---
title: "Discovery of human antiquity"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_human_antiquity"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:57.794617+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Human origins and the "universal deluge" debated ====
The Flood could explain extinctions of species at that date, on the hypothesis that the Ark had not contained all species of animal. A Flood that was not universal, on the other hand, had implications for the biblical theory of races and Noah's sons. The theory of catastrophism, which was as much secular as theological in attitude, could be used in analogous ways.

There was interest in matters arising from modification of the biblical narrative, therefore, and it was fuelled by the new knowledge of the world in early modern Europe, and then by the growth of the sciences. One hypothesis was of people not descended from Adam. This hypothesis of polygenism (no unique origin of humans) implied nothing on the antiquity of man, but the issue was implicated in counter-arguments, for monogenism.

==== La Peyrère and the completeness of the Biblical account ====
Isaac La Peyrère appealed in formulating his Preadamite theory of polygenism to Jewish tradition; it was intended to be compatible with the biblical creation of man. It was rejected by many contemporary theologians. This idea of humans before Adam had been current in earlier Christian scholars and those of unorthodox and heretical beliefs; La Peyrère's significance was his synthesis of the dissent. Influentially, he revived the classical idea of Marcus Terentius Varro, preserved in Censorinus, of a three-fold division of historical time into "uncertain" (to a universal flood), "mythical", and "historical" (with certain chronology).

==== Debate on race ====
The biblical narrative had implications for ethnology (division into Hamitic, Japhetic and Semitic peoples), and had its defenders, as well as those who felt it made significant omissions. Matthew Hale wrote his Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677) against La Peyrère, it has been suggested, in order to defend the propositions of a young human race and universal Flood, and the Native Americans as descended from Noah. Anthony John Maas writing in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia commented that pro-slavery sentiment indirectly supported the Preadamite theories of the middle of the 19th century. The antiquity of man found support in the opposed theories of monogenism of this time that justified abolitionism by discrediting scientific racism.
Already in the 18th century polygenism was applied as a theory of race (see Scientific racism#Blumenbach and Buffon). A variant racist Preadamism was introduced, in particular by Reginald Stuart Poole (The Genesis of the Earth and of Man, London, 1860) and Dominic M'Causland (Adam and the Adamite, or the Harmony of Scripture and Ethnology, London, 1864). They followed the views of Samuel George Morton, Josiah C. Nott, George Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz; and maintained that Adam was the progenitor of the Caucasian race, while the other races descended from Preadamite ancestry.

James Cowles Prichard argued against polygenism, wishing to support the account drawn from the Book of Genesis of a single human origin. In particular he argued that humans were one species, using the interfertility criterion of hybridity. By his use of a form of natural selection to argue for change of human skin colour as a historical process, he also implied a time scale long enough for such a process to have produced the observed differences.

==== Incompatible views of chronology ====
The Early Christian Church contested claims that pagan traditions were older than that of the Bible. Theophilus of Antioch and Augustine of Hippo both argued against Egyptian views that the world was at least 100,000 years old. This figure was too high to be compatible with biblical chronology. One of La Peyrère's propositions, that China was at least 10,000 years old, gained wider currency; Martino Martini had provided details of traditional Chinese chronology, from which it was deduced by Isaac Vossius that Noah's Flood was local rather than universal.
One of the considerations detected in La Peyrère by Otto Zöckler was concern with the Antipodes and their people: were they pre-Adamites, or indeed had there been a second "Adam of the Antipodes"? In a 19th-century sequel, Alfred Russel Wallace in an 1867 book review pointed to the Pacific Islanders as posing a problem for those holding both to monogenism and a recent date for human origins. In other words, he took migration from an original location to remote islands that are now populated to imply a long time scale. A significant consequence of the recognition of the antiquity of man was the greater scope for conjectural history, in particular for all aspects of diffusionism and social evolutionism.

==== Creation of man in a world not ready ====
While extinction of species came with the development of geology to be widely accepted in the early 19th century, there was resistance on theological grounds to extinctions after the creation of man. It was argued, in particular in the 1820s and 1830s, that man would not be created into an "imperfect" world as far as design of its collection of species was concerned. This reasoning cut across that which was conclusive for the science of the antiquity of man, a generation later.

=== Archaeological context ===
The late 18th century was a period in which French and German caves were explored, and remains taken for study: caving was in fashion, if speleology was only in its infancy, and the St. Beatus Caves, for example, attracted many visitors. Caves were a theme of the art of the time, also. Cave remains proved of great importance to the science of the antiquity of man. Stalagmite formation was a clearcut mechanism of formation of fossils, and its stratigraphy could be understood. Other sites of importance were associated with alluvial deposits of gravel and clay, or peat. The early example of the Gray's Inn Lane Hand Axe was from gravel in a bed of a tributary of the River Thames, but remained isolated for about a century.