Tools Makyth Man’ 
By KENNETH OAKLEY 
British Museum (Natural History) 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN appears to have been the first to call man the 
“toolmaking animal,’? while Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus 
(1833) declared: “Without tools he is nothing.” In pre-Darwinian 
days the definition of man was no more than a philosophical exercise. 
That man might have evolved from lower animals was in the minds 
of very few people in those days. Certainly the question of how to 
draw a boundary between prehuman and human had not yet become a 
practical issue. Even the conception that man had a long unrecorded 
past had barely taken root a hundred years ago, although the seeds of 
the idea had been sown by a few men far ahead of their time, such as 
Isaac de la Peyrére, who published a book in Paris in 1655 on Primi 
Homines ante Adanvum, and John Frere whose discovery of flint tools 
in brick earths at Hoxne in Suffolk led him to infer in 1797 that they 
had been “used by a people who had not the use of metals,” and “be- 
longed to a very ancient period indeed, even before that of the present 
world.” aes 
The idea that man had an extensive prehistoric past began to grow 
during the second quarter of the last century, largely asa result of stone 
tools being recognized in deposits containing the remains of extinct 
animals. Flint implements associated with bones of Diluvial (we 
should now say Glacial) animals were reported from Belgium caves 
in 1832, and in 1840 from below a thick layer of stalagmite in Kent’s 
Cavern, Torquay. At this time orthodox scientists, following the 
French naturalist Cuvier, were incredulous of such discoveries. 
When, in 1846, a French customs official, Boucher de Perthes, repeated 
his claim (first made in 1838) that he had discovered at Abbeville in 
the ancient gravels of the river Somme, flints worked by man and 
associated with remains of Antediluvian animals, the majority of 
archeologists and geologists were frankly scornful. In 1854 one of 
his critics, a physician named Rigollot, was converted to the unortho- 
1 Reprinted by permission from Antiquity, vol. 31, 1957. 
2 Quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, April 7, 1778. 
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