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Discovery of human antiquity

The discovery of human antiquity was a major achievement of science in the middle of the 19th century, and the foundation of scientific paleoanthropology. The antiquity of man, human antiquity, or in simpler language the age of the human race, are names given to the series of scientific debates it involved, which with modifications continue in the 21st century. These debates have clarified and given scientific evidence, from a number of disciplines, towards solving the basic question of dating the first human being.

Controversy was very active in this area in parts of the 19th century, with some dormant periods also. A key date was the 1859 re-evaluation of archaeological evidence that had been published 12 years earlier by Boucher de Perthes. It was then widely accepted, as validating the suggestion that man was much older than had previously been believed, for example than the 6,000 years implied by some traditional chronologies.


In 1863 T. H. Huxley argued that man was an evolved species; and in 1864 Alfred Russel Wallace combined natural selection with the issue of antiquity. The arguments from science for what was then called the "great antiquity of man" became convincing to most scientists, over the following decade. The separate debate on the antiquity of man had in effect merged into the larger one on evolution, being simply a chronological aspect. It has not ended as a discussion, however, since the current science of human antiquity is still in flux.

the story of the and the descent of humans from a single couple;

Garden of Eden

the story of the universal , after which all humans descended from Noah and his wife, and all animals from those saved in the Ark;

biblical Flood

genealogies providing in theory a way of dating events in the Old Testament (see ).

Genealogy of the Bible

The Antiquity of Man in Western Europe (1860)

Édouard Lartet

——, New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mammifers characteristic of the Last Geological Period (1861)

Charles Lyell, (1863). It was a major synthesis that discussed the issue of human antiquity, in parallel with the further issues of the Ice Ages and human evolution that promised to throw light on the origins of man.

Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man

Alfred Russel Wallace, The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection' (1864)

The Great Ice Age and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1874).

James Geikie

Tool use by animals

List of first human settlements

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the : Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Preadamites". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

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