Before the Stone Age Existed

What is the difference between temptation and geological time? The one is a wile of the devil and the other is a devil of a while. (Dawkins to Hughes, 17 March 1870: SMC: TMH) In the early eighteenth century, John Conyers, an apothecary and antiquary of London, discovered the body of an elephant as he was digging for gravel at Gray’s Inn Lane. Nearby lay a flint implement (Fig. 1.1). Today we might well call his elephant a ‘mammoth’ and refer the implement to the ‘Palaeolithic’ period; in 1715, however, Conyers’s beast was dated to the reign of Claudius, the Roman Emperor. This was the belief of John Bagford, an old friend of Conyers, a bookseller and one of the founder members of a tavern-based antiquarian club that was soon to become the Society of Antiquaries of London. At the time, a Roman elephant attacked by an Ancient Briton seemed a likely scenario to account for the curious occurrence of this animal in London, far from its hot and distant homeland. It would be a century and a half later when our ancestors were acknowledged as the contemporaries of such enormous animals: they would then be pictured in a newly-discovered geological world, more ancient than the time of the Romans or even the British natives described by Caesar. For Bagford and his contemporaries, the time allotted to humans, and even to the Earth itself, was not long. Their knowledge about the distant past was gathered from folklore or historical texts, and the Bible supplied a particularly important source of chronological information. Back in the seventeenth century, James Ussher (1581–1656) had famously calculated the age of the Earth and the Creation to date to 4004 BC. But Ussher did not, as is often believed, reach this date by counting back through the generations of the Bible; indeed, he could not. As John Fuller has observed, there is no fixed point from which to start counting: a vague gap divides the last of the Hebrew books from the year AD 1.

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