Antiquity of man

26 May 1859, at the Royal Society

On 26 May 1859, Joseph Prestwich presented the Royal Society with evidence that humanly worked flints occurred in undisturbed late-geological deposits alongside remains of extinct mammals. His case rested on gravel pits at Saint-Acheul near Amiens and at Abbeville in the Somme valley, with comparable evidence from Hoxne in England.

A month earlier, on 27 April, he and John Evans had inspected and photographed a handaxe still embedded in an apparently undisturbed Saint-Acheul gravel face — 17 feet below the old surface and 6½ feet above the chalk.

One week later, the antiquaries

On 2 June, Evans put the archaeological argument to the Society of Antiquaries, describing worked flints in undisturbed gravel, sand and clay on the Continent and in England.

He concluded that the evidence strongly supported human coexistence with mammoths, rhinoceroses and other extinct mammals — while declining to assign an exact age.

Verification, not discovery

Jacques Boucher de Perthes had been reporting ancient flints from the Somme gravels for years, and guided the British visitors through his collection and the sites. Hugh Falconer, after seeing that collection, had urged Prestwich to go and look.

What the two presentations supplied was influential British scientific verification of claims that had been disputed.

The association they established was between stone tools and the remains of extinct nonhuman mammals, not ancient human skeletons — and the word Palaeolithic did not yet exist, arriving with John Lubbock's Pre-Historic Times in 1865.