was evidently related; but was not one in which Charles Darwin initially made his own views public. Consolidation of the "antiquity of man" required more work, with stricter methods; and this proved possible over the next two decades. The discoveries of Boucher de Perthes therefore motivated further researches to try to repeat and confirm the findings at other sites. Significant in this were excavations by William Pengelly at Brixham Cavern, and with a systematic approach at Kents Cavern (1865–1880). Another major project, which produced quicker findings, was that of Henry Christy and Édouard Lartet. Lartet in 1860 had published results from a cave near Massat (Ariège) claiming stone tool cuts on bones of extinct mammals, made when the bones were fresh.

== List of key sites for the 19th century debate ==

== Further issues ==

=== Antiquity of man in the New World ===

=== Tertiary Man ===
When the science was considered reasonably settled as to the existence of "Quaternary Man" (humans of the Pleistocene), there remained the issue as to whether man had existed in the Tertiary, a now obsolete term used for the preceding geological period. The debate on the antiquity of man resonated in the later debate over eoliths, which were supposed proof of the existence of man in the Pliocene (during the Neogene). In this case the sceptical view won out.

== Publications ==

=== Publications of the central years of the debate ===
Édouard Lartet, The Antiquity of Man in Western Europe (1860)
——, New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mammifers characteristic of the Last Geological Period (1861)
Charles Lyell, Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863). It was a major synthesis that discussed the issue of human antiquity, in parallel with the further issues of the Ice Ages and human evolution that promised to throw light on the origins of man.
T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863)
Alfred Russel Wallace, The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection' (1864)
James Geikie, The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1874).

=== Publications of the latter stages of the debate ===
John Patterson MacLean, A Manual of the Antiquity of Man (1877)
James Cocke Southall, The Epoch of the Mammoth and the Apparition of man upon the Earth (1878)
William Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period (1880)
Richard Owen, Antiquity of Man as deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton during Excavations of the Docks at Tilbury (1884)
George Frederick Wright, The Ice Age in North America, and its Bearings upon the Antiquity of Man (1889)
George Grant MacCurdy, Recent Discoveries Bearing on the Antiquity of Man in Europe (1910)
George Frederick Wright, Origin and Antiquity of Man (1912)
Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (1915)

== See also ==
Tool use by animals
List of first human settlements

== References ==
Citations

Sources
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Preadamites". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.