432 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
dox view when he himself found similar chipped flints (hand axes) in 
fossil-bearing river gravel at St. Acheul, near Amiens. In November 
1858, the English paleontologist Hugh Falconer visited Abbeville, and 
was favorably impressed by the evidence. In the following April, at 
Falconer’s suggestion, the geologist Joseph Prestwich went to Abbe- 
ville and St. Acheul. After examining the collections and visiting 
the pits in company with the English archeologist John Evans, he 
returned to London and on May 26, 1859, presented a paper to the 
Royal Society announcing his acceptance of the claims made by 
Boucher de Perthes and Rigollot. ‘This pronouncement, coming from 
a geologist of such high repute, had a great effect on scientific opmion 
throughout the world. The year 1859 was, as we now see, one of the 
turning points in human thought; the immense antiquity of man was 
established almost simultaneously with the publication in book form of 
Darwin’s theory of evolution, “On the Origin of Species by Means of 
Natural Selection.” 
Fossilized skeletal remains of man were found during the second 
half of the last century at a number of localities: Neanderthal (1856), 
Cro-Magnon (1868), Spy (1886), and Trinil in Java (1891). It was 
gradually realized that these provided concrete evidence that man had 
been subject to evolutionary change as deduced by Darwin in his 
“Descent of Man” (1871). However, none of these discoveries pushed 
back the antiquity of man, for the unquestionable flint tools from the 
Abbeville gravels had already indicated his existence in Europe before 
the arrival of the typically glacial fauna. As Boucher de Perthes 
expressed it (after translation) : “In spite of their imperfection, these 
rude stones prove the existence of man as surely as a whole Louvre 
would have done.” 
How great is the antiquity of man? If he is defined as the tool- 
making primate, this problem resolves itself into the question of the 
geological age of the oldest known artifacts. Although the flint hand 
axes (palaeoliths) dating from the earlier part of the Pleistocene 
period are crudely flaked, they are nevertheless standardized tools, and 
this has generally been regarded as indicating that a long tradition of 
slowly acquired skill lay behind them. This was the idea sustaining 
the search for traces of the handiwork of Tertiary man, in other words 
the hunt for eoliths. 
I must here digress for a moment to recall that the Tertiary era, 
beginning 75 million years ago and distinguished by the rise of mam- 
mals, is divided into the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene 
periods. The Pleistocene period or Ice Age, with its postglacial ap- 
pendage of Holocene or Recent time, constitutes the Quaternary era. 
Originally the Pleistocene was defined as coincident with the Quater- 
nary Ice Age, but the International Geological Congress in 1948 
recommended its redefinition to include the Villafranchian stage (for- 
