Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
Book by Charles Lyell
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- 4 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Evolution, Natural selection and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Background
Lyell had been consistently skeptical of evidence for high human antiquity since the early 1830s, and distanced himself from the theory of ice ages after a brief flirtation with it in the early 1840s. He attacked the evolutionary ideas of Lamarck in detail in his book Principles of Geology. New developments in all three areas forced him to reconsider these positions in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and became the subject matter for Antiquity of Man.
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Content
The section about man summed up the evidence for human antiquity that had been brought to light by British geologists in 1858-59, and integrated it with archaeological evidence from the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age.
The section about glaciation integrated continental ice ages into the larger picture of the Quaternary Period that Lyell had built up in his earlier works.
The section about evolution recapitulated Darwin's arguments and endorsed them, though not enthusiastically. It acknowledged that human bodies might have evolved, but left open the possibility of divine intervention in the origins of human intellect and moral sense.
Controversy
Hugh Falconer, a key player in the establishment of human antiquity, charged that Lyell – a minor player in the process – had misleadingly cast himself in the lead while ignoring the contributions of others. He raised his charges in the pages of the weekly journal The Athenaeum, and pressed them with a vehemence that some of his colleagues found distasteful.
John Lubbock, a young but rising scientific star and a member of Darwin's inner circle, charged that Lyell had incorporated large amounts of material that Lubbock had published in articles and was then reworked into a book of his own. His criticism was largely private, but well known in the scientific circles in which both moved.
Lyell gradually changed the text of Antiquity of Man to blunt some of their criticisms, but throughout the process held that he had been wrongly accused. Lyell's response is recorded in his archive, held at the University of Edinburgh's Heritage Collections, who have also created a dedicated website to Lyell's work.
Impact
Antiquity of Man had its greatest impact in the years immediately after its publication. Lyell's presentation and endorsement of the new evidence for human antiquity firmly established the theory as scientific orthodoxy. His integration of both ice ages and a very old human race into the (geologically) recent history of the Earth was novel for its time, as was his presentation of archaeological data that from continental Europe. Until the early 1860s, "archaeology" had been synonymous, in England, with the study of antiquity and the Middle Ages through artifacts. Antiquity of Man expanded it to include the study of prehistory.
The book's three-part structure meant, however, that it was quickly supplanted by more detailed works that followed in its wake. Lubbock's Prehistoric Times (1865), Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), James Archibald Geike's The Great Ice Age (1874) and William Boyd Dawkins' Early Man in Britain (1880) became the standard works on the fields to which Lyell had introduced a generation of mid-Victorian readers.