Archaeological discoveries

The flint ax that broke the biblical conception of the antiquity of humanity

The story begins with a fortuitous meeting aboard a train from Surrey to London, possibly in the year 1854, without either of its two protagonists ever revealing the exact date.

Both Joseph Prestwich and John Evans were businessmen, the former in the wine trade and the latter in papermaking. But they had a common passion, geology, which they chatted about animatedly throughout the drive, as well as archaeology, which was Evans' main interest. It was the beginning of a friendship that would last 40 years, until Prestwich's death.

Both would form one of the most famous couples in the history of archaeology, and a few years later, in 1859, they would change the world forever, ahead of Darwin and his publication of The Origin of Species for six months and establishing the evidence for the antiquity of man . That is, the human race had appeared on Earth many thousands of years earlier than biblically based tradition claimed.

Just a decade ago Austen Henry Layard excavated the city of Nineveh and discovered the clay tablets containing the Poem of Gilgamesh , later translated in 1872 by George Smith, and which blew up the biblical conception of history.

In the midst of all this effervescence Prestwich and Evans, together with the geologist Charles Lyell, visited the Abbeville deposits in France in 1859. Nearly a century before, John Frere had found prehistoric bifaces and axes here, coming from deposits where workers claimed that there were also fossil bones of extinct animals. But the pre-Darwinian mentality of the time ignored Frere's findings and theories that those tools had been made by very ancient men who did not know the use of metal.

Years later, between 1836 and 1846, Boucher de Perthes followed in Frere's footsteps by finding (actually buying the pieces from workers on the gravel terraces of the River Somme near Abbeville) new flint tools and fossil bones, also reaching the conclusion that they must have been of great antiquity. But even so, conclusive proof was lacking, evidence for such claims that was found in situ, at an undisturbed geological level. Indeed Boucher would be widely ignored and ridiculed, even by Darwin.

According to James Sackett, the fact that Perthes' discoveries needed to be verified before members of the French Academy of Sciences would accept his postulates lay not so much in the evidence itself, but in the way Perthes interpreted and interpreted it. had published. They were not going to accept the tests of an eccentric and self-taught bureaucrat just like that.

It would be precisely Prestwich and Evans who were going to find that definitive proof. What they were looking for was a flint tool, which would appear in an unadulterated context, and at a geological level similar to that of the bones of extinct animals such as the mammoth.

On April 27, 1859, while touring the Abbeville sites with Boucher de Perthes acting as their guide, they received a telegram announcing that a flint ax had been found in Saint-Acheul, near Amiens. They immediately took the first train and in the late afternoon they showed up at the scene.

Photographs exist of the moment in which they proceeded to examine the ax in situ, accompanied by scientific witnesses (today in the municipal library of Amiens), being the first time in history that this technology was used (he was about 30 years old at the time). in a prehistoric archaeological discovery.

This specimen was later lost, mixed among the numerous bifaces and axes that would be extracted in the following years. In fact, it would have been lost for almost a century and a half, until Professors Clive Gamble and Robert Kruszunski identified it, thanks to Prestwich's descriptions, in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London.

Today it is considered the most important Stone Age tool in terms of what it meant for the establishment of the geological age of mankind. For the first time, conclusive evidence was found that man was more than 6,000 years old, having coexisted with the great mammoths of the ice age 400,000 years earlier.

Archaeologists would eventually discover much older stone tools, up to two and a half million years old, but that little ax was the start of it all.

Prestwich would make many more important geological discoveries in his lifetime, and after his death in 1896 his huge collection of fossils and other artifacts was donated to the Natural History Museum in London, where it is on display today.

Evans went on to become Europe's foremost authority on stone tools, publishing his Ancient Stone Implements in 1872. , considered the most important treatise on the subject. He chaired the Geological Society of London and was a member of the French Institute, dying in 1908. One of his sons, Arthur John Evans, would follow in his footsteps and discover the Minoan palace of Knossos on the island of Crete.