Prehistory

:hur Cotterell

Prehistory
The age of the planet Modern scientific awareness of both prehistory and the vast geological age of planet earth is really a result of investigations over the past two hundred years. Although the eighth-century Chinese mathematician and astronomer, I-Hsing, had considered the world to have been in existence for millions of years, it was more than a millennium beforesuch a notion could be entertained in Europe. As late as 1650 the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, calculated from the Old Testament that the date for the creation of the earth was 4004 BC. Dr John Lightfoot, then the Master of St Catherine's College, University of Cambridge, further refined this date and declared that it had taken place on 23 October 4004 EC at nine o'clock in the morning. Thecalculation allowed a modest 6000 years for the age of the planet and this was duly printed in the margin of the Authorized Version of the Bible. Despite this, pressure began to build up against the Ussher/Lightfoot proposition, especially during the eighteenth century when fossils began to be widely accepted, together with the growing awareness that the earth's geology was complex in nature.Extinct animals were identified and some scholars put forward the ingenious suggestion that they were remains of creatures drowned in the Flood. As time progressed and the science of geology began to be studied seriously, many more fossil finds were made and, in addition, stone implements were discovered and recognized as being the works of man before the use of metal. Sequences of fossils weredocumented and put forward as proof of the length of time represented by the fossil-bearing strata. Opposition to this idea was so strong that a popular contention held that a series of catastrophes must have occurred, each having wrought havoc with the animal and plant life of the planet, thus producing the fossils. After each disaster, God had restocked earth with quite new species. Noah was believedto have built his ark to deal with the last catastrophe. It was in the early part of the nineteenth century that the immense age of the planet began to be generally accepted. In 1830 Charles Lyell published The Principles of Geology which had considerable impact upon scientific thought at the time. Evidence for the long descent of mankind came from the discovery of flint hand axes associated withthe remains of extinct mammals. This discovery was first made in 1850 by a French customs official at Abbeville, Jacques Boucher de Crevecoeur de Perthes. He argued strongly for the great antiquity of his
1470, the oldest complete skull discovered in Kenya, reveals a crucial hominid development-an enlarged brain.

Richard E. Leakey

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finds. We now know that these artifacts indeed belong to the Old Stone Age of Europe and, since their discovery, many more sites have been found and studied all over the world. On 2 4 November 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species and the first printing of over 1000 copies was sold out theday of publication. Darwin's proposition was that the diversity of species known in the living world was the result of evolution. He put forward the theory that natural selection was the mechanism by which living organisms had gradually adapted to changing environments over many generations. He recognized that, by this process of evolution, a species might change and that an ancestral form might bequite different from its evolutionary descendant. Origins of mankind In 1871 Darwin published his Descent of Man which firmly placed mankind in the evolutionary scheme and suggested that we had had apelike ancestors. He also suggested that Africa would prove to be the cradle of mankind. Although there was considerable controversy over Darwin's ideas, a significant body of scientific evidence...