The most important stone artefact in the story of human origins has been rediscovered :
26/05/2009
Having been lost to history for 150 years, the most important stone tool in the establishment of the geological antiquity of humankind has now been rediscovered by Professor Clive Gamble, an archaeologist in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
On 27 April 1859, seven months before Darwin published his ‘Origin of species’, a momentous discovery was made in a gravel pit outside Amiens in northern France. Two English businessmen, Joseph Prestwich and John Evans, whose interests were respectively in geology and archaeology, had come there to find the evidence that would prove the great antiquity of humans. What they discovered was to dispel the long held Biblical view which put a timescale on the whole of Creation of only 6000 years.
Evans and Prestwich had been searching for the evidence, looking for a special kind of stone tool that they wanted to extract themselves from undisturbed ground, and it had to come from the same geological levels as the bones of extinct animals such as woolly mammoth and rhino. On 27 April their search proved successful: a flint axe was found in St Acheul, just outside Amiens. In the presence of scientific witnesses and a photographer, they discovered the stone that shattered the time barrier and pushed our ancestors back in time to the era of the ice age mammoths.
This vital stone implement was exhibited in 1859 at the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London along with the photograph of its discovery – the oldest photographic record of an archaeological discovery anywhere. But it was then lost to history, never displayed or even illustrated in a scientific journal.
In 2008, Professor Gamble began research for the anniversary of Prestwich and Evans’ discovery. ‘Enquiries to several museums drew a blank and it was assumed their flint tool had either been lost or lay unlabelled in a drawer alongside many thousands that have been collected since’, says Professor Gamble. Then his enquiry to the Natural History Museum, which had received Prestwich’s collection in 1896, paid off. The curator Dr Robert Kruszynski searched through the stone tools and found a triangular shaped piece with a small label with the words ‘St.Acheul Amiens April 27 – 59’.
Today this stone artefact is still archaeology’s most dangerous discovery because it shattered a central myth of Creationism and broke the stranglehold of Biblical explanations for our past. It is as potent as Darwin’s theory that followed later in the year and added the process of change to an ancient chronology.
But why was it forgotten? ‘The answer is simple’, explains Professor Gamble. ‘As stone handaxes go it is an unfinished piece, roughly made by a human ancestor 400,000 years ago. Prestwich and Evans would have been amazed at such an age, but they had the task of convincing the doubters in London and Paris that it was indeed a human artefact. Subsequently, they found many better-made pieces, some entirely symmetrical that left no doubt that these were produced by design and not accident’.
The full story of the rediscovery, the place of their find in Victorian science and the establishment of human antiquity is the subject of a conference on 2 June 2009 at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House Piccadilly. This marks the anniversary of Sir John Evans’ lecture to the Society that laid out the evidence. The first publication of the artefact is in ‘Antiquity’ today (26 May 2009).