15,000,000,000 (15 billion) years ago The creation of the
universe according to
Physical Sciences
information gateway (psigate) (Launched Manchester September
2001. - last surviving Internet Archive traced is 26.9.2006, but see
UK Web Archive)
13,800,000,000 (13.8 billion) years ago The creation of the
universe according to present estimates of "big bang" -
"Stephen Hawkings and others... estimate between 18 and 11 billion
with
13.8 being the closest estimation".
4,540,000,000 (4.54 billion) years ago Formation of planet Earth
- Usher's date
was 4,004BC - flood
geologists have suggested about
8,000BC
4,540,000,000 to
541,000,000 years ago
Pre-Cambrian - Before even old Welsh
rocks. The earliest 4.06 billion years (4,060,000,000?) of Earth's history.
88% of geologic time. See
Wikipedia. Followed by
Cambrian -
Ordovician -
Silurian
Azoic: Having no trace of life or containing no organic remains.
(Oxford Engish Dictionary)
(Wikipedia)
3,700,000,000 years ago Did life first come into being in a
primordial soup of compounds? In 1924
Alexander Ivanovich Oparin argued that it did. (See
biological
bases -
circumstances -
primeval swamp).
Archeozoic: end of Azoic to 2,500,000,000 years ago: The era
of the
earliest living beings on earth.
"More than 3.5 billion years ago, small single-celled organisms acquired
the capacity to photosynthesize" "Plants were restricted to the aquatic
world until three billion years later,
at the end of the Ordovician period"
(Miguasha
"plant world")
|
BBC 4 picture cyanobacteria - blue
green bacteria - on a stone from a rock pool.
|
|
Wikipedia says: Putative fossils are reported from
3,460,000,000 years ago. The reference here is to possible
cyanobacteria from the Warrawoona Group in Western Australia. Also dated
3,465,000,000 years ago.
(Wikipedia)
|
Wikipedia says: the first uncontroversial evidence for life is
found 2,700,000,000 years ago. The reference relates to sulphate and
iron reduction as early forms of microbial respiration. It is suggested
that analysis of sedimentary pyrite from the Belingwe sedimentary basin in
Zimbabwe may provide evidence for bacterial reduction at this date.
2,500,000,000 to 542,000,000 years
ago The Proterozoic Eon: the most recent part of the Precambrian
Supereon.
(Wikipedia)
Proterozoic: Age of
animalculae,
jelly fish,
green scum and the
like. In water "there was probably as rich and abundant and active a
life of
infusoria
and the like as one finds in a drop of ditchwater today".
Life in the
early paleozoic had a "general resemblance", to
ditchwater life on a larger scale.
(H.G. Wells)
starting about 2.500,000,000
years ago, sedimentary rocks affected by higher amounts of
oxygen in the atmosphere, appear red, as
though rusted.
Mesoproterozoic from 1,600,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 years ago.
(Wikipedia). May correspond to
Schenk's Upper Pre-Cambrian
The amoeba has no hard part, but some single cell organisms produce
microscopic skeletons or shells. Foraminifer's calcite creates limestone
and chalk. The silica of Radiolaria forms chert. Particular importance
attaches to
Phytoplankton, such as diatoms, which
photosynthesise much of the worlds oxygen and are the microscopic plants
at the base of the oceanic food chain.
|
Schenk, p.12: Seaweed, Algae-colonies,
Flagellate algae.
|
about 1.300,000,000 years ago
early seaweed formed. (BBC
4). Molecular clock methods indicate that red and
green algae arose around 1,500,000,000 years ago, and the secondary
symbiosis that eventually led to the
chromists occurred around
1,300,000,000 years ago during the late Mesoproterzoic era, after the
earth's transition to a more highly oxygenated atmosphere with an
ozone screen. Fossil evidence is consistent with these gene-based
estimates.
Schiel and Foster 2015, chapter one
"Introduction to Giant Kelp forests worldwide"
|
Wikipedia says: cells with nuclei certainly existed by
1,200,000,000 years ago. The reference relates to Multicellular
filaments from arctic Canada identified as a red algae Bangiomorpha
pubescens. "In all but detail, this fossil is indistinguishable from
modern Bangia"
(Butterfield 2000), which consists
of
hair-like filament of dark red cells which dry as dark skeins flat against
inter-tidal rocks. See
seaweeds of Alaska
|
|
Schenk, p.12: Sponges, Seaweed,
Giant seaweed, Coral.
|
|
Neoproterozoic from 1,000,000,000 to 541,000,000 years ago.
(Wikipedia)
Cryogenian Period from about 720,000,000 to 635,000,000 years ago
Cryo (cold) and Genesis (birth). - It was cold.
(Wikipedia)
about 700,000,000 years ago Fossils
of multicellular organisms. When oxygen levels
became high enough, a powerful ozone
screen started to form in the upper atmosphere.
(Stephen J. Mojzsis). The only fossils from
all but the last 100 million years or so of Precambrian time represent
single-celled life forms (541,000,000 plus 100,000,000 = 541,000,000 years
ago)
Summary of the life on earth
Ediacaran Period from about 635,000,000 to 542,000,000 years ago
Name reflects
Ediacaran biota.
(Wikipedia).
Wikipedia says: It took almost 4,000,000,000 years from the
formation of the Earth for the Ediacaran fossils to first
appear,
655,000,000 years ago.
"The Record of the Rocks... begins in the midst of the game... The curtain
rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been going on
for some time".
(H.G. Wells)
600,000,000 years ago First traceable
fossils dated to this time. (psigate) [Edgeworth David (1928 and before)
analysed pre-Cambrian rocks in Australia and found traces of micro-
biological material] - See also
primordial soup -
Cambrian -
Old Red Sandstone -
seed ferns -
hominid -
Piltdown geology -
Noah -
word and theory
Also page 15 "Inhabitants of the pre-Cambrian sea: Algae, flagellate algae,
volvox algae, sponges, flat worms,
brachiopoda,
echinoderms and molluscs.
All plant and animal life was present only in the oceans."
The soft bodies of worms would not have been preserved as fossils - See
Darwin on worms - but traces of (sea) worms are found in
Cambrian rocks.
Giovanni Arduino (1759) divided geologic time into
Primary,
Secondary, and
Tertiary. Jules Desnoyers (1829) added the term
Quaternary.
GeoWhen Database suggests the Primary and
Secondary are rough analogs of the Paleozoic and
Mesozoic.
and these more modern terms have taken their place. By contrast, the term
"Tertiary" has survived and is still in common use today.
Paleozoic (ancient life) Era includes the
Cambrian,
Ordovician,
Silurian,
Devonian,
Carboniferous, and
Permian. During most of
the Paleozoic, continents like Gondwana and Laurentia were coalescing to
become
Pangea
Rocks (and fossils) of the Welsh periods (Cambrian - Ordovician - Silurian)
are similar: hard sandstones, shales, slates, grits and (Ordovician and
Silurian) limestones
|
Early Paleozoic: Before the appearance of any vertebrate animals. Age of
sea scorpions and trilobites.
(H.G. Wells)
Now thought there were early vertebrates (without jaws) in the Cambrian.
Jawed vertebrates became common in the
Devonian.
(Wikipedia)
|
505,000,000 years ago
Fossil jellyfish
|
|
In
1849
one could buy a hand coloured engraving called "The
Antidiluvian
World. Illustrations of the animals, reptiles, birds, fishes, trees, plants
etc which existed in different epochs prior to the
creation of man, and
whose remains are found entombed in the various
strata. From the
discoveries of
Buckland,
Cuvier,
Mantell,
Lyell
etc", Drawn and engraved by John Emslie. London, Published by James
Reynolds 174 Strand, 20t.10.1849. This showed life
beginning with the Silurian system, which it described as "a marine deposit
of vast extent containing abundance of marine organic
remains. 1. Encrinites and marine plants 2.
Trilobites 3. Marine
shells. 4
Lizards"
[too early]. In 1835, William Kirby in On Power of God in
Creation of
Animals 2. xiii. 10 referred to "plant-like animals .. which, from a
supposed resemblance..to the blossom of a liliaceous plant have been
denominated Encrinites".
|
485,000,000 to 444,000,000 years ago The
Ordovician
period.
(Ordovices were a Welsh tribe).
Nautiloids. Fossils include earliest fish, but of types very different
from modern ones.
Deposits that made Westmorland Green slate formed around 450 million years
ago. Grains being deposited in water led to patterning. About 50 million
years later, the material was altered by heat and pressure (metamorphosed)
to slate, during mountain-building.
(Kirk and Cook)
470,000,000 years ago mid-Ordovivian
470,000,000 years ago First evidence of plants on land.
Cryptospores - possible affinity with today's liverworts.
(BBC News 18.9.2003).
But see
Wikipedia: evolutionary history of plants. "At the end of the
Ordovician period... signs of the "tentative presence" of plants on land.
After many more millions of years, they resembled patches of moss a few
centimeters high. But things changed in the
Devonian Period.
(Miguasha plants)
Richard Cowen's
Chapter Eight: Leaving the Water -
images
-
curent page
470,000,000 to 248,000,000 years ago Eurypterids, otherwise known
as sea scorpions.
(Wikipedia)
Late Ordovician survivals and
extinctions: There were no land animals and extinctions were
confined to water life. There were two distinct extinctions roughly a
million years apart. The first of these began about 443 million years ago.
Together, these extinctions may have removed about 85 percent of species of
marine animals. All of the major animal groups of the Ordovician oceans
survived, including trilobites,
brachiopods, corals,
crinoids and
graptolites, but each lost important members. Widespread families of
trilobites disappeared and graptolites came close to total extinction.
(Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural
History).
|
The Ordovician/Silurian boundary was agreed in 1985 at
the base of the Parakidograptus acuminatus Biozone (a group of concurrent
graptolite species) in a
boundary stratotype at
Charles Lapworth's
[Wikipedia]
classic locality of Dob's Linn
[Wikipedia]
in
the Southern Uplands of Scotland. Graptolites (rock writing) are thought to
be horny skeletons of small creatures. Some are pictured here from the
Observers Book of
Geology, Their many different forms have enabled
beds of ancient rock to be identified.
|
The earliest graptolites appear in
Cambrian rocks and the last in
Carboniferous
443,000,000 to 416,000,000 years ago Silurian period.
(Silures a Welsh tribe). Sea Scorpions. Fossils include earliest land
animals and forerunners of ammonites. See
Pneumodesmus.
"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the
lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed
of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Judging from the past we may safely infer that not one living species will
transmit its unaltered likeness to distant futurity." (Charles
Darwin)
Taylor's "Story of a piece of limestone" concerns only
Silurian limestone.
Later Paleozoic: Age of
fishes,
amphibia and
swamp forests
.
(H.G. Wells)
|
From primal swamp to speaking humans: Ernst Haeckel said (1903) that
the Pithecoiden (monkey) theory of
human evolution requires tracing our animal ancestors before monkeys.
He began to do this
in 1866 in the General
Morphology.
Silurian
fish are followed by
Devonian
Lurchfische,"
[lungfish] "the
Carboniferous
amphibians, the
Permian
reptiles and in the
Mesozoic the first
mammals. Mammals appear again in the Triassic as monotremes [egg layers], then in the
Jurassic as
marsupials [nurturing babies in pouches], and the
Cretaceous
The oldest placental mammals, in the
Tertiary
period
(Eocene), include our lowest primate ancestors, including
lemurs, the first catarrhines the Monkey (Cynopitheken), and later the
great apes (anthropomorphic). From a branch of the apes,
speechless
ape-man
(Pithecanthropus alalus) arose in the
Pliocene, leading,
finally, to the speaking person.
(source)
|
The
Old Red Sandstone [see
Wikipedia]
of Scotland is very thick and contains many
fossils,
particularly of the Devonian fishes.
Lungfish first appeared in the Early
Devonian. -
Taylor's "Story of a
piece of sandstone" -
Miquasha (Canada): "The Devonian is known as
the "Age
of Fishes" in reference to their evolutionary explosion during this
period". - The earliest rock in the
1854 Sydenham display is Old Red Sandstone,
but it does not feature animal life until the New Red Sandstone, treating
the
Devonian
and
Carboniferous
as ages of rocks and economic minerals.
|
408,000,000 to 359.200,000 years ago
Devonian period. Primitive fish. Some life left the water.
Primeval swamp?
Ichthyostega
(Wikipedia) Greek ikhthus: fish - stegi: roof
|
Labyrinthodontia (Greek, "maze-toothed") is an extinct amphibian
subclass, of which the order Ichthyostegalia is the earliset example, and
the earliest landliving vertebrates.
(Wikipedia) -
G. Paselk
pictures four legged "protoamphibians", Acanthostega and
Icthyostega,
lungfish
(Dipterus) and a placoderm (Bothriolepis), with
early trees, Archeaosigillaria [see Devonian Times on
lycopsids]
and
Archaeopteris
in the background.
Amphibian: an animal living in both water and on land.
Reptile originally meant
a creeping animal,
and included amphibians. The
1854 Sydenham display is based on
islands in
water from which
life emerges (see
photo by Warren), which is relevant both to
the
biblical origin of life and to evolutionary theories. The
Sydenham display also links water to the
steam which drove the industrial revolution.
about 419,2000,000 to 393,300,000 years ago Early Devonian
The vegetation of the early Devonian consisted primarily of small plants,
the tallest being only a meter tall. By the end of the Devonian,
ferns,
horsetails and seed plants had also appeared, producing the first trees and
the first forests. University of California Museum of
Paleontology. See University of Aberdeen on
Rhynie Chert
about 393,300,000 to 382,700,000 years ago Middle Devonian
Ferns first appear in the
fossil record
382,700,000 to 358,900,000 years ago Late Devonian
382,700,000 to 372.200,000 years ago Frasnian age of the
Late Devonian
Late Devonian So called
"seed ferns". Wikipedia:
Pteridospermatophyta.
See
Marie Stopes
Late Devonian forests of large plants left many fossils in the
Old Red Sandstone,
mostly resembling
ferns
[Wikipedia], club-mosses
[Wikipedia]
and horsetails
[Wikipedia], but the
size of trees. These forests of flowerless trees, but with greater variety,
flourished even more in the
Carboniferous period. Similar plants lived throughout the rest
of the Paleozoic and well into the
Mesozoic.
(Observers
Book of Geology and Wikipedia
Timeline of plant evolution
The
coastal cliffs at Miguasha, Quebec, Canada, are Upper Devonian
strata of alternating layers of sandstone and shale deposited between
375,000,000 and 350,000,000 years ago. OR
(source)
The
Escuminac
formation
is now attributed to the middle part of the
Frasnian
Age. This corresponds to an approximate age of 380,000,000
years ago.
|
Archaeopteris was the main component of the earliest forests
until its extinction around the Devonian/Carboniferous boundary.
Archaeopteris grew up to seven metres (23 feet) tall, with a
trunk of lignin and cellulose and branches supporting fern-like fronds
extending horizontally to capture sunlight.
|
The
first picture shows a large frond from Archaeopteris halliana in the
Escuminac Formation in the Miguasha Museum. The Canadian stamp
was issued
in 1991.
"The earth's atmosphere was changing rapidly, going from perhaps 10 percent
to 1 percent CO2 and from about 5 percent to 20 percent oxygen over a 50-
million year period in the (late) Devonian period. All plants were
responsible for the transformation, but Archaeopteris was important because
it made up 90 percent of the forests during the last 15 million years when
these changes accelerated" ... "It was the first plant to produce an
extensive root system, so had a profound impact on soil chemistry".
(Science Daily summary "Archaeopteris is the earliest
known modern tree," by Brigitte Meyer-Berthaud, Stephen E. Scheckler, and
Jobst Wendt. Nature 22.4.1999.
See Devonian Times
archaeopteris and plants and soils and
"The Tree That Changed the World" by John
Perlin, Pacific Standard 29.3.2010.
|
Old Red Sandstone
of Kiltorean, County Kilkenny, Ireland.
Taylor 1873 writes of fine-grained greenish sandstones
deposited in freshwater in which land plant fossils are well preserved.
"Among the most attractive of these" tree-fern once called
Cyelopteris (Round-leaved Fern), re named Palasopteris
Hibernicus (Primitive Irish Fern). This was later renamed
Archaeopteris Hibernicus. It was the "monarch of the primeval
forests" whose "graceful fronds bent over the clear waters of a lake".
372,200,000 to 358,900 years ago Famennian age of the
Late Devonian
359,000,000 years ago End of the Devonian period - Start of the
Carboniferous period: In latter half of the Devonian, there are three
important
extinctions
separated by about 10 million years. About 375 million years ago, towards
the end of a time interval called the Givetian. The end-Frasnian extinction
(the largest) about 375 million years ago. The about 365 million years ago
during the Famennian.
The end-Frasnian extinction was most pronounced in tropical environments,
particularly in the reefs of the shallow seas. Reef building sponges called
stromatoporoids and corals suffered losses and stromatoporoids finally
disappeared in the third extinction near the end of the Devonian.
Brachiopods
associated with reefs also became extinct. Groups of trilobites
disappeared at each of the three extinctions and very few survived into the
following Carboniferous Period.
(Sam Noble
Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)
359.200,000 to 299,000,000 years ago Carboniferous
period.
By carboniferous [carbon bearing] soils, Richard Kirwan in 1799 meant the
"various sorts of earth or stone among or under which coal is usually
found". William Daniel Conybeare and William Phillips (1822, page vii)
proposed to consider all rocks in an ascending order with a group including
"not only the great coal-deposit itself, but those of the limestone and
sandstone also on which it reposes" as the "medial" [middle] order. They
said "the epithet carboniferous is of obvious application to this series".
Henry Shaler Williams (1891) proposed Pennine System as the name
for the Carboniferous. This was not adopted, but his division into
Mississippian, for the
Early Carboniferous and Pennsylvanian,
for
the
Late Carboniferous,
was (in the USA).
Giant insects. [Large]
Brachiopods.
Taylor's "Story of a piece of coal" focuses on coal formation,
but includes a section on the carboniferous limestone. It lists (but does
not discuss) the intervening millstone grit.
It mentions the following periods to indicate how long ago coal was formed:
Carboniferous followed by
Permian,
Triassic,
Liassic,
Oolitic,
Cretaceous (or chalk),
Eocene,
Miocene,
Pliocene
and
Pleistocene
... Illustrations of a section of Calamite (tree-like
horsetail)
[Wikipedia] - Branches, and fruit
(Lepidostrobus) of Lepidodendron (scale-trees)
[Wikipedia] - Bark of Sigillaria Groe seri
[Wikipedia] - "Fossil Fern
(Neuropteris)" (a
seed fern)
[Wikipedia] - Portion of Fossil Tree Fern
(Pecopteris arborescens) on Coal Shale
[Wikipedia] - Annularia. A Fossil Plant
allied to the Calamites -
[Wikipedia] -
358,900,000 to 323.200,000 years ago Early Carboniferous or
Mississippian
(USA) - noted for limestones (calcite). See
Late
Carboniferous
Palaeos -
Humboldt
|
363,000,000 to 325,000,000 years ago: Deposition of mountain or
carboniferous limestones of England and Wales.
The
1854 Sydenham display shows the carboniferous
deposits sandwiched between the
Old Red Sandstone
and the
New Red Sandstone.
Rocks deposited during the Carboniferous period (350 - 290 million years
ago) underlie almost all of the Peak National Park and probably two thirds
of the remainder of Derbyshire.
|
359,200,000 - 326,400,000 years ago Dinantian series or epoch from the
Lower Carboniferous system in Europe
326,400,000 to 313,400,000 years ago Namurian stage in the regional
stratigraphy of northwest Europe
|
Chatsworth House - Where
Paxton built a
greenhouse: Carboniferous limestone (green)
Clay Cross: Hill Tupton
Rock - Sandstone (not marked)
over Pennine Lower Coal Measures (brown).
Matlock: Carboniferous
limestone (green), near to millstone grit (buff).
The
limestone continues under the grit and the
coal measures.
|
Mawe 1802 (sections 2 and
3), followed by
Ward (1818) (page 10), says the order
to the strata explored by the Derbyshire miners is: Argillaceous (clayey)
Grit, in which
coal
and
iron
are found - Silicious
Grit, providing stone for building and millstones - Shale - then lime-stone
and toadstone alternately. The veins of metallic ores appeared in the
limestone.
Three strata of toadstone had been found, and the limestone under the
third was as far as miners had reached. (About 300 yards underground). The
Bonsall map project describes the
"shallow tropical sea surrounded by coral reefs" in which the limestones
were laid down and how "subterranean volcanoes erupted spasmodically
through the sea floor, covering the limestones with ash and lava" which
formed the toadstone.
|
Igneous intrusions in the limestone (red: basalt, greenstone?) are the
source of minerals, particularly
lead. Bonsall area igneous rocks
includes a stone comprising basalt and dolerite, locally
referred to as toadstones.
A complex of mine and natural cavern near
Matlock Bath
inspired the mine and cavern feature in the limestone at the
1854 Sydenham display
|
Rutland
and
Great Masson
(now part of
Heights of Abraham) are well known public caverns in Matlock
Bath. Others are, or were, Victoria -
Devonshire
-
Flour Spar
- Speedwell -
Cumberland
- Fern -
High Tor. (See
History, Topography, and Directory of Derbyshire
offline
by Bulmer and Company 1895 page 428 following, and Ward Lock's Matlock
and Dovedale pages 11-16 -
Derbyshire Cave Association Register -
offline Masson Cavern complex)
[See Ann Andrews
Lead Mining in Matlock and Matlock Bath -
Peak District Mines
Historical Society - The most common source of
lead is
Galena (lead sulfide) formed as pockets or veins in carbonate rock into
which the mineral bearing fluid rock has intruded. Galena can contain minor
amounts of antimony, arsenic, bismuth, cadmium, copper, silver, and zinc
See
Lead ore and mines.
Water flowing through limestone is responsible for creating its natural
caves and also for their features of dripstone, stalactites
(water icicles)
and stalagmites. Encountering impermeable strata (such as toadstone) it
forms underground lakes in the limestone which overflow to the surface as
natural springs (a resurgence). To reach lower layers, miners drained water
from their mines through artificial tunnels (sloughs), thus adding
artificial springs. The thermal (hot) springs come from water in the
Carboniferous Limestone in structural settings that allow
meteoric water (rainfall etc) to descend low enough for it to be heated by
the geothermal gradient (earth heat), and then return to
the surface without a significant fall in temperature. [See
1780].
The original natural thermal resurgences at Matlock
Bath were greatly
modified by mining activities, but according to a contributor to the
Mine Exploration Forum, all the springs at
Matlock Bath
seem to
originate from Bacon Rake or the Bonsall Fault in the Ball Eye area.
See Matlock Bath
and
Crystal Palace
The main Early Carboniferous plants were the Equisetales
(Horse-tails), Sphenophyllales (scrambling plants), Lycopodiales
(Club mosses),
Lepidodendrales (scale trees), Filicales
(Ferns), Medullosales (previously
included in the
"seed ferns", an artificial assemblage of a number of early
gymnosperm groups) and the Cordaitales. These continued to
dominate
throughout the Carboniferous period.
[Wikipedia]
323.200,000 to 298.900,000 years ago Late
Carboniferous
or
Pennsylvanian (USA) - noted for coal (fossilised carbon)
|
Plate 22 in
Observers Book of
Geology
includes a depiction by Eli
Marsden Wilson (1935) in the Natural History Museum, which it titles "A
primeval swamp of the chief coal-forming period". The picture used here
comes from Edwin J. Houston's The Elements of Physical Geography
Philadelphia 1891, which says "The continents during this age consisted
mainly of large, flat, marshy areas, covered with luxuriant vegetation."
|
Gymnosperms
[Wikipedia] originated in the late Carboniferous period,
replacing the lycopsid
[Wikipedia] rainforests of the tropical region. Taylor says
coniferous flora grew "abundantly" during the
Liassic.
Alfred Wegener
proposed that from the late
carboniferous, all continents were stuck together as one big
land mass, surrounded by just one ocean. (300,000,000 to
175,000,000 years ago)
We can see this in his diagrams
(below). Instead of giving the original continent a name, he uses German
composite words, beginning ur, that just mean original. Der
Urkontinent is
the original continent, which is surrounded by einen großen
Urozean
(a large original ocean). Der karbonischen Urkontinentalmasse is the
original continental mass in the carboniferous period. The
Urkontinent
was later called Pangea (all-
earth).
(See
Die Entstehung der Kontinente und
Ozeane 1920 -
Alfred Wegener - and
Wikipedia)
|
|
|
Lage der Kontinentalschollen für die Karbonzeit
(ohne Rücksicht auf Wasserbedeckung) -
Location of continental floes for the Carboniferous period (without
regard to water cover)
|
Pangea existed during the late
Paleozoic
and early Mesozoic
eras. It assembled about 300 million years ago, was intact until about
200 million years ago. and began to break apart about
175 million years ago.
|
The 1922 and
1929 editions of Wegener's book contain a map of the world at
three time
periods: Late Carboniferous (Jung Karbon: this picture) -
Eocene - and
Quaternary.
|
The shading
shows land and sea at the time, with white land, dotted shallow lake and
shade: deep sea. Outlines of today's continents and some rivers ae
superimposed.
|
298,900,000 to 252,170,000 years ago Permian. Named after the Perm
district in Russia. In Britain includes dolomite limestones running south
from Durham.
(Observers Book of Geology [Wikipedia]
Primitive reptiles, such as
Pelycosaur and
Cotylosaur, illustrated in this
picture from H.G. Wells'
The Outline of History 1920. Emerged in the late
Carboniferous. Flourished in the Permian.
In Greek sauros is a lizard. From this came saurian - applied
to lizard-like creatures, including
crocodiles,
ichthyosaurus and
plesiosaurs in water,
pterosaurs in the air,
and dinosaurs like
megalosaurus and
brontosaurus
|
about 251,000,000 years ago: Permian extinction (worst
in history) wiped out more than 90 percent of all marine species and 70
percent of land animals.
(National Geographic) - See
Wikipedia
Permian-Triassic extinction
event
(Sam Noble
Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)
|
Graph attempting to represent extinction events based on replacement of
certain marine fossils.
.
(Wikimedia commons).
The Permian-Triassic (P - Tr) extinction is at the centre.
The table below is from D. M.
Raup and J. J. Sepkoski's "Mass extinctions in the marine fossil record",
published in Science in April 1982.
(online -
offline)
|
|
Raup and Sepkoski say that "five mass extinctions are clearly defined".
They occured "near the ends of geologic periods", which reflects
the fact that the periods were originally defined, in the first half of
the 19th century, using major changes in the fossils records.
|
Mesozoic (Middle) Era includes the
Triassic -
Jurassic - and
Cretaceous ages. It has
been associated with
conifers and
reptiles. In the
1854 Sydenham display, the Triassic
represents the
Primary part of geological history, the
Secondary starts with
the
Jurassic.
252,170,000 to 201,300,000 years ago Triassic (So named because it
has three divisons in Germany)
In England Bunter (bright coloured) Sandstone and above it Keuper Marl.
Forming north-west Midlands and including Cheshire salt beds. Formed in
desert conditions. Almost completely without fossils.
Taylor's "Story of a
piece of rock-salt". New Red Sandstone or Trias
|
The Primary Island of the
1854 Sydenham
display is based on the New Red
Sandstone. It is here that its prehistoric animals begin. According to
Owen (1854) its animals are Batrachia,
[Wikipedia], from the Greek word for a frog, now
represented by "frogs, toads, and newts, or water-salamanders". [See
amphibians]
"But, at
the period of the deposition of the new red sandstone, in the present
counties of Warwick and Cheshire, the shores of the ancient sea, which were
then formed by that sandy deposit, were trodden by reptiles, having the
essential bony characters of the Batrachia, but combining these with other
bony characters of crocodiles and lizards ; and exhibiting both under a
bulk which is made manifest by the restoration of the largest known
species".
|
The models include
Labyrinthodon
salamandroides, the Salamander-like Labyrinthodon -
Labyrinthodon pachygnathus, the Thick-jawed Labyrinthodon - and
Dicynodon lacerticeps, or Lizard-headed Dicynodon. See Simon Jackson on
Labyrinthodon
and
Dicynodon
-
photo by Warren -
Wikipedia:
Dicynodon
|
237,000,000 to 228,000,000 years ago Carnian or Karnian stage
[Wikipedia]
at the
start of the Late Triassic epoch. Archosaurs
[Wikipedia]
, ancestors of birds and
crocodiles, became the dominant faunas. Phytosaurs
[Wikipedia] first appear during the
Carnian. With many other large crurotarsan
[Wikipedia]
reptiles, they disappear at the
end of the Triassic
|
|
Picture (signed by the author), page 188 Water Reptiles of the Past and
Present by Samuel Wendell Williston.
Published 1914 by The University of Chicago Press in Chicago.
(Internet Archive -
offline). See
Teleosaurus.
|
230,000,000 years ago "The first
dinosaurs appeared about 230
million years ago and for the
next 160 million years, the Earth belonged to
these ancient
reptiles"
Natural History Museum.
208,000,000 years ago Asteroid impact in what is now Quebec,
Canada,
created crater 70 kilometres in diameter and wiped out many species
(psigate)
about 205,000,000 years ago First appearance of
Plesiosaurs in the latest
Triassic
Period (possibly Rhaetian stage),
They became especially common during the
Jurassic
Period and
continued until the the
end of the Cretaceous Period. They had a worldwide oceanic
distribution. Elasmosaurus is a Plesiosaur from the
late Cretaceous.
"a flying reptile or dragon, called Pterodactyle, from the Greek
words pteron, a wing, and dactylos, a finger; because the wings are mainly
supported by the outer finger, enormously lengthened and of proportionate
strength, I which, nevertheless, answers to the little finger of the human
hand. The wings consisted of folds of skin, like the leather wings of the
bat; and the Pterodactyles were covered with scales, not with feathers: the
head, though somewhat resembling in shape that of a bird, and supported on
a long and slender neck, was provided with long jaws, armed with teeth."
(Owen 1854)
Late Triassic survivals and
extinctions (about 201 million years ago):
All major groups of marine invertebrates survived, but most suffered
losses.
Brachiopods, shelled
cephalopods, sponges and corals were
particularly hard hit. On land, casualties included the
phytosaurs.
(Sam Noble
Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)
201,300,000 to
145,000,000
years ago Jurassic. More dinosaurs.
Jurassic from the Jura Mountains on the borders of France and Switzerland.
about 200,000,000 years ago After 100,000,000 years
the world still consisted of one continent,
Pangea, surrounded by one ocean.
The picture shows the Tethys according to
Leopold Kober in 1922. Kober
thought it was a sea that ran in a syncline between the two great land
masses. Eduard Suess wrote in
Natural science: a monthly review of scientific progress
in 1893: "Modern geology permits us to follow the first outlines of the
history of a great ocean which once stretched across part of Eurasia. The
folded and crumpled deposits of this ocean stand forth to heaven in Thibet,
Himalaya, and the Alps. This ocean we designate by the name 'Tethys', after
the sister and consort of
Oceanus." (Oxford
English Dictionary)
Jurassic Park: a 1993 USA film in which re-created dinosaurs escape from a
theme park.
English Heritage's
A Building Stone Atlas of Dorset
-
(offline)
-
British Geological Survey begins with the Lias Group and
works upwards to
Heathstones in the
Lower Tertiary. The best known of the Dorset building stones are
the
Purbeck Marble
and
Portland limestones
Lower
Jurassic beds called Lias (quarrymen's layers) in
England
running between Whitby on the coats of Yorkshire and Lyme Regis in Dorset,
consisting of alternate beds of limestone and shale.
Owen 1854: The Lias
"forms the base of the oolite, or immediately underlies that division of
secondary rocks". But see
Wikipedia -
Gateway - Engineering Geology of British
Rocks and Soils - Lias Group 2012
online
offline
|
"Imagine well-watered and gently undulating lands teeming with plants and
animals, drained by large rivers turbid with mud and sand, and discharging
their burden of sediment, organic debris, and soluble salts into an open
but not very deep sea in which life abounded. Such is the picture of the
lias" (Wills 1929
p.134 and Figure 51 on p.126). For the figure, Wills references
[Émile] Haug - [Theodor] Arldt - and
[Dudley] Stamp
[Introduction to Stratigraphy 1923?]
|
|
Taylor's "What the
piece of jet had to say". "Where jet occurs: Lias beds". "As a fossil pitch
or gum, I am related to the peculiar
coniferous
flora which grew so
abundantly, although in comparatively few species, during the Liassic
epoch". (Taylor, p.129).
See
Lulworth forest
and
Hanover Point. Jet
was popular after
1861 when Queen Victoria wore it following the death of Prince
Albert.
[Wikipedia]
|
|
|
This drawing of a
Ichthyosaurus (fish lizard) is from J. E. Taylor's
Geological
Stories 1873)
|
199,600 to
140,000,000 years ago Fossil remains of Steneosaurus
[Wikipedia]
range
from the early
Jurassic
through the early
Cretaceous.
|
Steneosaurus
bollensis (previously Teleosaurus chapmani Konig) fossils are found
within Europe, including Germany, France and England. The
Whitby crocodiles
are regared as such Teleosaurs. See
Crocodile. Thalattosuchia
or sea crocodiles
[Wikipedia],
|
190,800,000 to 182,700,000 years ago
Pliensbachian in lower
Jurassic. Cleveland
ironstone. Jurassic
ironstone deposits
stretch in a broad arc from North East England through Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and into Oxfordshire. See
Wealden ironstone
182,700,000 to 174,100,000 years ago Toarcian in lower
Jurassic.
Includes
Alum shales of the Cleveland basin.
about 175,000,000 years ago Middle
Jurassic.
Lower Oolite: Inferior oolite - Fuller's earth - Great oolite and
Stonesfield slate - Cornbrash and forest marble.
- Middle Oolite: Oxford clay and Coral rag -
Upper Oolite: Portland stone and Kimmeridge clay
about 168,300,000 years ago to 166.100,000 years ago
Bathonian stage of the Middle Jurassic, named after Bath.
Lee's Quarry, Taynton Down, Oxfordshire is the type section for the Taynton
Limestone Formation. Part of the Great Oolite Group. Sites of four mines
around the village of Stonesfield Village, Oxfordshire,
are the type-locality of Stonesfield Slates, probably developed
at the base of the Taynton Formation.
|
The Stonesfield "slates" are limestones,
originally deposited in a shallow sea.
William Buckland obtained fossil
bones from the quarries which later composed
Megalosaurus,
shown here dominating the Oolitic island at the centre of the
1854 Sydenham
display. To the right flew "Pterodactyles of the Ooolite",
Buckland's
Pterodactyle, found "pretty abundantly" at Stonesfield.
|
Pangea
began to rift from the
Tethys
Ocean in the east to the Pacific in the west.
One rift resulted in the North Atlantic Ocean.
brontosaurus the thunder lizard -
stegosaurus covered lizard -
pterodactylus the winged finger -
camptosaurus flexible lizard -
diplodocus double beam -
tyrannosaurus tyrant lizard -
trachodon rough tooth -
triceratops three horned face -
archaeopteryx ancient wing -
Pictures from H.G. Wells'
The Outline of History 1920
about 161,000,000 million years ago Upper
Jurassic. Contains many
beds of limestone of the type called Oolite
Taylor's "What the piece of Purbeck Marble had to say". Includes
"flying
reptiles" and
"stonesfield slates".
between about 152,100,000 and 145,000,000 years ago The Tithonian
age, named after Tithonus, the lover who chased
Eos (dawn). It is the last
age of the
Jurassic, chasing the
Cretaceous. Includes
the the lithographic limestones of Solenhofen, Bavaria, which was used for
fine printing plates and which also preserves detailed fossils. Portland
stone (Dorset) underlies Purbeck Marble.
[Cambridgeshire] At the end of the Jurassic, about
145,000,000 years ago, the land was gradually sinking and a series of
clays were being deposited. See
Gault -
Upper Cretaceous -
Cambridge Greensands
145,500,000 to
66,000,000
years ago Cretaceous. Last
dinosaurs.
Although cretaceous means chalk, the lower cretaceous does not include
chalk. In Britain it comprises the Wealden Beds, the Lower Greensand and
the lower part of Blue Gault Clay.
Strata near Swanage, Dorset:
Portland
rock,
Purbeck
deposits,
Wealden, and
Cretaceous beds.
"Darwin's
"abominable mystery" asked how did the world's flora go from no
flowering plants at the beginning of the Cretaceous to modern ones by the
time of the
Dakota Group,
40 million years later".
around 140,000,000 to 125,000,000 years ago
Wealden Supergroup
|
Generalised section across the Weal in south-east England, crossing the
escarpments (downs) in the north, but following the Ouse valley in the
south. From (Wills 1929
p.200). See
Portsmouth Symposium 2000 for relation to
Isle of Wight and Dorset. Also see
Bucks Geology Group
|
The "Pine Raft" at Hanover Point near Brook consists of
gymnosperm tree
remains that can be seen at low tide. They come from a Wealden plant bed.
The tree remains are either compressed or in solid uncompressed form ...
Examples ... impregnated by calcite at a very early stage ... have avoided
compaction. (Ian West's Brightstone Bay) - See
1825 and
BBC
The Petrified Forest which says
"the wood has been converted into a substance
resembling the mineral
Jet". See [Brightstone is also known as Brixton and is probably
where
Mantell found his cottage garden
Iguanodon toe bone]
about 139,800,000 to 132,900,000 years ago Valanginian stage of the
Lower Cretaceous includes Wadhurst Clay Formation. Clay
ironstone
nodules occur in the Wadhurst Clay and Ashdown Sand of the Kent and
Sussex Weald. [See
extraordinary book of doors for detailed
strata] See Jurassic
ironstone. Wealden ironstone was the basis of Wealden
iron. See
Research Group
Swanage (Dorset): The upper part of the Wealden, as seen very
completely in
the
Northern
Cliffs of Swanage Bay [Punfield Cove], exposes about 700 feet of clays
frequently red or
purple, less frequently blue, greenish, or very pale, alternating with
sandstones of different tints, mostly soft and fine- grained, but sometimes
hardened by irony impregnation, or modified by admixture of pebbles. One
band contains much lignite. In the upper part of this series, above every
red or purple bed, are
alternations of sandstone and pale shale. In one of the shale-beds is a
course of small nodules of pyritous ironstone.
John Phillips 1859 - See
Buckland 1829
|
Eli
Marsden Wilson's 1935- "Idealized Landscape of the Wealden Lake" showing
Iguanodon
(iguana tooth),
Cetiosaurus (whale lizard)
and
Polacanthus (many spiked), (from the Natural History Museum,
London, has
the title "Mesozoic scene with great
reptiles" in the
Observers Book of
Geology. The Natural History Museum website
Image ID: 004324
describes it as "Scene from the Wealden times, during the Cretacous
period".
|
|
Fossil bones of an Iguanodon from the Wealden Beds of the Isle of Wight
(Observers Geology Plate 23)
|
about 125,000,000 to 113,000,000 years ago Aptian stage of the
Lower Cretaceous. Main period of lower greensand deposits.
about 120,000,000 to 90,000,000 years ago Mid-Cretaceous Period
"one period in the geologic past that stands out as distinctly warmer than
today, particularly at high latitudes"
(NOAA)
[Cambridgeshire] about 113,000,000 to 110,000,000 years
ago Gault
Clay deposited (reaching about 45 metres near Cambridge).
From about 110,000,000 years ago: a local upward
movement of the sea-bed caused sea erosion of the Upper Gault.
Heavier material, including fossils, was rolled around and
re-deposited , mixing fossils of different ages, and coating them in a
hard phosphate, sand and phosphatic nodules formed the
Cambridge Greensand.
100,500,000 to
66,000,000
years ago. Upper Cretaceous [Chalk] See
Dakota Group in North America.
Taylor's "Story of a piece of chalk". In
Britain
the upper cretaceous comprises the upper part of the
Gault, the
Upper Greensand, and the whole of the
chalk.
Place in strate in
Cambridgeshire: Topsoil, Chalk,
Chalk Marl,
Upper [Cambridge]
Greensand,
"Coprolite",
Gault, Lower Greensand. Picture below is a sketch of a pit
excavating phosphatic nodules at Horningsea, four miles north of Cambridge,
about 1874. The average depth of working the nodule bed was about twelve
feet but, as the undulations in the gault show, this was very varied.
|
"On the Relations of the Cambridge Gault and
Greensand" by A. J. Jukes-Browne, of the Geological Survey
of England. Read 13.1.1875.
|
Quarterly Journal of the Geological
Society xxxi, p.260,
[Internet Archive] -
(offline)
about 100,500,000 to 93,900,000 years ago
Cenomanian age began the Upper Cretaceous.
[Cambridgeshire]
Cambridge
Greensands with phosphatic nodules.
Cambridge Greensands: "Glauconitic marl: Thin
but distinctive condensed basement bed of pale greenish grey marl rich in
phosphatic nodules (so called
"coprolites") at base. Much dark green
glauconite as sand-sized grains, disseminated or concentrated in pods and
layers giving a sandy texture and hence name "greensand"."
(Gateway to Earth). The nodule beds are on
average 25cm thick but, where hollows in the
Gault occur, local depths of over a metre
could accumulate.
Fossilised dung relatively scarce. Fossils at core of nodules
include many small sea creatures particularly bivalve molluscs (like
Terebratula),
brachiopods,
ammonites and belemnites.
Larger fossils include many fish and reptiles such as ichthyosaurs,
pterosaurs and some (often poorly preserved) dinosaurs.
(Wimpole coprolites 2015)
"The fossil beds were found at the
base of both the Lower and Upper Cambridgeshire Greensand".
(O'Connor)
|
100,000,000 to 650,000,000 years ago. The Chalk Sea. Culver Cliff,
Isle of Wight was photographed in 1956, when I was twelve and it
not yet a milion years old. "Chalk is made from billions of tiny shells of
plankton which lived in the clear warm waters"
(Isle of Wight Geological History)
|
|
about 83,600,000 to 72,100,000 years ago Campanian age of the
Late
Cretaceous, when the
Plesiosaur Elasmosaurus swam in the
Dakota inland
sea
Fossils of flowering plants first become abundant in the chalk. Those of
the earlier
Tertiary including types
(in Britain) characteristic of a tropical climate.
(Observers
Book of
Geology and Wikipedia
Timeline of plant evolution) -
Charles Darwin
sought an explanation for what appeared to be an abrupt origin
and highly accelerated rate of diversification of flowering plants in the
mid-Cretaceous.
(Friedman 2008)
From 1853 fossils of the leaves of flowering plants were
collected from Cretacious rocks in the Dakota Formation in the USA mid-
west.
about 75,000,000 years ago According to Ron Hubbard, science fiction
writer and founder of the
scientologists,
Xenu, ruler of a Galactic Confederation of 76 planets, transported
billions of his charges in spaceships to Teegeeack (Earth), placed them
near volcanoes and killed them by exploding hydrogen bombs,
Their "thetans" (souls) later inhabited the bodies of
humans, causing the
dysfuntions that scientology claims to be able to repair.
about 72,100,000 to 66,000,000 to years ago Maastrichtian age ends
Late Cretaceous
None of the reptile "monsters are found in the rocks later than the Chalk"
(Observers Geology, p.132)
Tertiary (third) period: former term (still much used) for the
geological period from
66,000,000 years ago to the
Quaternary. Cenozoic (recent life). Ceno from
Greek kainos, meaning new or recent. Also used in -cene at
end of epochs: Paleo (old) - Eo (dawn) - Oligo (small) - Mio (less) - Plio
(more) -
Pleisto
(most) -
Holo
(whole) -
Anthropo
(human)
Age of mammals,
including primitive
horses and hominids.
Following the
Cretaceous
extinction of dinosaurs, the Eocene epochs -
Paleocene -
Eocene
-
Oligocene
-
Miocene
- and
Pliocene
-
have
been described as chapters in the mammals rise to dominance.
Most recent geological materials are soft sediments like sands and clays.
66,000,000 years ago extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the
Cretaceous epoch.
Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event
. Psigate said
65,000,000 years ago "Impact at Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, created
crater almost
200 kilometres across, caused global devastation and possible extinction of
dinosaurs, along with an estimated 85% of all life".
Another source: Dinosaurs (and
90% of all species) wiped out after a meteorite. defined by a "golden
spike" in sediments around the world iridium
dispersed from the meteorite.
Extinction
(vertebrates) of
dinosaurs and flying
pterosaurs, the mosasaurs,
plesiosaurs
and
ichthyosaurs of the oceans. (Marine invertebrates) ammonites,
groups of cephalopods and some bivalves, such as the
reef-building rudists and some relatives of modern oysters.
(Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History)
- Most groups of organisms survived. Soon after the end of the
Cretaceous, there was a tremendous diversification of insects, mammals,
birds, and flowering plants on land, and of fishes, corals, and molluscs in
the ocean.
(Richard Cowen).
|
56,000,000 to 33,900,000 years ago Eocene Epoch. Plate 21 in
Observers Book of
Geology includes this depiction by Eli
Marsden Wilson (1935) in the Natural History Museum, which it titles
"Eocene landscape, London clay period".
|
A world that was essentially ice-free
|
Wegener's Eozän: Eocene
In the early Eocene, there were land connections between Antarctica and
Australia, North America and Europe through Greenland, and probably between
North America and Asia through the Bering Strait.
|
About
60,000,000
to 55,000,000 years ago, Laurasia split when North
America/Greenland and Eurasia separated, opening the Norwegian Sea. See
Tethys. In the mid-Eocene, Australia and Antarctica separated.
New ocean currents cooled the world towards the end of the Eocene.
(source).
about 45,000,000 years ago during the early to mid Eocene
Palaeotherium species living in the tropical forests covering Europe.
(Wikipedia)
34,000,000 years ago
Antarctic ice sheet began to form around this time
(psigate)
Tropical forest to temperate grassland. Enter the
beautiful world
33,900,000 to 23,000,000 years ago Oligocene: a transition from the
tropical Eocene more temperate climates. Grasslands expanded world-wide and
tropical forests receded to the equatorial belt.
During the Oligocene and Miocene the
Alpine chain of mountains was formed, replacing the western end
of the
Tethys.
28,100,000 years ago Upper Oligocene (Chattian) -
(Wikipedia) - Abbe Bourgeois announced in 1867
that he had discovered man-made tools in an assemblage of chipped flints in
the bed of upper Oligocene age near Thenay. Similar finds were made
elsewhere in Europe in 1872 and 1877 in upper
Miocene beds. The human
origin of these
"eoliths" was disputed.
25,000,000 years ago hominoids (apes) diverged from the Old World
monkeys according to
Wikipedia. The Greek word pithecoid (ape like) was much
used in 19th century evolutionary theory. A 1900 Dictionary defines an ape
as a four limbed animal with teeth of the same number of form as humans and
without either tails or cheek-pouches, and Pithecoid as pertaining to apes,
or resembling an ape, or ape-like.
|
|
"Divergence among great apes, a small ape, and an Old World monkey with
respect to humans",
figure one from an article in
Nature 469, 529-533
(27.1.2011)
|
Rather than call this Middle Tertiary "in
1833 I proposed the name of Miocene, selecting the
'faluns' of
the valley of the
Loire in France as my example or type". "No British
strata have a distinct claim to be regarded as Miocene". (Charles Lyell)
|
|
23,030,000 to 5,332,000 years ago Miocene era -
(Wikipedia
"If the Creator
made this world
especially for man, then there was one
period paricularly adapted to man's wants. The world never experienced a
more beautiful period. That period was the Miocene, and by all manner of
logical reasoning it was the time when man should have appeared"
Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man by John Patterson MacLean 1878
page 67
|
|
Picture of Miocene mammals from
The Prehistoric World: or, Vanished Races
by Emory Adams Allen 1885.
Taylor's "Story of a piece of lignite"
Whilst accepting the authenticity of the flint tools found by
l'abbé Bourgeois at
Thenay,
Albert Gaudry did not admit the
existence of humans in the Miocene epoch. Sommeone suggested Dryopithecus
cracked the stones.
(Histoire) - See
Mortillet.
|
|
In 1856
Éduard Lartet
described fossil jaw fragments and a piece of humerus from a
"très-grand
Singe de la tribu des
Simiens"
[Simian]
"ou Singes supérieurs", which had been
discovered by Monsieur Fontan, of
Saint-Gaudens (Haute-Caronne),
a [zealous] naturaliste.
He named the monkey whose bones these were,
Dryopithecus fontani [See
below]. They were found
in a strata of
marly clays (banc
d'argile marneuse) from the
Miocene being exploited at the base of the
plateau
on which Saint-Gaudens is built,
|
|
at the start of the plaine de
Valentine that stretches to the foothills of the Pyrenees.
|
|
Fontan recovered from the same site, bones of
Macrotherium,
Rhinoceros,
Dicrocerus elegans, apparently identical to species of the same
genera previously found at
Sansan. These mammals belong essentially, Lartet said, to "nos
terrains tertiaires moyens
(miocènes)", as we also find their remains in the
faluns
of
Touraine.
- See Lartout
"Note sur un grand singe fossile qui se rattache au groupe
des singes supérieurs" in
Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences
Paris, Band 43, 1856, pages 219-223.
(offline)
The fossils were not (as Lyell states) found in lignite deposits, but
Lartet refers to trunks of oak, chestnut and pine in lignite in the
lowest foothills of the Pyrenees, which he thinks are the
same age as fossils a Saint-Gaudens and Sansan, because he has collected
some remains of mammals belonging to the same period. Lartet concluded
on the evidence he had that this monkey, of very great size, mainly ate
fruit, and lived usually in trees, as Gibbons of the present time.
He said he took the name Dryopithecus from [Greek] Dryos (tree, oak)
and pithekos
(monkey). So Lyell is correct in linking the name to oaks found in lignite.
Monsieur Fontan, after who the full name Dryopithecus fontani comes, is
named as Urbaine Fontan in the Journal de Toulouse. He may also be "A.
Fontan, docteur-médecin", who is mentioned elsewhere.
The Journal de Toulouse carried to reports of the discovery (the second
correctin the first) on
3.8.1856 and
5.8.1856. Fontan is reported as
saying the find is the more interesting as Cuvier had not managed to find
such a fossil. Flourens "went even further, this unexpected result gives
him hope that one will soon find fossil men". (3.8.1856 - Third page)
|
|
Plate and notes (adapted) provided with Lartet's note
|
1. A series of teeth from "une négresse du Gabon"
2. The same series from an adult Chimpanzee - 3. Orang from Borneo - 4.
Gibbon from
Siamang - 5. Gorilla
7, 8, and 9 are Dryopithecus. 7 shows shows three views of jaw fragments
with teeth and 8 how they fot in to the whole jaw. 8 shows the humerus
(upper arm) bone (not to scale)
10 and 11 are the teeth and jaw of
Pliopithecus antiquus that Lartet
discovered at Sansan in 1837.
6 is a gorilla's jaw (not to scale)
|
|
Lartet says the
Siamang, "placed by Zoologists in general in the last row
of the tribe of the Simians or higher apes, nevertheless, provide by their
skeleton, a sum of characters approaching the human type much greater than
one can find in
Orang or even in the
chimpanzee".
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13,000,000 years ago divergence between humans and orang-utangs
(between 12 and 15 million years ago).
more than 7,000,000 years ago divergence between the two existing
beavers: castor canadensis (north america) and castor fiber (europe and
asia).
7,000,000 years ago divergence between humans and gorillas
(between 6 and 8 million years ago).
6,230,000 years ago The the red deer (cervus elaphus) and Indian
spotted deer (axis axis) last shared a common ancestor. However, they
remain completely interfertile. ("Neanderthals and modern humans: an
example of a mammalian syngameon?" by T. W. Holliday 2006)
6,000,000 years ago divergence between humans and chimpanzees
(between 5 and 7 million years ago). Common ancestor of chimpanzees and
humans. Skin on face and hands of baby chimpanzees darkens after exposure
to the sun. The rest of the body is protected by hair (fur)) and remains
pale.
5,300,000 years ago appearance of Ursus minimus (the Auvergne bear).
(Wikipedia). It is thought to have been the
ancestor of Ursus etruscus. Etruscus became a larger bear. Radiating across
Europe and Asia, it gave rise
cave bears in Europe and
brown bears in Asia. See
A Review of Bear Evolution by
Bruce Mclellan and David
C. Reiner, 1992/1994.
Pliocene
means "more recent".
The shelly sand-banks of East Anglia known as crag were formed in
the Pliocene.
Pleistocene was "was
originally regarded as ... the period in which man, as tool-using animal,
first made his appearance and ... evolved". But the case was made in
"recent years" (1929) that tool-users existed in the "Pliocene or even
earlier". (Wills 1929
p.209).
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5,333,000 to
2,580,000 years ago Pliocene geological epoch. Eolithic
means dawn of
stone
and the term eolith was used for flints that might have
been hand wrought, but might be natural. This one is said to resemble a
musk ox on the left and a bear on the right.
(Larousse Prehistoric)
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|
|
Nature 29.3.1924
contained a report dating eoliths that could have been tools to
"at least,
an early phase of the Pliocene period".
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Rushton Hall
(1928/1930)
wrote "Out of the mists of Antiquity appear the
earliest known people, to whom
the name the people of the dawn or eolithic period has been given"
(p.40).
"Piltdown may be the remains of a Dawn Period man" (page 57).
His
Dawn Man developed in
River Drift Man, another possibility for
placing Piltdown
Man. The pictures are of Piltdown Man and an eolith from
Rushton Hall.
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The so called southern apes
4,000,000 years ago to
2,000,000 years
ago
Australopithecus genus in Africa. Named by
Raymond A. Dart (1893-1988) in 1925 from Latin australis "southern" and
Greek pithekos
"ape". Wikipedia:
Australopithecus
about 3,900,000 years ago Equus caballus, the modern horse, ,
diverged from the lineage it shares with zebras and asses, according to
molecular data. The fossil suggests a divergence at least 2 millions years
ago.
about 3,600,000 years ago A woolly rhinoceros in the Himalayas lived
there during a general world period of warmth. they migrated from there to
northern Asia and Europe when the
Ice Age
began. The woolly rhinoceros co-existed with
woolly mammoths in the
Pleistocene.
Successively named Rhinocerotis antiquitatis - Gryphus antiquitatus -
Rhinocerotis tichorhini and Coelodonta antiquitatis.
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European land mammals
Lindsay and others in 1980 wrote of
"three major dispersal events of large mammals during the Pliocene" at
3,700,000 years ago - then 2,600,000 years ago - then 1,900,000 years ago.
3,600,000 to 3,000,000 years ago or earlier Start of Villafranchian
fauna.
(Wikipedia) -
Villafranchian: The land-mammal stage that spans the upper Pliocene and
lower Pleistocene 3,600,000 to 1,200,000 years ago (Oxford: A Dictionary
of Zoology by Michael Allaby 2009). Villafranchian: An age that is
dated at base at approximately 3,000,000 years ago. It lasted approximately
2,000,000 years and therefore crosses the Late Pliocene/Early Pleistocene
boundary. (Oxford: A Dictionary of Plant Sciences by Michael Allaby
2006)
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Leptobos event. Early Villafranchian starts with appearance of a primitive
bovid of the genus of Leptobos in Italy. Leptobos existed only during the
Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene, thus it is a diagnostic taxon for the
Villafranchian-Nihewanian land mammal ages of Europe and China
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|
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The Etruscan rhinoceros
(Stephanorhinus etruscus) was the European rhino from the early
Pleistocene. It was
succeeded the Steppe Rhino (Stephanorhinus hemitoechus)
in the middle Pleistocene.
|
|
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Elephant-Equus (elephant horse) event. somewhere between 3,000,000
and 2,000,000
years ago. It starts with the appeance of Equus (real horse) and
Mammuthus meridionalis. "We now report new data that
limit the time of Equus' dispersal and into Europe to the 2,600,000
years ago dispersal event". (Lindsay and others)
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|
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Equus was derived from a species of the single-toed horse Pliohippus, known
only from North America.
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Begining of middle Villafranchian coincides
with Gauss/Matuyama magnetic transgresson and onset of
Quaternary
(Pleistocene) 2,580,000 years ago.
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The Wolf event, may fall near
1,700,000
years ago.
The late Villafranchian
starts with the appearance of Canis etruscus (Etrurian wolf)
|
|
end Villafranchian event
Followed by
Galerian
Mammal Age and
Aurelian Mammal Age
(350,000 to 13,000
years ago).
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3,300,000 years ago Lomekwi 3 site tools in Kenya discovered 2015.
Proposal to call the Lomekwian technology as
older and distinct from
Oldowan.
"Oldest stone
tools pre-date earliest humans"
(BBC) - Wikipedia:
stone age -
stone tools -
Article from Nature 21.5.2015 -
Article from Science 14.4.
2015
3,300,000 years ago hominin (human-like primate) called "Lucy"
discovered in Ethiopia in 1974
BBC 4.3.2015 -
Wikipedia
-
Google doodle archive.
Jablonski 2012
infers
skin and fur similar to chimpanzees as activities would not "built up
excess heat as the result of prolonged activity".
2,800,000 years ago Ethiopian jaw bone.
BBC 4.3.2015 "'First human' discovered in Ethiopia"
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Wegener's Alt-Quartär: early Quaternary
The major land masses were about where they are today.
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Quaternary Period current period of the
Cenozoic Era in the geologic
time scale. Includes two epochs: the Pleistocene to
11,700 years
ago - and the
Holocene to today.
Quaternary glaciation.
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2,600,000 to
11,700 years ago Pleistocene [From Greek for most
recent. Term introduced by Lyell in 1839 for ice age deposits after the
Pliocene].
Current ice age with permanent ice sheets in Antarctica and
perhaps Greenland, and fluctuating ice sheets elsewhere.
The ice across
much of Russia preserved
remains of Pleistocene mammals such as this
mammoth from near Moscow whose mounted bones are diplayed in the entrance
hall to the Orlov Museum of Paleontology. The
Woolly Rhinoceros
also roamed
Siberia. See Édouard
Lartet's age of.
|
|
|
furry coat or sweaty skin
a case of bi-polar - hot then cold - cold then hot
Glacials and
interglacials:
|
North Germany: Pre-Tiglian -
Tiglian
- Alpine region (Donau = Danube): Biber
(Wikipedia) - Biber/Danube - Danube
(Wikipedia)
-
Danube/Gunz
(Wikipedia)
MIS 62 -
Günz
-
MS 22
-
Cromerian (Piltdowns)
MIS 15
MIS 14
MIS 13
-
Mindel
MIS 12
-
Holstein MIS 11
(Swanscombes) -
Riss
MIS 10
(Bilzingslebens)
MIS 8
MIS 6
-
Eem (hippos)
MIS 5 -
Wurm
- MIS 2 -
Holocene (farmers)
MIS 1
.
Mammoth:
and rhinoceros -
ivory carving -
prehistoric art -
Aurignacian -
mammoths in art -
Dolni Vestonice -
cave bear and other
extinctions -
eburnien -
reindeer -
mammoth extinct -
The first cool period at the junction of the
Pliocene and the Pleistocene was the pre-Tiglian. - the Pre
tiglian cold stage can be dated between about 2,500,000 and
2,300,000 years ago -
The Tiglian was about 2,000,000 years ago -
The Tiglian interglacial phase ends in the Olduvai magnetic event about
1,700 years ago - 1,700,000 to
1,200,000 million years ago Donau-Günz or
Tiglian
interglacial.
Tiglian derived from Tegelen in the Netherlands
(Wikipedia). "A classical
Villafranchian
locality".
Part of a sketch of what the Tegelen landscape may have looked like, made
by Dubois (1904?). From
"A century of research on the classical locality of Tegelen (province of
Limburg, The Netherlands)" by
Lars W. Van Den Hoek Ostende
and John De Vos
Noted for its deer. Dubois wrote about a species of Eucladoceros (bush-
antlered deer) Eucladoceros tegulensis, later called Eucladoceros, and
Cervus rhenanus Dubois, 1904 (named after him), the small deer of Venlo,
remains of which are found primarily in Tegelen.
Elephants, rhinoceroses, a wild pig species and possibly even tapirs - a
landscape of riverine woodlands and swamps ("Origins and development of
grassland communities in northwestern Europe" by Herbert H. T. Prins 1998)
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Paleo = old lithos = stone. The three ages, Paleolithic,
Mesolithic
and
Neolithic, were
named in
relation to the type of stone tools that survived in archaeological sites.
The Paleolithic is divided into
Lower,
Middle
and
Upper.
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Paeolithic
savagery
(Gordon Childe)
[Strepean?] -
Chellean - Abbevillian
(Wikipedia) - Oldowan
(Wikipedia).
See
Mortillet classification
2,600,000 to 2,550,000 years ago Mode one - Oldowan - stone tools.
Picture above from Wikipedia of a "simple
chopping-tool".
Tools made by knocking flakes off a core stone (pebble core) with a
hammerstone. Core and
flake
tools made.
|
World prehistory: a new outline,
by Grahame Clark. 1969, page 31.
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"Archaeology studies human history from
the development of the first
stone tools.." (Wikipedia). It is one of the
main ways in which social theorists have tried to access pre-history (the
human story before writing). Another major way has been through speculation
on the content of
myths. Artefacts, like stone tools, can be dated in a way
that inferences from myths can not. On the other hand, myths may give
access to the mind in a way that artifacts do not.
Lower
Paleolithic
The first homo - Latin for
human
2,350,000 years ago upper jaw from Hadar, Ethiopia, oldest
fossil attributed to the genus Homo before
2015 jaw
"Man alone has become a biped" (Charles Darwin) - After
Lucy.
2,000,000 years ago (or later) Upright human: Homo erectus: "the
fossil record between ...
Lucy
... and Homo erectus (with its relatively large brain and humanlike body
proportions) two million years ago is sparse".
((BBC 4.3.2015) -
Wikipedia
"Compared with its
australopithecine forebears-who were four feet tall with
ape-sized brains and no stone tools - Homo was larger physically, had a
larger brain, and made stone tools."
(Tomasello 1999)
Map based on hominids leaving Africa about 2 million years ago. They get to
the far east in 100,000 years, but take over 1,000,000 years to get to west
Europe. Why? - Read about
Wushan Man and
Indonesia's top five hominid fossil sites -
Norfolk footprints and
Boxgrove tibia
1,800,000 years ago Hippopotamus antiquus, the European hippopotamus
appeared.
(Wikipedia)
1,800,000 years ago "Early human migrations began when Homo erectus
first migrated out of Africa over the Levantine corridor and Horn of Africa
to Eurasia about 1.8 million years ago".
(Wikipedia in an earlier incarnation) -
Two major dispersals of hominins out of Africa occurred. That of
homo erectus began around 1,800,000 years ago.
That of homo sapiens began
around
80,000 years ago.
(Jablonski 2012)
about 1,750,000 years ago The Olduvai child: OH 7 and Zinjanthropus:
OH 5
MIS 62 - 1.750,000 years ago: end of the
Tiglian
By about 1.76
million years ago, early humans began to make
Acheulean
handaxes and other large cutting tools.
(Smithsonian)
Acheulean about 1,600,000 to
200,000 years ago
Acheulean artifacts from Africa date to 1,600,000 years ago. The
oldest sites
in India are
slightly younger. In Europe
[See
Mortillet classification], the earliest
Acheulean tools appear just after
800,000 years
ago, as
homo erectus
moved north out of Africa.
(anthromuseum.missouri). But the classical
French Acheulean
is much later.
Mode two tools: Large bifacial cutting tools made from flakes
and cores
such as Acheulean handaxes, cleavers and picks.
about 1,500,000 years ago Turkana Boy or Nariokotome Boy
(WT-15000) discovered in Kenya August 1984.
108 bones
(view bones): almost all the scull and most
of the rest of the skeleton. The most complete early hominid found.
Structure suggests a physically very activ biped and
Jablonski 2012
deduces that early hominids had lost body hair and increased sweat glands
by the time he "traversed the woodland grassland" of the Lake Turkana
Basin.
Homo erectus preferred to
homo ergaster
1,500,000 years ago Attirampakkam, south India, Acheulean site.
See
Antiquity -
Indi-Uni -
Science -
Indian Acheulean.
Also see earlier dating.
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1,400,000 years ago
Acheulean - Mode two tools. The picture, from
Wikipedia, is of an Acheulean handaxe from Zamora in Spain.
From
Saint-Acheul, a suburb of Amiens where the first tools from this
period were found in 1859. Wikipedia:
Acheulean
The start of
Antroparkbaby in the
European Acheulean is based on
the
Bilzingsleben site of early palaeolithic human remains in
Thuringia, Germany, dated about 370,000 years ago. Also
Shoningen and
Stránská .
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The four levels of Antroparkbaby are
Acheulean, which it associates with
homo erectus -
Mousterian
(Neanderthal) -
Gravettian - and
Magdalenian (both
homo sapiens)
about 1,250.000 to 700,000 years ago
The
Mid-Pleistocene
Transition or revolution. A period during which the dominant periodicity
of Earth's climate
(glacial-interglacial) cycles inexplicably changed from
41,000 years to 100,000 years
1,200,000 to
700,000
years ago Günz
glaciation (Alps). Britain's corresponding
Beestonian Stage consists of alternating glacial and interglacial phases.
The Beestonian Stage and Marine Isotope Stage 22 ended about 866,000 years
ago.
(Wikipedia).
H.G. Wells calls the "first glacial age"
MIS 22 - 1,030,000 years ago, marking the end of the Bavelian period in
Europe. The Leerdam interglacial is located at MIS23 and the Bavelian at
MIS25 by
Wll Roebroeks and Thijs Van Kolfschoten.
They include both in the Bavelian complex. This complex precedes the
Cromerian complex.
Antoine in began a chart
of regional sequancies with Leerdam followed by the aluvial
Somme
terrace "Ferme de Grace" (MIS22). The road to Ferme de Grace is in the
Renancourt district of Amiens.
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In arranging
geological
strata Alexander Brongniart (1770-1847) proposed that each
stratum could be defined by the presence of one or more specific
fossils of animals or plants, which he called a fossile
caractéristique. In prehistoric archaeology, Mortillet spoke,
instead, of a
fossile-directeur, which served the same function. The Fossile-
directeur was a tool made by humans rather than a biological remain.
En 1861,
[Édouard Lartet] propose une chronologie du
Quaternaire fondée sur les
espèces successives de grands mammifères dominants, à
partir desquelles il pensait pouvoir dater les industries lithiques
paléolithiques: l'âge de
l'ours des cavernes, l'âge de
l'éléphant
(mammouth) et du
rhinocéros laineux,
l'âge du renne et l'âge de
l'auroch.
Lartet suggested four ages or periods based on associated
fauna, to which Felix Garrigou added an earlier Hippopotamus period:
The Hippopotamus period
The Cave Bear period
The Woolly Mammoth and Rhinoceros period
The Reindeer period
The Aurochs or Bison period
In Mortillet's scheme Hippopotamus became Chellean, most of Cave Bear and Mammoth became
Mousterian,
although
some late finds were put in a separate
Aurignacian.
Reindeer was divided into
Solutrean
and
Magdalenian, and
Robenhausian was
added for the Neolithic period.
(Oscar Abadía 2002)
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Names of some periods of the paleolithic as classified by
Gabriel de
Mortillet. "Mortillet's most successful idea was to define time-
periods by their typical
stone tools which acted like the
fossile directeurs of the geologists".
(Aggsbach's Paleolithic Blog)
Tertiary
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|
Thenaisienne -
Eolithique. Stones "étonnée par le feu". (shaped,
cracked into shape, using fire). Named after
Thenay
in Loire et Cher where,
from 1860, Abbé Bourgeois collected objects from
Upper Oligocene
beds that he suggested to the Congress of Paris in 1867 were man-made.
Possible
Tertiary man.
Picture 2 is an example shaped by fire. Picture 5 is an example
with its edge (bottom) retouched by chipping.
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See Piltdown often
considered before Chellean.
Quaternary
Chelléen
(Chellean). Term suggested by Ernest d'Acy in 1878, employed by
Mortillet in
1883. Named after
site at
Chelles (Seine-et-Marne, France)
(Wikipedia).
Henri Breuil proposed replacing by
Abbevillien
in reference to sites on the haute terrasse de la
Somme at
Abbeville
(Wikipedia), where
tools coexist with the fossils of animals from a hot climate such as
Elephas
antiquus.
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The characteristic tool is often
called an axe, but is a hand tool to cut, drill, trim and do
everything. Mortillet calls it a coup-de-poing (blow of the
fist - punch) or knuckle-fist. The word bifacial was substituted
following André Vayson (1920).
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Acheuléen
(Acheulean), named after a site at
Saint-Acheul
near Amiens
(Somme). A
transitonal period with a cooler climate, still dominated by the coup-
de-poing, which is refined. The
mammoth replaces the elephant as the climate cools
Wikipedia: Acheulean tools are classified as
mode two, meaning they are
more advanced than the (usually earlier) mode one tools of the
Clactonian
or Oldowan/Abbevillian
[Mortillet's Thenaisienne]
industries but lacking the sophistication of the (usually later)
mode three
tools of the
Middle Palaeolithic, exemplified by the Mousterian (below)
See tools
Moustérien
(Mousterian). Named after a site at the l'abri
supérieur du Moustier à Peyzac-le-Moustier (Dordogne)
discovered by
Édouard Lartet
in 1860. Associated with the great bear of the caves.
The Acheulean and Mousterian were both very long periods during which
large fluvial (river) alluvium deposits of gravel, sands and silts formed.
Their deposits are much more abundant than chelleennes alluvium. The
industry gradually changed and eventually was completely transformed. The
general purpose tool, though persisting, was increasingly replaced by
specialist forms such as the blade, the tip and the scraper.
|
Mousterian flint tools in transition to Solutrean
113: a flint pointe.
109 and 110: Two sides of one flint pointe.
116: A double scraper.
111 and 112: two sides of a very large scraper. Lanceolate shape. Montillet
notes the care and skill that has gone into shaping each side and comments
that "this remarkable instrument approaches
solutrean".
114 and 115: two sides of one tool. 114 shows "passage" from a ponte to a
scaper. A pointe has been retouched along the length of one side (bottom)
"forming a very beautiful scraper". 115 shows a Conchoidal fracture
(percusion chonchoid) in the corner.
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Aurignacian
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Solutréen
(Solutrean) after a site discovered
au pied de la Roche de Solutré (Saône-et-Loire) par Henry
Testot-Ferry en 1866, which Mortillet visited at his invitation. First part
associated with mammoths, second with reindeer. Tool remains include two
types of pointes, which, although not abundant, are characteristic.
One type is laurel leaf shaped, the other willow leaf with a side notch.
Artistic retouching on both faces, at both ends and at the perimeter,
distinguishes them from Mousterian pointes. They were made
to be emmanchées (mounted, on wood, for example). Later authors
agree that the Solutrean represents the pinnacle of working flint and
produced arrowheads of a perfection rarely equalled afterwards.
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|
Magdalénien
(Magdalenian). The name of the site of la Madeleine (Dordogne) discovered
by
Édouard Lartet in 1863. Humans lived in caves for the
most part. Asociated with reindeer throughout. Characterised especially by
development of instruments in bone and antler. It develops naturally
from the Solutrean. Bone objects begin to appear at the end of the
Solutrean and finely worked flint pointes are sometimes found in the early
Magdalenian. But the use of bone harms the development of flint objects,
which are less beautiful.
A dagger carved from reindeer antler. The handle is carved as a reindeer
From Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne)
(Wikipedia). Museum of Saint-Germain.
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[Mesolithic] Term not used on Mortillet's plans. Instead,
he added Tourassien to the end of the old stone age and Tardenoisien to the
start of the new stone age.
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Tourassien (1872? 1894?)
Wikipedia. Term fell into disuse in favour of
the
Azilien
[terme tombé en
désuétude au profit
d'Azilien].
(Wikipedia)
At the end of the
Paleolithic a warmer climate
forced reindeer north. Without this "animal heaven"
the human populations of Western Europe lived in
much more difficult times and (stone) industry declined.
The shelter beyond Tourasse, close to
Saint-Martory (Haute-Garonne) provides a good set
of tools, characterised by harpoons.
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Temps actuels = current time
"Sous le nom de temps actuels, on comprend tous ceux qui se sont
trouvés dans des conditions de géographie physique,
d'hydrographie, de climatologie, de flore et de faune à peu
pràs semblables
… celles de nos jours."
(Ascribed to Mortillet - Seems to be an extract from the second
edition (Paris 1895) of
Alcide Railliet's
Traité de zoologie médicale et agricole. Alcide
Railliet says that the Neolithic period contains only one time: the
Robenhausian. The "gap" between Quaternary and current time is
explained by the change from a cold dry climate to a temperate one, which
led to the reindeer moving north, followed by the humans who hunted them.
The space they left is eventually filled by a new people, bringing their
own tools.
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Current - Tardenoisien (1897)
(Wikipedia) - named after natural French region of
Tardenois
Wikipedia. Characterised by
small flints with geometric shapes.
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|
After geologic time came the current time, but at the beginning, and for a
long time, we are still in the stone age. At this point we call it
Neolithic or the new stone age. I begins with an industry
characterised by flint instruments which are very small and have geometric
shapes. They are in abundance in the Tardenois, Department of
the Aisne.
Néolithique
(Neolithic)
Period of Pierre polie (polished stone), because it generally polished
the most common instrument, the axe. Mortillet counts Tardenoisien and
Robenhausian as the two neolithic epochs. He just has one plate for
Tardenoisien, but many for Robenhausian.
Robenhausienne (Robenhausian) named after a Swiss Lake Resort,
the palafitte of
Robenhausen
(Wikipedia)
on small partly desiccated Lake Pfäffikon,
in the canton of Zurich. This important station provided
many and interesting information on industry, customs and habits of the men
in the end the period of the stone polished. The polishing of stone took
especially great development to
the robenhausienne time.
Plates with a diverse range of tools. The first plate being hammers or
firing pins, "the first of all the tools,.absolutely essential for trimming
stone".
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Mortillet says that ("primitive") Pottery, for general use,
appeared for the first time in Europe during the Robenhausian, having been
completely lacking during the
Quaternary. The
fist pots ("vases") are crude. (Perhaps?) incompletely fired. Only the
surface is reddened by the fire. The interior of the pottery is coloured
brown by the charcoal or black of smoke. It is usually mixed with angular
fragments of rocks or shells. This mixture intended to
give consistency to the clay and to prevent splitting during drying and
while cooking. These bottoms of these first pots are rounded, without a
flattened foot. To stand upright they would have to be pressed into earth,
sand or ash. Side nipples suggest suspension by cords.
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Âge; du bronze (bronze age)
Morgienne
Larnaudienne
Âge; du fer (iron age)
Hallstattienne
Marnienne
Lugdnnienne
Chompdolienne
Wabennienne
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Mortillet 1883 Le
Préhistorioue - Antiquité de L'Homme p.21
A basic binary division is made between "temps geologiques" (geological
time) and
"temps actuelles" (current time). In geological time is
Tertiary
and
Quaternary, until the start of the Neolithic in current time,
which is marked by the polishing of stone tools.
It was considered possible that hunter humans had simply been replaced by
other humans who tilled the soil. It has been suggested (seriously?) that a
gap between the two might have marked
Noah's flood. The search for an alternative, develomental,
process led to the two-stage theory becoming a three stage one with a
Mesolithic (middle)
stage. See Wikipedia
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|
Mortillet's research gap - the missing middle
Mortillet:
16.4.1874 at
la Société d'Anthropologie,
Toute la discussion, je crois, repose sur un malentendu.
Entre l'époque paléolithique ou des cavernes et
l'époque néolithique ou de la pierre polie, il existe un
hiatus; mais cet hiatus n'est qu'une simple lacune dans nos connaissances.
Il ne représente'pas une véritable lacune dans le temps et
dans l'industrie. Certainement l'époque paléolithique
a dû se rattacher et se souder à l'époque
néolithique;
mais nous n'avons pas encore découvert le point de
contact. Entre les deux époques, il n'y a pas eu une période
où l'Europe était inhabitable; seulement, les restes de
l'époque de transition ou de passage n'ont pas encore
été trouvés et reconnus. C'est ce qui constitue
l'hiatus que nous constatons. Je le répéte, cet hiatus n'est
pas réel un existe que dans le résultai de nos études
et de nos recherches actuelles. Je devais une explication parce que je suis
le principal propagateur de l'idée de l'hiatus. J'ai signalé
le
fait pour stimuler les recherches et les investigations.
The entire discussion, I believe, is based on a misunderstanding.
Between the Paleolithic era or the caves and the time Neolithic or polished
stone, there is a hiatus; but this hiatus is just a simple gap in our
knowledge. It is not a real gap in time and in the industry. Certainly the
Paleolithic era has had to be connected and merge in the Neolithic, but we
have yet to discover the point of contact. Between the two eras, there has
not been a period where Europe was uninhabitable; only the remains of the
epoch of transition or passage have not yet been found and
recognized. That is the gap we see. I repeat, this hiatus is not a real
one, but exists only in the results of our studies and our current
research. I owe this explanation because I am the main
propagator of the idea of the hiatus. I pointed out the fact to
stimulate research and investigations.
Mesolithic - needed or not needed?
Phillipe Salmon argued for a Campignian Culture (name from Campigny,
Seine
Inferieure
- Wikipedia)) starting before the
Robenhausian
(1882? 1891?). The
Tourassien
(later Azilian) may have been suggested in 1894 and the
Tardenoisien
in 1897. The Tourassien and Tardenoisien industries were collated to form
the Mesolithic period, which remained a controversial concept until after
the second world war. From the marxist approach of
modes of production, the transition from the old stone age to
the new was a transition from
savagery to
barbarism, and
a transitional stage was not needed. Gordon Childe wrote that cultivating
the soil "was the first step in the neolithic revolution, and suffices to
distinguish barbarism from savagery" (1942, p.43)
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Musée préhistorique by Gabriel and Adrien de Mortillet.
1903 edition. The major change from the
1883 chart is two transitional epochs between the old and new
stone ages.
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1,000,000 years ago
about 1,000,000 to 900,000 years ago The "end-
Villafranchian"
event. A practically total rejuvenation of the fauna of Eurasia, along
with new types of adaptation, and changes in climate and vegetation. May
have been triggered by tectonic movements in the mountain belts of central
and southern Asia. Major reorganization of large-mammal communities within
the interval from about 920,000 to 750,000 years ago, which is from the
early to middle Galerian mammal age. The bear Ursus dolinensis and the
bison, a more evolved form than Bison (Eobison), are taxa typical of the
beginning of the Galerian mammal age. Above beds with upper Villafranchian
fossils in East Anglia is the
Cromer Forest Bed. Early Cromerian and early
Galerian may be the same.
Choppers and flake tools (including scrapers) occur at a number of sites
before 1,000,000 years ago.
(Gilligan 3.2010) - Scrapers are possibly an indication of work
on hides for
clothing.
1,000,000 years ago "members of the genus
Homo living in Africa ... from which
all modern humans evolved ... probably had mostly naked and
darkly pigmented skin"
(Jablonski 2012)
Happisburgh: "Site 3 probably dates to one of the prominent warm stages
(i.e. those most likely to have supported deciduous forest and other
thermophilous plants)".
(British Museum) -
See
British Archaeology January/February
2006
About 80 flint tools
Footprints -
Research article: "Hominin Footprints from Early
Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK" 7.2.2014.
Dates for Cromer Forest Bed: 780,000 to 450,000 years ago?
(Wikipedia). Link for
West Runton (mammoth and
rhino) - See Galerian
The three levels of the Thames Terraces: (gravels black)
Flood Plain Gravels (F.P.) are ones younger than the Taplow ones.
The Thames gravels were used to date the Piltdown gravels.
As a "missing link" between
monkey
and man,
Piltdown was considered as
buried in Boyn level gravels. The gravels he was alleged to have been found
in were, in fact, at the younger Taplow level. See
Piltdown geology.
The diagram is based on one by Henry Dewey and taken from
Wills 1929 p.241.
866,000 to
478,000
years ago or 700,000 to 650,000 years ago:
an
interglacial period - Called
Günz-
Mindel - Pre-Illinoian - or Cromerian. Called third
interglacial if dating backwards, but
H.G. Wells calls the "first interglacial period"
Chellean (Abbevillian) culture in France. The fossil locality of
Chilhac three is known for a rich
Villafranchian
fauna (Boeuf 1983) ......
thought to represent the earliest stage named Chellean (De Mortillet 1883).
See
Wikipedia. Possible fauna:
Etruscan
rhinoceros - Hippopotamus - Primitive horse - Sabre tooth tiger
- Broad
nosed rhinoceros - Straight tusked elephant - Giant beaver - Short faced
hyena - Deer - Bison - Wild Cattle.
"With extreme cold glacial times following the Cromerian, the European
Hippopotamus moved out of Britain, never to return. It would be another
250,000 years before a hippopotamus were to waddle into Britain again."
(Jan Freedman)
Cromerian interglacials starting 563,000 years ago
(MIS15)
- 533,000 years ago
(MIS14)
-
478,000 years ago
(MIS13)
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"Prior to the Cromerian age the fossils are African"
"Australopithecus" - Then
"hominids are found in Asia and Europe as well - the volcanic
strata of
Java and the fossil beds near
Peking
and
Heidelberg
being good examples. These fossils have recently been grouped as
Homo erectus".
(Larousse Prehistoric 1957-1962).
Other finds were said to "show that the following animals lived in this
part of the Wealden country when Piltdown Man was here: Giant Elephant
(probably
Elephas antiquus). Horse
(Equus caballus).
Hippopotamus
(Hippopotamus amphibius). Red Deer
(Cervus elaphus). Beaver
(Castor fiber).
To these may be added the following from Eastbourne:- Small-horned
Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros hemitarchus *). Giant Irish Deer
(Megaceros
hibernicus ). Bison (Bison priscus). The country must have been well
wooded, and watered by rivers which were often bounded by swamps. The
climate could not have been very different from that of the present day,
only perhaps with heavier rain. It was indeed a truly mild episode in the
Great Ice Age, and the occurrence of the hippopotamus with the giant forest
elephant confirms the supposition that this was the earliest break in the
Arctic record. The Piltdown gravel is therefore shown to belong to the
early part of the
Pleistocene period." (pages 35-36)
*
Stephanorhinus hemitoechus - Dicerorhinus hemitoechus -
Rhinoceros
hemitoechus
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The geology of Piltdown, in the Weald of East Sussex: The area is
one of "Tunbridge Wells Sand" from the
cretaceous period.
However, in places, there are shallow surface deposits of gravel. These
deposits were not shown on the geological maps until after the first world
war. Workman repairing roads excavated them, however, and are said to have
provided Charles Dawson with his first scull fragment in 1908.
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The strata at Piltdown.
1. 35 centimeters (14 inches) of surface soil
2. A few centimters to a meter (3.3 feet) of pale yellow gravel
3. 50 centimeters (20 inches) of dark gravel in which
fossil were "found"
4. 25 centimeters (10 inches) of gravel without fossils
5. Tunbridge Wells Sand
(Cretaceous)
Francis H. Edmunds mapped the Piltdown gravel in 1925. He found it
correlated with the
Thames Taplow gravels, much younger than the
Swanscombe terrace
deposits.
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Another account has some Piltdown men (I)Eoanthropus
(Eolithic culture)
about
1,000,000
years ago probably living in "the valley of the early post-Pliocene
Thames". An Ice Age
started and then men of the
Old Stone Age
appeared in the lower part of the valley at least
500,000 years ago. These
included both
"Chellean
and
Acheulean Paleolithic cultures". The use of stone tools probably
began about 500,000 years ago. Chellean man developed stone tools for about
200,000 years.
about 781,000 to
126,000
years ago (655.000 years): Middle
Pleistocene
or Ionian stage. See
Mid Pleistocene Transition
"toolmakers graduated from the chopping tools to... a
handaxe, made of quartzite or flint"
(Coon, p.75).
During cold periods towards the end of the Middle Pleistocene,
proliferation of
scraper tools in the
"cooler climatic zones occupied by hominins, facilitated the manufacture of
simple clothing. (See
below)
(Gilligan 1.2010 and 3.2010)
about 750,000 years ago A date for Peking Man
(BBC - Wikipedia:
Peking Man -
Zhoukoudian caves - "a tool-maker, killed and
devoured his fellow beings and even knew the use of fire" (
Schenk, G. 1961, p.75)
MIS 17 - 712,000 years ago
MIS 16 - 676,000 years ago
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MIS 15 - 621,000 years ago
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The Somme valley in northern France is developed on an
Upper Cretaceous
Chalk bedrock (continuous with that under the Thames) and has
has terrace system in its middle
part (about 70 km long). Between Amiens and Abbeville, ten stepped alluvial
formations (nappes alluviales) have been described.
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In the area of Amiens, the river terraces tiered system of Somme includes
ten fossil alluvial the oldest (the highest) was set up there more than a
million years. Numbered from the most recent to the oldest,
The upper terrace (Nappe de Grâce) weathered to red on the surface,
may be
attributed to the Older
Mindel
phase. These deposits are generally
decalcified, with little wildlife, except at Abbeville.
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Table from
Le système de terrasses du Bassin de la Somme...
by Pierre Antoine. Quaternaire Année 1993 Volume 4
Numéro 1 pp. 3-16. See also his thesis:
Les terrasses quaternaires du bassin de la somme. ...
Thèse,
Université des Sciences et Techniques de Lille Flandres-Artois,
1989.
(offline) - and
Paléoenvironnements pléistocènes et peuplements
paléolithiques dans le bassin de la Somme 2003.
in Abbeville (Carrière Carpentier), where mammal assemblages show
that calcareous fluvial deposits have been deposited in an interglacial
environment. On the basis of terrace stratigraphy, ESR-quartz dating, and
biostratigraphic data, these fluvial deposits are allocated to
MIS 15.
Handaxes discovered at the base of the slope deposits, directly overlying
the fluvial sequence, can be, as a first hypothesis, allocated to
MIS 14. They are thus due to
Homo heidelbergensis according to the age of the eponymous Mauer
site in Germany. Consequently, in the state of knowledge, the "Rue du
Manège" and Carrière Carpentier findings represent the oldest
in situ evidence of the hominid occupation in the terrace record of
Northern France.
Dating the earliest human occupation of Western Europe:
New evidence from the fluvial terrace system of the Somme basin (Northern
France) by
Pierre Antoine, Emmanuelle Stoetzel and others 2015.
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about 600,000 years ago The Heidelberg jaw discovered in
1907.
about 600,000 years ago First human settlements at
Stránská Rock, Brno, Moravia. Further settlements between
40,000
and
30,000
years ago.
(Wikiedia) See
Bohunician.
MIS 14 - 563,000 years ago
550,000 years ago Possible date for earliest
Somme valley
Acheulean remains (see below)
MIS 13 - 533,000 years ago
About 500,000 years ago Flints and a hominid tibia from
Eartham Pit. Boxgrove, Sussex in
Britain.
500,000 to 450,000 years ago Earliest human occupation in Somme
Valley according to
Antoine 2003 who says they already represented well developed
Acheulean
industries (about the start of
MIS 12
according to modern excavations)
478,000 to 424,000 years ago Mindel
glaciation
-
Anglian in UK - MIS 12 - "The Anglian Stage and Marine Oxygen Isotope Stage
12
started about 478,000 years ago and ended about 424,000 years ago." The
most extreme ice age during the last 2 million years. In Britain the ice
sheet reached Hornchurch in north-east London"
(Wikipedia). Equated with the
Elster glaciation of northern Germany, but dates
given are very different.
H.G. Wells calls the "second glacial age"
Quarry of Menchecourt at Abbeville (where
Boucher de
Perthes recovered antediluvian antiquities.
In the Somme terraces system in situ Acheulean settlements where dated to
early
MIS 12 at about
450,000
years ago in the 1990s, but new field
discoveries allow to increase significantly the age of the oldest human
occupation (Early Middle Pleistocene). The first one (Amiens "Rue du
Manège" 2007) is dated at about 550,000 years ago using ESR and
terrace
stratigraphy.
(Antoine, Stoetzel and others 2015).
The Abbevillian type site is on the 150-foot [45.72 meters] terrace
of the
River
Somme. Tools found there are rough chipped bifacial handaxes
made during the
Elsterian Stage of the Pleistocene Ice Age, which covered
central Europe between 478,000 and 424,000 years ago.
(Wikipedia). See
Mortillet
The Carrière de Menchecourt à Abbeville (Quarry of
Menchecourt at Abbeville), Rue de Haut
80100 Abbeville, France, in the grounds of what was the
Maison du Temple
à Abbeville (House of the Templers at Abbeville) was made
an
historical monument on 1.12.1983. (See
also)
Marcel-Jérôme Rigollot inspected the Abbeville
finds and Menchecourt quarry in 1853, and made similar finds at
Saint-Acheul in 1854. See
Mortillet
See Jardin archéologique de Saint-
Acheul -
Archeological Travel -
Le-Musee-Boucher-de-Perthes
424,000 to 374,000 years ago
[Marine Isotope Stage 11] or
300,000 to 250,000 years ago: an
interglacial period - Called
,
Mindel-Riss, Pre-Illinoian,
Holstein
and Hoxnian. Called second interglacial if dating backwards and by
H.G. Wells.
Boyn Hill Thames Terrace deposits
.
Sand and gravel
deposits underneath Swanscombe were laid down between 425,000 and 350,000BC
by an ancient course of the Thames,
(Swanscombe Heritage Park) -
Swanscombe woman
and
Steinheim (man?)
Swanscombe Animals: lion, straight tusked elephant - rhinoceroses - giant
deer - mice - bats - water voles - reptiles - fish - molluscs -
A climate slightly warmer than the present day.
MIS 11 424,000 years ago - Hoxnian Stage in Britain.
"Differentiating the two interglacials
MIS 11
and
9
is not always possible,
as they were short and sometimes shared common climatic and environmental
features.
MIS 10
is also considered to be short and is not always preserved
in the sedimentological record."
(Aggsbach's Paleolithic Blog)
The Clactonian is the name given to an industry of European flint tool
manufacture that dates to the early part of the Hoxnian interglacial.
a tufa deposit located at the top of a Middle Pleistocene fluvial
sequence... correlation of the Saint-Acheul assemblage with malacofaunas
recovered in other MIS 11 tufa deposits from the Somme and Seine
valleys....
reappraisal of these French molluscan assemblages shows that they are
similar to British malacofaunas of
Hoxnian
age. These new results strengthen the uniqueness and biostratigraphical
value of the 'Lyrodiscus assemblage'.
(N. Limondin-Lozouet and P. Antoine 2006,
"A new Lyrodiscus (Mollusca, Gastropoda) assemblage from Saint-Acheul
(Somme Valley): a reappraisal of MIS 11 malacofaunas from northern
France". Boreas, 35: pp 622-633).
See also -
and
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400,000 years ago Common ancestors of
neanderthal humans and
homo erectus began separation. Neanderthal developed in Europe and homo
erectus in Africa.
The picture shows a racial depiction of the separation in a 1950s
Children's Encyclopedia. The separation of "ape men" from "true
men" is
shown as equivalent to, or greater than, that
separating humans from
gorillas and
chimpanzees. True men then divide into
two distinct lines - black (negro - negroid - australoid) and white
(european - mongoloid). This distinction is shown as equivalent to that
between
orang-utangs and gorillas.
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A group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature is
considered the same species, however different appearances. See
early human gene exchange.
|
about 400,000 years ago scullcap discovered in Olduvai Gorge by
Lewis Leakey in 1960.
Coon classifies as homo erectus.
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400,000? years ago First use of fire
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See trees.
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about 400,000 years ago
Swanscombe woman lived and died in Kent,
Britain.
Charcoal may indicate fire. Before the
Boxgrove tibia,
her remains were the earliest in what became
Britain. See
Britain an island. She lived during the
MIS 11 interglacial, near
the start of the
Aurelian mammal age.
Argued to have a lower
Clactonian strata below an
Acheulean culture. One of the richest Pleistocene vertebrate
localities in Britain, and by far the richest locality attributable to the
Hoxnian
Interglacial.
About 400,000 to 380,000 years ago Wooden spears made of spruce of
from an ancient lakeshore hunting ground. Found in a coal mine in
Shöningen, near Hanover, Germany in 1997.
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about 370,000 years ago Bilzingsleben site in Germany. In the 1970s
Dietrich Mania excavated "three round ground plans of dwellings
with
hearths by their entrances". (Antropark).
He "found large
stones arranged in a circular manner. He thought that it probably was a
base for a
dwelling. However, ring-center analysis showed that the site was
an open air site. C. Gamble proposed that humans congregated at the site
around the
fire".
Stone chopping tools of small size, mainly flint.
Numerous bone tools include hoes,
scrapers,
point
and gougers. Some hoes
made of antler or ivory. Some wooden artefacts preserved.
(Wikipedia)
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Sewing The burin, a
stone chisel that could shape bone, was rare before the
Upper Paleolithic. Instead of bone awls, the Antropark website suggests, people made holes in
leather using wooden
awls made of dry yew and sewed with sinews. "Another
possibility was
to cut narrow stripes and to make small holes in those parts of leather one
wanted to join using a minor flake. The holes were cleaned using a sharp
piece of wood. The stripes were then pushed through the holes and parts of
leather were sewn together in this way."
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350,000 to 250,000 years ago Steinheim skull
350,000 to 13,000 years ago Aurelian
Mammal Age. (after Via
Aurelia,
north east of Rome). Start indicated by the Irish elk (Megaloceros
giganteus), the
cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), and grey wolf (Canis lupus).
Few "archaic carnivores survived the transition to the Aurelian ELMA,
roughly around the beginning of MIS 9" about 333,000 years ago.
(Steven Churchill
2014).
MIS 9 - 337,000 years ago. Informally called the Purfleet
Interglacial
Wikipedia). See
GeoEssex
300,000 years ago "Cave bears inhabited caves in Europe throughout
the Pleistocene, from
about 300,000 to 15,000 BC,
disappearing by the end of the last ice age. Their population
seems to have diminished upon the arrival of
Cro-magnon in Europe" "Most
cave bears seem to have died off well before the
Weichselian glaciation".
(Cave Bears) - See
cave Chauvet and
Édouard Lartet's age
of
Middle
Paleolithic
300,000 to 30,000 years ago
300,000 years ago In the mont Châlat area of Chelles a
settlement of people whose flint tools were discovered in 1874. Near
Lauchonia sylva (forest) and the river Marne. See
flint biface in Musée
départemental de Préhistoire d'île-de-France,
Nemours, from the collection of local prehistorian Edmond Edmee Doigneau
(23.9.1825-4.5.1891). See
Mortillet
300,000 to 125,000
years ago
Rhodesian man - See
1921 and
1950s reconstruction and
Heidelberg.
250,000 to 120,000 years ago Riss
glaciation
Penultimate Ice Age.
H.G. Wells calls the "third glacial age"
Early
blade tools in Europe date from the penultimate ice age
The Riss is paralleled by MIS 6, 8 and
10, which would therefore place it about 350,000 and 120,000
years ago
(Wikipedia)
MIS 8: Somme level three: Argoeuves. 300,000 to 250,000 years
ago
lavalloisian
250,000 to 200,000 years ago First "true"
Neanderthals
(Whatever
that means)
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"Most of the
Mousterian
as well as the upper Paleolithic cultures seem to
have coincided with one of the
Glacial episodes when man dwelt chiefly in caves"
(Wills 1929 p.248).
"The cave bears were old tenants with long existing rights. But the
Mousterian hunters had... the courage of despair. They must be housed or
perish" (Rushton Hall
1928/1930 p.80)
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220,000 to
40,000
years ago
Mousterian on
Antroparkbaby. Mode three
tools. Based on
Molodova -
Ukraine. Tool culture named after
Le Moustier. Associated
primarily with Homo
neanderthalensis.
Wikipedia dates Mousterian from
160,000
years ago - See
Mortillet classification
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Mode
three tools: Flake tools struck from prepared cores, with an
overlapping sequence of flake removal (sometimes referred to as
façonnage) system - including the Levallois technology, See
Archaic Human Culture by Dennis O'Neil and
Making Flint Tools by Don Hitchcock.
The picture, from
Noël-Hume (1953), shows a
core culture axe at the top and then a flake point. Technology
moved its emphasis from fashioning cores to fashioning flakes.
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sapiens: the wise, discerning, thinking
200,000 years ago "It is most likely that modern
Homo
sapiens born 200,000 thousand years ago, somewhere in Eastern
(Central)
Africa"
(Dates in the history of
biology)
(I have assumed it means 200,000)
The first
anatomically modern human fossils
date back 195,000 years.
Geneticists argue that almost all living men gained their Y chromosome from
a common male ancestor living between 140,000 and 60,000 years ago.
(New Scientist)
"Since the earliest appearance of modern humans more than
150,000 years ago during the
Pleistocene (Ice Age), people had always relied on hunting herds
of wild animals, fishing, and gathering wild plants to feed themselves...
All human groups during the
Paleolithic ("Old Stone") period during the Ice Age were nomadic
hunters and gatherers."
(Gil Stein)
190,000 to 50,000
years ago Range of stone tools discovered alongside
homo floresiensis the dragon island Flores in Indonesia.
(Wikipedia)
From about 180,000 to about 60,000
years ago: no evidence of human occupation in Britain, Wikipedia:
Prehistoric Britain
160,000 years ago
Between 130,000 and 114,000 years ago, the ice retreated during the
Eemian
interglacial
- and then advanced again to create the glacial that
most people know as "the ice age".
(New Scientist 24.5.2010).
Riss-
Würm. Corresponds to
Marine Isotope Stage 5e.
Called first interglacial if dating backwards, but
H.G. Wells calls the "third interglacial period"
The
Taplow Terrace dates to the rise of the sea in this
interglacial.
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At the peak, Northern Hemisphere
winters were generally warmer and wetter than now. The hippopotamus was
distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames.
(Wikipedia) - and further north:
Bones from a hippopotamus, and some from rhinoceros and
elephant, were
dug up in Derby in 1895. They are now in the Derybshire Museum's
new nature gallery
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121,000 years ago ± 4000 years: uranium-thorium dating of
Calcite
deposits overlying the bone-bearing sediments in the
Kirkdale Cave.
MIS 5: 130,000 to 71,000
years ago.
MIS 5e - 123,000 years ago. (Eemian or Ipswichian)
MIS 5d - 109,000 years ago.
MIS 5c - 96,000 years ago.
MIS 5b - 87,000 years ago.
MIS 5a - 82,000 years ago.
According to Unwritten History, Dawn man developed into river drift
man. River drift man began in the warmer climates that supported
rhinoceros, hippopotamus and straight tusked elephants in Britain. In the
succeeding cold period, river drift man developed into cave man
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A large number of sites in Britain are attributed to Marine Isotope
Stage 5e, mainly on the basis of hippopotumus remains. None show signs of
humans. See
Nick Ashton
In Britain Elephas (Palaeoloxodon) antiquus is often found in association
with remains of hippopotamus in early Last Interglacial deposits (OIS
substage 5e), about 125,000 years old.
(Natural History Museum)
Harry William Whanslaw's picture (1934) shows "river-drift men" hunting the
"straight-tusked elephant of prehistoric time". A specimen from Upnor, near
Chatham, Kent, was mounted at the Bitish Museum of Natural History in 1926.
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about 126,000 to
11,700 years ago Late
Pleistocene
or Tarantian geological stage. Strata start with sediments laid down at
the start of
the Eemian interglacial and
include the subsequent
ice age. Archaeological
remains include
scrapers,
blades,
awls and adornment. Industries with
blades and awls accompany humans into colder zones. Signs of
modern human
behaviour.
(Gilligan 3.2010)
125,000 years ago
Modern humans,
Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa up to
200,000 years
ago and reached the Near East around 125,000 years ago.
An attempt to depict migrations from
Madison Coonan's website
|
From the
Near East, these populations spread east to South Asia by 50,000 years
ago, and on to
Australia by
40,000 years ago, when for the first
time H. sapiens reached territory never reached by H. erectus.
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H. sapiens
reached Europe around 40,000 years ago, eventually
replacing the
Neanderthal population. East Asia was reached by 30,000
years ago.
(Wikipedia)
110,000 to
12,000 years ago - The last
glacial
period - Weichselian
glaciation. Frequently just called the Ice Age.
H.G. Wells calls the "fourth and last glacial period"
last 100,000 years of the
Pleistocene
See
maximum.
100,000 years ago Noam Chomsky's date for the chance mutation that
he considers made the sudden appearance of
language possible.
100,000 years ago Blombos Cave, South Africa, tools for making ochre
paint.
(BBC) - Wikipedia
Blombos Cave
100,000 to 90,000 years ago
With the last Ice Age,
there developed the more-or-less continuous use of clothing. This was
partly because cold promoted the replacement of
simple clothing
(draped loosely over the body) by
complex clothing (shaped to fit body and limbs). This acquired
psychosocial functions
that have helped to maintain its continuing use up to the present.
(Gilligan 1.2010 and 3.2010)
80,000 years ago
"Climate Change May Have Spurred Early Human
Migration"
70,000 years ago A possible date for the
"Python Cave" evidence of
ritual in the
Tsodilo Hills of Botswana that some suggest is the first evidence of
religion.
(National Geographic report).
Bone tools in Blombos Cave, South Africa, indicate
"modern" behaviour in humans.
(National Geographic report)
|
Modern humans began living above the tropics more than 60,000
years ago.
|
Jablonski 2012 relates this, and
later movement, to survival value from light skin.
50,000 to 10,000 years ago
Upper
Paleolithic
(Wikipedia)
"Blades became the favored technology... although they are occasionally
found in earlier periods" (Wikipedia
blade). Stone burins (French for
engraving tools) or chisels were developed for carving
ivory,
bone and
antler
into spears, harpoons, throwers,
and portable art like figurines. See
Gravettian pictures
See
Epipaleolithic and
Mesolithic
|
Modern humans began living above 50 degrees north about
40,000 years ago.
|
Jablonski 2012
Prehistoric imagination, art and craft
"It was in the
upper Paleolithic
that for the first time man gave expression to his beliefs,
his feelings
and thoughts with figurines, engravings and exorcist
rock-paintings".
(
Schenk, G. 1961
, p.111)
Ice Age
art arrival of the modern mind (2013 exhibition at the
British Museum)
"Ice Age art was created between 40,000 and
10,000 years ago
and many of the pieces are made of
mammoth
ivory and
reindeer
antler
Édouard Piette (1827-1906) used the term glyptic for the period of
carved figures. In the
eburnien (ivory) period
he decided (from analysis of
carved figures) that two races existed: a hairy and a hairless race or a
fat (steatopygous) race and a not fat (asteatogenous) race. The fat race
became associated with the idea of people of
African appearance (but hairy)
living in Europe, and producing
fat Venuses, who were dominated by another
race - less hairy and thinner,
Cro-Magnons.
Between 38,000 and 29,000 years ago Aurignacian
Named after the
cave of Aurignac
Mode four tools: "Punch struck
blades with steep retouch" (Clark). A core
stone is prepared from which blades are struck and then retouched into
various specialized forms such as scrapers,
burins, backed blades and points. See
pictures
40,000 to 35,000 years ago
Venus of Hohle Fels figurine. Discovered in
2008 in the
Hohle Fels
cave in Germany. The figurine is tiny (6 centimetres). A nearby discovery
was a 20 centimetre long vulture's bone
flute
with four holes and a V-
shaped mouthpiece. See
Divje Bab eflute
36,000 years ago Goyet Cave, Samson River Valley, Belgium
Dog-like skull
36,000 years ago A date for the Man of Spy - Homme de Spy -
Mens van Spy. Discovered
1886. See
Espace de l'Homme de Spy
|
About 35,000 years ago,
Carleton S Coon begins his "second phase of
history" "the skilled hunter and healer", when "man covers the face of the
earth". Ending "about
7000BC with the invention of
agricuture". See
50,000BC and
phase
3
|
"thirty or thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer" a
"more intelligent" race
"ousted the
Neanderthalers
from their caves ... they hunted the same
food; they probably made war upon their grisly predecessors and killed them
off"
(H.G. Wells 1922. Drawing inspiration from
Rutot and
Mascré).
Rutot called the new race
Paleolithic and argued that it enslaved the
Neandethals.
|
The end of the
Mousterian has now been pushed back to about
40,000 years ago. See
co-existence.
|
35,000 to
11,500 years ago
mammoths
in
prehistoric art
around 35,000 years ago The development of the needle. See
sewing -
22,000 years ago -
clothing remains -
manufacture -
needle lost -
needlework 1840 -
sewing machine
1917 -
About 35,000 years ago First human occupation of the
Grotte
d'Aurignac (Cave of Aurignac). Remains also show occupation
by wild
animals: 10 herbivores include horse
(Equus caballus),
aurochs
(Bos primigenius/Bison europceus), rhinoceros
(Rhinoceros tichorhinus),
mammoth, stag
(Cervus elaphus),
elk
(Megaceros hibernicus), roebuck (Cervus capreolus),
reindeer
(Cervus/Rangifer tarandus), and pig (Sus scrofa). Carnivores
included
cave-bear
(Ursus spelceus),
brown bear (Ursus
arctos?), badger (Meles taxus), polecat (Putorius vulgaris), cave hyaena
(crocuta spelae), cave-
lion (Felis spelcea), wild cat (Felis catus ferus), wolf
(Canis lupus), and
fox (Canis vulpis).
The oldest layer of the cave is later than the
Acheulean
(1,700,000 to
300,000
years ago), but before the
Solutrean
(approximately
22,000
to
17,000
before present), thus defining a
new prehistoric culture, the
Aurignacian
(approximately
39,000
to
28,000
before present), the first culture of the
Upper Paleolithic in Europe.
34,000 to
24,000
years ago "With the exception of dwarfed island descendants in the
Mediterranean, the expansion of cold grasslands and the contraction of
forests drove Palaeoloxodon to extinction" in Europe.
(National Geographic -
Wikipedia)
|
About 30,000 years ago, modern
homo sapiens entirely
replaced earlier
man-like forms. Weapons and tools of flint and bone survive
along with
female carved stone figures with exaggerated sexual features,
suggesting
fertility symbols and magical ceremonies.
Mentone caves. "Grimaldi Man" "The three best-known skeletons
(4,5,6) may
have been burials from an early
Upper Paleolithic
(Aurignacian or
Gravettian)
level into a sterile layer that may represent an interstadial period.
This last level immediately succeeds the latest
Mousterian horizon in the cave." (source)
A
1934 Encyclopedia
contrasts the "Grimalid Race" remains, which are of "a
Negroid type" with
"Cro-magnon remains" at a higher level in the Mentone caves.
|
Growth of the
ice sheets to their maximum positions occurred between
33,000 and
26,500 years ago. (Peter Clark and others
Science 7.8.2009).
MIS 2: 29,000 years ago (near Last Glacial Maximum)
30,000 years ago Gravettian on
Antroparkbaby, which calls
it "the biggest and the longest continued civilisation of the
modern man".
Based on
Pavlovian culture. Probably
Dolni Vestonice
|
29,000 to 22,000 years ago: Gravettian toolmaking culture Named
after La Gravette in the Dordogne region of France.
(Don's maps). Toolmaking culture most closely
associated with
Venus figurines.
|
29,000 to 25,000 years ago. Pavlovian culture [a variant of the
Gravettian]
existed in the region
of Moravia, northern Austria and southern Poland. See
Antropark -
archive
28,000 years ago age of Cro-Magnon cave people: Louis Lartet Lartet
discovered the first five skeletons in the
Abri de Cro-Magnon in March 1868. "These Cro-magnon humans were
soon
identified as a new prehistoric human race distinct from the
Neanderthal
fossils discovered in Germany in 1856".
(source). A
1934 Encyclopedia
focuses on the
Mentone
caves (Italy) rather than France, contrasting Cromagnon with
Grimaldi man:
"It ws not until the opening-up of the Mentone caves that our
direct ancestors were found... early representatives of
Homo sapiens... named
the Cro-magnon Race".
and saying "These men men were the pre-historic artists and mystics",
speaking the possibilities of "a great beyond" in the "cults of nutrition,
death and motherhood" revealed by
cave drawings.
A 1952 Pictorial
Encyclopedia mentions cave painting and tools and says:
|
Nearly all ice sheets were at their
Last Glacial Maximum positions from 26,500 to
20,000
to 19,000 years ago
26,000 years ago
The mammoth hunter of Dolni Vestonice
|
Head carved from mammoth
ivory showing a person with an asymmetrical face,
found in Dolni Vestonice, Southern
Moravia. It is a face:
"finely strung, lively,
sympathetic and also suffering, a being which stood facing the
world
devout, pure and humble. This picture...has all the
characteristics of
human elevation. Everything points to the Ice Age hunter
having depicted
himself". (
Schenk, G. 1961
, p.127)
First thought to depict a man, it is now known as Venus XV and the
consensus seems to be that it depicts the
woman who made the ceramic figures from
Dolni Vestonice]
|
about 24,000 years ago European
"cave bear"
(Ursus spelaeus) became
extinct.
Wikipedia on
Pleistocene extinctions: - Across Eurasia, the
straight-tusked elephant became extinct
between 100,000-50,000 years ago. The hippopotamus, interglacial rhinoceros
(Stephanorhinus), cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), and heavy-bodied Asian
antelope (Spirocerus) died out between 50,000-
16,000
years ago. The spotted hyena, woolly rhinoceros and
mammoths died out
between 16,000-
11,500 years ago. The
musk ox died out later, as
did the giant deer
(Megaloceros)
with the last pocket having survived until
about 7,700 years ago in western Siberia. A pocket of mammoths survived on
Wrangel Island until 4,500 years ago. - See
Édouard Lartet
about 22,300 years ago Kostenki I (Polyakov site) prehistoric
settlement in the watershed of the river Don in central Russia. Excavation
begun by I. S. Polyakov in 1879. See
"Palaeolithic Art from the Danube to Lake Baikal" by
Väino Poikalainen in Folklore
volume 18 2001 and
Kostenki Paleolithic site on the Don River
Flint points from Kostenki-I have use-wear traces of hide-working at their
tips indicating they were used as
awls.
(Gilligan 3.2010)
22,000 to 17,000 years ago: Solutrean
a mammoth and racing animal [reindeer] time (eburnien and tarandien) ... a
horse, mammoth and racing animal time (liquidien, eburnien and tarandien)
... a
Solutrien and Magdalenian time ... or a mild weather open sky and cold cave
living time... Von H. Behlen in Haiger. (1907?) "Der diluviale
(paläolithische) Mensch in Europa". [The diluvial (Paleolithic) humans
in Europe].
(Internet Library). Ebur: Latin ivory.
Reindeer in Latin: rene, onis, or tarendus
Eyed
needles from the Solutrean (dating to
MIS 2) at Grotte de
Jouclas.
France
(Gilligan 3.2010).
Marine Isotope 2 began 29,000 years ago near the
Last Glacial Maximum.
(Wikipedia)
22,000 years ago
20,000 to 19,000 years ago start of the Northern Hemisphere
deglaciation. (Source of an abrupt rise in sea level)
20,000 years ago
20,000 years ago to about 10,500 years ago Epipaleolithic or Levant
Mesolithic. The Levant is the eastern end of the Mediterranean: modern
Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
See The Mesolithic (EpiPaleolithic) of the
Levant The "most diagnostic archaeological feature"
of the mesolithic "was a chipped stone industry characterised by
microlithic tools".
[Mode five tools]. See
microlith technology. Levant Mesolithic sites were
first discovered in Palestine. The earliest group of these sites
was called Kebaran.
(
(Wikipedia)). The second phase was called
Natufian.
Mode five tools: Retouched microliths and other retouched components of
composite tools -
Middle Stone Age toolkits included points, which could be hafted on to
shafts to make spears; stone awls, which could have been used to perforate
hides; and
scrapers that were useful in preparing hide, wood, and other
materials. (Smithsonian) - But see
Bilzingsleben and
Late Pleistocene -
Kostenki one
19,400 years ago Ohalo village of six circular
brushwood huts
on the shore of the sea of Galilee in Palestine.
Wikipedia -
Ohalo to
Jericho
19,000 years ago wolf-like
canid drawing, Font-de-Gaume, France.
By radiocarbon analysis charcoal and bone proteins associated with pottery
fragments in strata at Yuchanyan Cave, Hunan Province,
China, it has been possible to "securely date" the pottery to
"18,300 to 17,500" years ago. The cave was occupied from around
18,000 to 14,000
years ago.
(Elisabetta Boaretto and others, 1.6.2009).
Pottery "may be the oldest known to science".
(BBC News 1.6.2009). "The Yuchanyan pot is oldest
known clay vessel". History of "firing clay and making figurines" is "twice
as long as vessel making". See ceramic objects from
Dolni Vestonice.
Anthropology.net. See
clay and
settlements and
Robenhausian.
18,000 years ago
|
17,000 years ago is 15,000 BC
|
17,000 to
12,000 years ago
Darren Brewer's
events in science and history
begins between
15,000 and 10,000 BC with the world warming up from the ice
age and people
painting in caves. This corresponds with the five thousand year
Âge du renne (age of the reindeer). Name given to the final
phase of
the
European Upper Paleolithic by
Édouard Lartet in
1861. It
was later renamed the Magdalenian. The Magdalenian on
Antroparkbaby is based on
the cave of
Altamira which was occupied (used?) from
22,000 to
13,000 years
before the present.
(Museo de Altamira) - See
settlements
Stone burin (chisel) characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic
(especially
Magdalenian) in the Old World and of some Early Lithic and Mesolithic
cultures of the New World. Most stratified finds of spear-throwers (Europe)
come from the Magdalenian.
|
Fragment of engraved reindeer metatarsal decorated on one surface with two
reindeer, one of which is now incomplete. Length: 7.1 centimetres.
Width: 3.3 centimetres. Thickness: 2 centimetres. Stored in the British
Museum where the
acquisition notes say "exacavated by both Christy and Lartet in
1863".
|
about 17,000 years ago (15,000BC) Cave paintings at Lascaux, near
Montignac, south west France. Charging bulls. Discovered by three teenagers
searching their lost dog in 1940. Opened to the public in 1948. Closed
1963. Reproduction paintings now on view in the International Centre of
Parietal Art at Montignac.
16,945 years ago Eliseevich-I site, Bryansk Region, Russian Plain,
Russia:
"Ice-age
dogs"
16,000 years ago
|
about 15,000 years ago (13,000BC) Cave art
Trois Frères,
Ariège, France.
(French Wikipedia).
Dieu cornu (horned god) or Sorcier (sorcerer) or
chaman (shaman). In animal skins and stag antlers. Upper
wall above the entrance to the 20,000-25,000 year-old grand
gallery.
|
|
|
Petit Sorcier a l'Arc Musical (Little sorcerer with musical bow),
amongst animals in 285 cm wide panel on right hand wall of Sanctuary.
|
The two human figures in Trois Frères, are wearing animal skins as a
form of
clothing.
13,500 to 11,100BC Hamburg culture a Late
Upper Paleolithic
culture of
reindeer
hunters in northwestern Europe. Finds from this culture in
Scandinavia have been excavated since the early 1980s.
MIS 1
- 14,000 years ago: end of the Younger Dryas marks the start of the
Holocene, continuing to
the present.
14,000 to 15,000 years ago start of the
deglaciation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. (Source of an
abrupt rise in sea level)
about 14,500 years ago (12,500BC) to 11,500 years ago (9,500BC) Natufian
culture in the
Levant sedentary hunter-gatherers. -
Wikipedia
about 12,000 to
9,000BC Azilien cultural period. Mortillet's
Tourassien.
about
12,000 to
8,000
years ago - 10,000 to 6,000BC
Flood geology locates
Noah's flood.
|
Fossil
evidence: On "the highest mountains" "shells, skeletons of fish and sea
monsters" have been found, showing the sea once covered them. Animals are
found "far from their native areas": Elephants in England. Crocodiles in
Germany.
(Edwin Rice 1893). Coder and Howe's The Bible, Science and
Creation (1966, page 63) says "flood geology" dates creation to about
10,000
years ago "and relates most of the geological strata and fossil beds
to the Flood"
|
|
The flood
has been located (about 1870) between the old and new stone
ages. The New Bible Dictionary (Douglas 1962, page 429) relates much
"evidence of a serious flood" to the
Ice Age and suggests a
world wide flood might have been caused by "release of water" at the end of
that about "10,000BC"
|
12,000 years ago (12,000BP) is
10,000 BC
|
About 10,000BC End of last glacial period
(ice-age), beginning of
Holocene (recent), or present period with ice at the north and south and on
mountains. [About 11,700 years ago End of the
Pleistocene, start of the Holocene]. Holocene defined by
boundary between two ice layers in a core taken from Greenland and now
stored in Denmark.
On one system, interglacials are numbered backwards from the Holocene (1)
and glacials also backwards.
Spindle whorls. Thermal basis for greater use of woven fabrics in post-
glacial climates. Production of fibres for
textiles
a prominent feature of early
agriculture.
(Gilligan 3.2010)
12,600 years ago (10,600
BC) to 10,300 years ago
(8,300BC) Period when the
Baltic
was a large freshwater, inland, lake. The
Baltic Ice Lake.
(See
evolution of Baltic)
"Finds of
bone implements (axes, harpoons, fishing tackle), as well as of
very primitive
flint implements... These ... bone age people
evidently lived by hunting and fishing". (Hallendorff
and Schuck p.2)
See Hamburg culture -
bone -
Baltic sea -
7000BC Middle stone age -
Ertebølle culture
-
Meilgård midden -
Megalit graves
-
Alvastra -
single graves -
bronze -
iron
"Until recently, the last woolly
mammoths
were generally assumed to have vanished from Europe and southern Siberia
about 12,000 years ago", (Wikipedia)
Jodey Bateman's (2002)
Jericho history begins with Natufian camp
fires around 11,000BC. Around 11,000 to 10,000BC:
Levant
warm spell in which
Natufians occupied much of the Middle East. "At places like
Jericho they left the charcoal of their campfires and the distinctive tools
of stone and animal bone that they used". They deserted the Jericho site
during "a brief cold spell" from about 10,000BC to 9,800BC.
(Bateman 2002)
10,200BC Neolithic (new stone age) in some parts of the Middle
East (See Wikipedia) -
Europe.
Neolithic
barbarianism (Gordon Childe)
10,000BC - 12,000 years ago
|
Tell es-Sultan:
In Arabic, a tell is a tall hill.
In Midle East Archaeology, a tell
is a mound formed by the accumulated remains of ancient
settlements.
|
Jericho: Earliest permanent settlement at Tell es-
Sultan
(Wikipedia) dated between
10,000 and 9.000 BC. "The earliest remains date back to the
Natufian
period, 10th-8th millennia BC"
(UNESCO) - See
Ohalo to Jericho -
Bateman -
town -
wall -
Cipola -
second settlement
- 5500BC
- bronze age Jericho
- Jericho and Ai
destroyed -
Canaanites -
end of bronze age
town -
Joshua -
Hiel -
Judea -
end -
Herod's Jericho
"The round
pit-houses in Natufian settlements at
Jericho and
Abu Hureyra are some of the world's earliest known
villages."
(Gil Stein)
10,000 to 5,000BC: Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age in Europe. See
Levant -
(Wikipedia)
Core axe known as a Thames pick. Small blade
known as "microlith" used collectively mounted on wood in spears, and
harpoons and a borer.
"The oldest
clothing remains in the world in the Middle East dated
to around 9,500 years ago" . But we have evidence of the kinds of tools
required to make fitted garments - primitive
hide-scraping and cutting
devices and
needles. Until the last cold period,
30,000
years ago,
Neanderthals
did not bother with specialised cutting and sewing technologies."
Ian Gilligan. The Australian National University, See
ochre -
sewing -
50,000BC -
Trois Frères
art -
Spanish art
9,000BC - 11,000 years ago
8,500BC?
"The town of
Jericho", covering about 6
acres, preceded the wall by about
500 years". It contained round
mud-brick
houses, without street planning. (Wikipedia)
8,300 to 7,500 BC Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) - cultivation of
wheat and barley.
As the
the Baltic ceased to
be a lake the "climate became less severe and the vegetation less stunted".
From this time onwards the "shores of southern Scandinavia yield numerous
traces of early man. In particular, the
'kitchen-middens'" "The
implements now in
use were generally made of flint". (Hallendorff
and Schuck p.2)
Eighth millennium BC
8,000BC - 10,000 years ago
Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula
(Wikipedia). "According to UNESCO, the oldest
art ... is from 8000BC, and the most recent examples from around
3500BC"
|
"The bow seems to have been invented near the transition from the
Upper
Paleolithic
to the
Mesolithic, roughly
10,000 years ago".
(Wikipedia). See
Valltorta
From 10,000 to 6500BC Valencian cave art. Scene of hunting of deer
with
bows and arrows. Wall painting in
Cueva de los Caballos in the Valley of Valltorta, Castell in Eastern
Spain
Other pictures from this area/period show people wearing
clothes.
|
About 8,500BC Initial domestication of taurine cattle from local
wild ox (aurochs) in the Near East. About "80 female aurochs were initially
domesticated". An initial breeding phase lasted some 1.5 millennia in an
area between the Levant, central Anatolia and western Iran. Domestic cattle
started to appear in western Anatolia and southeastern Europe by 6,800BC,
in southern Italy by 6,500BC and Central Europe by 6,000BC.
(Ruth Bollongino and others 1.9.2012) -
See also
Mario Melletti:
First cattle with short horns appeared in Mesopotamia about 3000BC
and was the most common form in Europe from about 1000BC.
"By the 8th millennium BC,
Jericho
became a big fortified town surrounded by a stone wall supported by a
massive round tower. These are the earliest urban fortifications known in
the world, later several times replaced" (UNESCO)
About 8,000BC
Star Carr in north Yorkshire, England. Post-
holes of a
round-house structure. About 7,600BC
Howick house, Northumberland, England. Similar to Star Carr.
7,500 to 5,700 BC
Çatalhöyük in southern
Anatolia. A city of
mudbrick
houses crammed together without streets between. Most entered
through holes in their roofs.
Wikipedia - Cast lead beads dating from about 6,500
BC. Earliest
metal smelted. See Moses metal
list.
Galena
is one of the easiest ores to
smelt. It can simply be placed in a fire and then lead can be recovered
from under the ashes when the fire goes out. Archaeologists have found
evidence that lead was smelted as early as 6,500 BC in what is now Turkey.
Small amounts of silver were refined from lead by the Romans about
2000 years ago. See lead UK
- Rutland 1470 -
Rutland 1810 -
Pb 1814 -
Rutland 1844 -
Crystal Palace 1854 -
Thomas Legge -
lead poisoning
1904 -
lead poisoning
1912 -
lead paint ban
1921 -
lead paint 1930-1955
-
lead in hair 1977
- lead in gardens -
lead paint ban
1992
7,500 to 6,000 BC Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) - domestication of
sheep and goats,
cattle
and pigs. about 6,800BC Second settlement
at
Jericho: rectilinear
(straight-sided) mudbricks
buildings on stone foundations. "Square adobe houses".
At Jericho from shortly after 7,500BC to shortly before
7,000BC. Wall paintings show dances wearing masks. Seashells
(traded?) carved for necklaces and to make eyes in the skulls of their
dead. "Left Tell es Sultan shortly before 7,000 BC and the mound
which had
been building up for almost
1,000 years was deserted for
1,500 years"
(Bateman 2002).
Seventh millennium BC
About 9,000BP (7,000BC) insolation peak of Holocene. Separated by
some 115,000 years from the Eemian insolation peak at 125,000BP. Suggests
insolation maxima at about 240,000BP and 355,000BP.
7,000BC Indus Valley:
Mehrgarh precursor to the Indus Valley
Civilization.
Remains of an ancient farming
village
at
Jericho have been
carbon-dated
to around 7,000 BC. The same excavations uncovered materials
pre-dating agriculture which have been carbon-dated 800 years earlier
(Carlo Cipola 1962, pp 18-19)
7,000BC The climate in
Scandinavia was warming as it moved from the
Boreal to the Atlantic period. Reindeer and their hunters had migrated
to northern Scandinavia, and forests had established. Wikipedia
Nordic Stone Age
(Mesolithic)
Between 6,430 and 6,120BC Calibrated
carbon dating of an underwater
oak tree bole at the foot of the underwater cliff at Bouldnor in
the Isle
of Wight. Mesolithic remains recovered from this underwater site include
string (6,220-5,980BC), worked
wood
(6,240-6000BC),
flint tools and flakes,
and
burnt (cooked?) hazel nuts. There is an imaginative
re-construction of
this as a "Mesolithic
Village" at
CosmOnline.
Sixth millennium BC
About 6,000BC Rising sea level cuts Britain off from Europe.
About 5,000BC Rising sea level submerges Bouldnor Cliff
About 6,000 to 4,000BC
Neolithic or New Stone Age in Europe. [See
Middle East]
Marked by the adoption of
agriculture, the development of pottery, polished
stone tools and
larger,
more complex settlements. "European Neolithization ~6000-4000 BC
represents a pivotal change in human history when farming spread and the
mobile style of life of the hunter-foragers was superseded by the agrarian
culture".
(Tegel)
6,000BC or earlier: beans, lentils, peas, and
chickpeas believed to have become part of the eastern Mediterranean diet.
about 5500 to 45005BC Linearbandkeramik flourished in Europe.
(Wikipedia). "Longhouses, pottery and stone
tools". The
longhouses
have left "only ground-plans in the soil".
(Tegel)
about 5400BC The
Sumerian settlement of
Eridu (Eridug) founded on a site that was then close to the
Persian Gulf near the mouth of the Euphrates River. It appears to be the
earliest settlement in the region. The
Sumerian King List begins by saying that "After the kingship
descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug. In Eridug, Alulim became
king; he ruled for 28800 years." Sumerian was the first language
to be written. No related languages are now known. It died out
as a spoken
language about 2000BC
Enki, the god of wisdom, was the patron god of
Eridu. Sumerians
believed that he created civilisation by bringing humanity's skills
together in a cohesive world order. Sumerian language, writing and culture
continued after their passing, in Mesopotamia, under the
Akkadians and
Assyrians.
Assyrians belied that Enki gave his people
metal working skills.
(Haidar, D. 2011). See also
Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Godesses
5500BC Pit-house dwellers at
Jericho made
pottery storage jars for
grain. A new people came who built houses of stone and adobe. The pithouse
people (unusual for Jericho or the Middle East) lived peacefully in the
same village with the house builders. Gradually everyone in the community
came to live in houses. The site was deserted again in
4000BC
approximately.
(Bateman 2002)
about 5300BC to
3950BC Ertebølle culture of
southern
Scandinavia. The last hunter-gatherer culture of the Stone Age?
Preceded
by Kongemose culture and followed by Funnelbeaker
culture.
(Wikipedia). The shell bank at
Meilgaard
was discovered in 1850.
5206 to 5098BC Date given to
oak timbers in excavation near Leipzig,
Germany, by Willy Tegel and Dietrich Hakelberg. See
"Early Neolithic Water Wells Reveal the World's
Oldest Wood Architecture"
|
From prehistoric to historic times:
|
|
Fifth millennium BC
5000BC to 4000BC Millennium between pre-history
and
(recorded)
history.
History is story told by human beings about human
beings, and our
first written records come from
Sumerian (southern Mesopotamia) and
Egyptian cultures
in the
fourth millennium
19th century historians were inclined to start
written history
much later, at the end of
the second millenium BC.
about 5000BC In Ensisheim, France, a 50-year-old man died. His
skull, excavated in "had two holes" that
Sandra Pichler (and others) 1997
say "were clearly the result of surgery, not violence".
(offline)
4700BC Possible beginning of
Sumerian
calendar.
4600BC to 4200BC
Varna Cemetry (Bulgaria). Some of the world's
oldest gold jewellery hanging on skeletons. See
silver and
coins.
4500BC Meilgård midden-settlement. In east of the coastal
forest of Nederskov on the
Djursland peninsula in
Denmark. Just north of
Meilgård castle. "Land covered debris" from a settlement
of the
Ertebølekultur about 4500BC.
(Panoramio -
fortidsmindeguide)
Worsaae (quoted
Gräslund, p.36) described artifacts found in association with shell
banks like this as
"rough-hewn flint axes, chisels, arrows, flint cores, nodules
and flint flakes made of deer antlers and a great many bodkins and
implements made of bone"
4228BC Possible introduction of
Egyptian calendar.
By 4000BC the
Sumerians
could melt copper - and so extract the metal
from its ore.
(Haidar, D. 2011). Copper Age also called
Eneolithic and Chalcolithic: Late 5th millennium BC in the Middle East and
the Caucasus for about 1,000 years to the
Early Bronze Age. The
transition from the European Copper Age to Bronze Age Europe occurs about
the same time, between the late 5th and the late 3rd millennia BC.
(Wikipedia)
Evidence of human use of the Spaccasasso cave in Southern Tuscany,
Grosseto, Italy, from
Late Neolithic to the Copper Age, the Early and Middle Bronze
Age, and Late Antiquity (5th and 6th centuries B.C.). The cave and
the calcareous rock face is characterised by thermal action, which
deposits mercury sulphide in the limestone rock and results in cinnabar
veins. Cinnabar minerals were mined in different phases
of the site's occupation. Copper age mining remains include a large
fireplace used to heat the rock face. Above this are copper age funerary
remains.
(Federico Poggiali and others 2015). See also
The Prehistoric Quarry of La Pietra ...
Copper Age Lithic Workshops and the Production of Bifacial
Points in Central Italy
by Adriana Moroni and others 2016.
Fourth millennium BC
"If the Creator made this world especially for man..."
Quran: thy Lord said to the angels:
"I am about to create man from
clay". Adam is considered the first of the prophets in
Islam. Others include
Ibrahim
(Abraham) - Musa
(Moses) -
Daud
(David)
- Sulayman
(Solomon) -
Isa
(Jesus)
- and Muhammad
4000BC
Sumerian
writing on
clay
tablets
using picture signs. See
Eridu -
2400BC -
library.
|
Foundations of 25 buildings discovered in peat wetland by
Robert Rudolf Schmidt
in
1930. About 20 two-room
houses with walls of split
wooden posts. A much
larger central building probably used for community acrivities. Other
buildings possibly for storage. A hunting community with wheat and barley
fields and livestock. Small polished stone hatchets and bone tools found.
Hearths and clay ovens in the houses. Unpainted pottery.
(Britannica)
"In prehistoric Europe the largest neolithic village yet known, Barkaer in
Jutland, comprised 52 small, one-roomed dwellings, but 16 to 30 houses was
a more normal figure; so the average local group in neolithic times would
average 200 to 400 members".
(Gordon Childe
1950)
|
3800BC
"Babylonian"
[Sumerian]
"census (for taxation purposes)" - Start of
Ed Stephan's
demography timeline and [Ireland's]
the census through
history an [UK]
census-taking in the ancient
world [Does anyone know the evidence?]
|
about 3500BC Limestone tablet engraved with pictographic writing
Kish,
Mesopotamia. Contains pictographs of heads, feet, hands, numbers
and threshing-boards. Now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Photographed by
José-Manuel Benito.
|
The cuneiform (wedge shaped) writing of
Sumeria (now Iraq)
starts about
3400BC. It is the earliest form of writing known that does
not use
pictures. The early stages of Egyptian hieroglyphics date from
about
3200BC
Metallurgists dealt with
copper for [over a thousand years before] bronze, an
alloy of tin and copper, was discovered. The Bronze Age in
Mesopotamia
started around 3300BC and it denoted that bronze tools, decorations
and weapons were commonly used and owned items. The
transition from the Copper to the Bronze Age was simplified because the
melting temperature of bronze is less than copper, between 1084øC and 232øC
449.4øF) depending on the percent of tin, so new techniques to cast and
forge bronze were not required.
(Haidar, D. 2011)
about 3600 to 2900BC Megalithic tombs in
Sweden. The oldest
megalithic tomb in Europe was built in Brittany around 4800BC. A few other
countries in Europe have tombs to the beginning of bronze age, around
1500BC. Skegried”sen is a well-preserved stone chamber tomb surrounded by
seventeen stones, dated 3000 to 2500BC. Wikipedia:
Megalitgrav -
Megalith. See
Alvastra and
single graves
about 3500BC New village on
Tell es-Sultan
now over 20 feet high is first of the
bronze age. Walled with a tower. Pottery styles show contact
with Sumeria and Egypt. Early village unplanned, with rubbish discarded
between houses. In "later Early Bronze layers" laid out in a grid and
rubbish discarded outside wall. Deforestation for construction or firewood.
(Bateman 2002)
Sometime between 3400BC and 3100BC: Death of Ötzi, the
Tyrolean Iceman.
Wikipedia
|
About 3100BC. Reign of Narmer in Egypt. The Narmer Palette (left)
was discovered by James E. Quibell in
1898 in Hierakonpolis. On it, Narmer displaying the insignia of
both Upper and Lower Egypt, giving rise to the theory that he unified the
two kingdoms and was the founder of the first dynasty.
Narmer is sometimes identified with Menes.
|
See:
5000BC -
calendar -
hieroglyphics -
Narmer -
papyrus -
geometry -
Old Kingdom
- Middle Kingdom -
Thebes library -
New Kingdom - Eighteenth Dynasty 1549-1292 -
Amenhotep 4 -
Nineteenth Dynasty 1292-1189 -
Ramesses 2 -
Twenty-sixth Dynasty 672-525 -
Amasis -
Ptolemaic (Hellenistic) -
Argead Dynasty
332-305 - Ptolemaic Kingdom 305-30BC -
Cleopatra
Papyrus, depicted on the
Narmer Palette, is a plant that grew in the river
Nile from which a writing material, also called papyrus, was made.
|
|
|
about 3100BC end of the Late Ubaid period in
Mesopotamia.
A
setlement from this period lay under the
Ur flood
deposit disovered by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley and announced in In
1929. Wooley believed the 3.75 meter (12 foot) thick clay deposit had been
laid down
by the
Great Flood. Jona Lendering
writes "It is likely... the event ... behind the myth... can be
dated to the end of Early Dynastic I period". (2,750BC?)
|
|
Third millennium BC
See
Wikipedia article on
Ancient History which has table from different parts of the world
from 3000BC
About 3000BC Alvastra pile dwelling constructed in the Dags Mosse
mire, Alvastra, Östergötland, Sweden. Swedish
stone age. See
Sweden graves
About 3000BC Silver first mined in Anatolia (Turkey) -
source. See
gold -
Moses metal list -
Shalmaneser -
coins -
Edmund -
Spain.
3000BC:
Five thousand years ago, the
Egyptians began the invention of
practical
geometry.
The waters of the river Nile
overflowed every year and wiped out the land boundaries.
Perhaps geometry
was invented because it was necessary to reconstruct the
fields for
taxation purposes and to tell people where to plant their
seeds.
One of the geometrical rules discovered was the
3,4,5
Rule
for constructing right angles. It
may have been discovered by people laying out fields, or
perhaps by
builders or architects. This way of making right angles was
used as a trick
of the trade. It was not known why the rule works, but it
does, and it was
used to make temples and
pyramids.
Cities
=
civilisation (!?)
Urban
revolution.
"About 5,000 years ago irrigation cultivation (combined with stock-
breeding
and fishing) in the valleys of the
Nile, the
Tigris-Euphrates and the
Indus
had begun to yield a social surplus, large enough to support a number of
resident specialists who were themselves released from food-production.
Water-transport, supplemented in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley by
wheeled vehicles and even in Egypt by pack animals, made it easy to gather
food stuffs at a few centres... Thus arose the first cities -
units of settlement ten times as great as
any known neolithic village."
(Gordon Childe
1950)
|
about 2900BC
Eridu (in southern Mesopotamia), argued to be the
oldest city in the
world has been said to have become a substantial city of
mudbrick and reed
houses covering 20 to 25 acres. Eridu is south of the (later)
city of Ur.
This are "was the birthplace of cities and of civilisation about 5,000
years ago and home to the
Sumerians
and the later
Babylonians".
(Stuart Campbell, Manchester archeologist.
See below)
|
about 2800BCE Swedish-Norwegian Battle Axe culture appeared.
It is known from about 3000 graves.
Wikipedia Corded Ware culture. Associated with single graves.
See
Sweden graves
"the stone-chamber tombs and the passage graves consitently
yield smoothly shaped, finished and sharp-edged flint artefacts and, in
addition, neat stone hammers, amber ornaments and earthenware pots, several
of which have quite tasteful shapes and decorations" (Worsaae quoted
(Gräslund, p.36)."
Old Kingdom of
Egypt
|
The first pyramid of Egypt. The Pyramid of Djzosèr built at Saqqara
in Egypt around 2630-2611 BC. Said to have been designed by Imhotep,
who may
be the first architect whose name we know, and who was defied 2.000 years
later as a god of medicine and healing. The picture is taken from the
Wikipedia website. Clicking on it will take you to more information
|
The pyramids in the Egyptian deserts are monumental
tombs for
the rulers of ancient Egypt, who were believed to be gods.
The Great Pyramids
at Gizah were erected about 2650BC. One of these, the grave of
Cheops, is
built of stone blocks
averaging
2.5 tons
in weight. The pyramid, 481 feet high, is of great
geometrical
accuracy.
The way the pyramids were built and the
mathematical
calculations
involved are
subjects of much speculation.
Jewellery From the
old kingdom onwards, much archaeological and textual evidence of
expeditions in search of
copper,
gold, turquoise, malachite and other
gemstones. (source)
about 2600 to 2400BC Early Dynastic Three period in
Mesopotamia - Royal
Tombs. A stratum from this period lay on top of the
Ur flood deposit
2400BC
Sumerian baked
clay tablets
with
arithmetic
. There is a large
body of mathematical tablets dating back to the
old Babylonian
period (1800 to
1500BC).
|
2348BC "The Second Age of the World" "When
Noah was 601 years old,
on the 1st day of the 1st month (Friday, October 23rd), the 1st day of the
new post-flood world, the surface of the earth was now all dry. Noah took
off the covering of the ark".
(Usher) refering to
Genesis 8:13.
See 1736
"evidences of the Deluge" and
flood geology. See
Epic of Gilgamesh and
Ur flood.
Picture described as "Various animals entering the Ark built by Noah
because of the great flood".
|
|
From the early nineteenth century (see
1849, for example) the term antediluvian
(before the deluge), sometimes lost specific reference to a flood and
referred to long extinct beings only known as
fossils.
2286BC One of the classical dates for the foundation of the city of
Babylon, originally a small semitic, Akkadian speaking city. See
Old Babylonian Period -
Hammurabi -
Ninevah falls -
and Nebuchadnezzar
about 2300 to 2200BC
Jericho and Ai (the largest town in the area) destroyed.
Invaders broke the walls of Jericho with fires.
(Bateman 2002)
2200BC Approximate date for the erection of the
standing stones at Stonehenge. The earlier earthbank and ditch have been
dated about 3100BC
2015BC Word
Siqlu, as a unit
of weight, in use in Mesopotamia. The Hebrew term shekel derives
from this.
Ur-Nammu, founder of Sumerian Third Dynasty
of Ur. See
... reconstructing the Ur-Nammu
Stela by Jeanny Vorys Canby. Possible dates for Ur-Nammu:
2112BC to 2095BC.
The
Legal Code of Ur-Nammu, written on tablets in the Sumerian
language
about 2100BC to 2050BC. Fragments are on display in the
Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The lugal (big man, or king) ruled
a society divided into two classes: lu
(free)
and
slave (male,
arad; female geme).
(Wikipedia)
about 2100BC in the Third Dynasty of
Ur, Early
Sumarian poems. Surviving copies of the complete
Epic of
Gilgamesh date from the
18th to
10th centuries BC. In these the
Cedar Forest, the realm of the gods, is
desecrated by Gilgamesh by cutting down cedars for
timber. See Jan Oosthoek
wood in world history.
Second millennium BC
"Old Babylonian Period" used for south Mesopotamia from about 2000BC
to
1600BC. Initially a
number of (city?) states dominating the
region: Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna and, from
1894BC,
Babylon.
Middle
bronze age in Middle East: 2100 to
1550BC
|
Excavation of Tell Khaiber, 20 kilometres from Ur
about 2000BC "We provisionally date the site to around 2,000 BC, the
time of the sack of the city and the fall of the last
Sumerian royal dynasty." Stuart Campbell, (April 2013)
,Manchester
archeologist
excavating at Tell Khaiber, 20km from Ur, "the last capital of
the Sumerian royal dynasties".
-
Web page of Ur Region Archaeology Project
The naked lady features on the 2013 Report
The
Jewish
book of Genesis say that
Abraham came from
"Ur of the Chaldees"
(Genesis 11:31)
|
around 2000BC
Middle bronze
age Jericho (Canaanite)
had stone walls six to nine feet thick on ridges of packed earth. The main
street, about six and a half feet wide, was built in stair steps to the top
of the mound and there was a small ditch alongside the street to catch rain
water and keep the area from flooding. In the Middle Bronze, about 200
settlements on the highland ridges including Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus
(Shechem).
(Bateman 2002)
2000BC Time that Cadmus would have introduced the original
(Phoenician) alphabet to Greece if the speculations of
Herodotus were correct. See
Hobbes on the invention of letters.
about 2000BC The
Lavagnone plough (Italy), made of
wood, claimed to be the
world's oldest surviving plough.
"You might as reasonably expect to understand the nature of the adult man
by watching him for an hour.. as to suppose that you can fathom humanity by
studying the last four thousand years of its evolution"
(Herbert Spencer quoted by
Paul Hirst, 1976, p.32)
1921BC
Usher's Third Age of the World. Start of 430 years which
Abraham
and his posterity spent in foreign lands.
about 1850BC The "Petrie
Papyri", from Kahun and Gurob, (named after
Flinders Petrie who discovered them in
1889). "Principally of the Middle
Kingdom" They include literary, medical and vetinary papyri and
mathematical fragments. The three pages of medical text are all
gynaecological and include a brief passage that suggests crocodile dung
and/or honey to prevent child-birth. I think this is the bit with the
crocodile:
1812BC to 1637BC (175 years). Traditional
Jewish dates for
the life of
Abraham. "He lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years". A
Christian
term for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and
other revered rulers of
families
(tribes) in the
Bible is the
Patriarchs. The same term is used for high ranking bishops in
the church. See
Die Familie
(1912). In Jewish tradition
"Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, known as the Patriarchs, are both the physical
and spiritual ancestors of Judaism". The word "Jew" is derived
from Y'hudah (Judah), the fourth son of Jacob.
Abraham's "family" or "household" was large. At one time he formed an army
of 318 "trained servants, born in his own house". He was "rich" in cattle,
silver and gold. All male members of his household
(slave or free) had to be circumcised.
Abraham was accompanied on his journey out of
Ur by his nephew, Lot.
Lot's adventures in relation to Sodom and Gomorrah are part of
the Jewish,
Christian and Muslim scriptures. These sinful cities were destroyed by
"fire and brimstone", brimstone being sulphur. See
gunpowder -
brimstone -
Paracelsus -
sulphuric acid -
Wesley -
sulphate -
manure -
phenothiazine -
child
labour -
antibiotic -
trace
methods -
surplus.
When Lot's wife turned to
look back, she became a pillar of salt.
1800BC
|
1792BC to 1750BC Reign of Hammurabi, who extended the rule of
Babylonia
throughout Mesopotamia
Code of Hammurabi - Babylonian law code.
|
1700BC to 1100BC Possible date range for the (oral)
composition of the Rigveda. - See
artificial limb
|
Sweden: Bronze age ahips
"The
stone age was followed by the
bronze age, which lasted from
about
1800BC
to 600BC" (Hallendorff
and
Schuck p.5). Johan Ling: BA Bronze Age
1700BC to
500BC.
about 1700BC to
500BC. Rock Art (Hällristningar - Cliff-drawings) in
Uppland,
Sweden includes some 2000 ship pictures. Drawings, dates and
text on these ships based on Johan Ling Rock Art and Seascapes in
Upland 2013.
|
|
Early Bronze Age 1700BC to
1100BC
Period one
200 years to
1500BC - Period two 200 years to
1300BC
-
Period three 200 years to
1100BC
-
Late Bronze Age 1100BC to
500BC
Period four 200 years to 900BC -
Period five 200 years to
700BC
-
Period six 200 years to
500BC
Ling suggests that the rock art at Bogösa indicates a meeting ground
in a maritime space for a wide area that was, at the time, penetrated by
the sea. (p.96)
|
|
Metres above sea-level of lowest images from succeding periods (ordered by
type of ship): Period
one: 25 metres.
Period
two: 22 metres.
Period
three: 19-20 metres. Period
four to
five: 18 metres.
Scandinavian boat drawings have been interpreted as skin boats, planked
boats, dugouts and rafts.
|
1670BC
According to Lenormant, a royal
library was established at Thebes in
Egypt. See
Amasis
1650BC The Hyksos (Shepherd Kings) ruled northern Egypt.
(Wikipedia)
1600BC
about 1550BC (stratigraphical dating by Kenyon).
about 1573BC (later carbon dating): Destruction of the Bronze Age
Jericho.
1500BC Domestication of silk worm in
China. [I think this is far too late a date]. See
silk road and
rayon.
|
All images with inturned prows and horizontal or
slightly upturned keel extensions were 24 metes or more above sea level.
(Ling page 81)
|
|
1500BC to
1300BC: Baal with Thunderbolt.
(Wikipedia). Drawing
(1960) by Gillian Potter from
a photograph of the limestone stele in Musée du Louvre, excavated
(1932) from Ras Shamra, Ugarit.
Baal meant lord, master, owner or husband in Semitic languages. It was also
applied to
Gods. The plural was Baalim. Baalim might own specific areas,
being the Gods of specific peoples.
The
Jews
also called God lord and believed he had a special relationship to them.
However, they (eventually) believed in only one God (monotheism) who is
master of all, and they believed that graven images should not be made of
him. [See
ten commandments]
See Amenhotep 4
|
1400BC Possible date for
Jews
settling in what became
Israel.
Traditionally, the
ten commandments and the rest of the
Torah (Five books
of "law" or Pentateuch) is conceived
to have been received by Moses before this. The
Tabernacle, a portable shrine said to have been created by Moses
to contain the law, eventually became part of the
Temple
It is possible that the earliest of the Jewish psalms (sacred songs -
hymns) is Psalm 90 and that this was composed about 1400BC. Psalms
continued to be composed until a time
after the exile (Psalm 137, after 538BC)
1446BC Suggested date for fall of
Jericho to forces under
Joshua (Hoshea),
who
God told to "march around the city... with
seven priests carrying seven trumpets of rams' horns before the Ark".
When they heard the sound of the trumpet all the people were to shout
"and the wall of the city will fall down flat". "Cursed... be the man that
... Jericho. At the cost
of his first-born shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his
youngest son shall he set up its gates." (Joshua 6:26 RSV).
1380BC to 1050BC Approximate period covered by the
Jewish
book of
Judges. "In those days there was no king in Israel: every
man did that which was right in his own eyes". See
John Locke on
justice in a state of nature.
|
1300BC Suggested date for the (mythical) journey of the ship Argo in
which Jason and the other Argonauts sought the Golden Fleece. Vase painting
(480-470BC) in British Museum shows 4 oarsman, but 6 oars.
Suggested there were 12 men, 6 oars each side, 3 men to a bench.
|
1348/1346BC
Egyptian
pharaoh Amenhotep 4th raised Aten (the Sun) to
the status of supreme God. This, and the "Great Hymn to the Aten" have been
considered as origins of
monotheism
(belief in one God). Amenhotep's chief
wife was Nefertiti.
|
about 1279 to 1213BC Ramesses 2nd. The Ramesseum in Thebes is
the 'mortuary temple' of this
Egyptian
king. The
Petrie Papyri were
found beneath this.
|
1194BC to 1184BC Dates of possible conflict behind the
stories of a "Trojan War". Roughly corresponds with archaeological evidence
for burning of Troy 7.
1100BC
|
1100BC to
900BC:
Bronze four. In periods four and
five more elaborate
"depictions of humans" (Ling, page 87)
|
|
*********
|
19TH CENTURY
1800-1828
Robert
Owen
ran a model factory community at
New
Lanark in Scotland, demonstrating, he thought, that people
respond to good
treatment by becoming good people. This was a refutation in
practice of
Malthusian
pessimism.
|
Possibly at the turn of the century that this house was built by
Quakers to guard
the new entrance to their main London graveyard. It became known
as the "caretaker's cottage"
A hipped
roof, oriel sash windows and symetrical proportion show the
Queen Anne style as a standard of restrained middle-class
domestic architecture.
|
Monday 10.3.1801: First British
Census
The 1801 census recorded the
number of people in each parish, the inhabited and uninhabited
houses, and
classified occupations into agriculture, manufacturing,
commerce and
handicrafts.
Population of England and Wales: 8,893,000; Scotland:
1,608,000
The censuses of 1801, 1811, 1821 and
1831 were purely
numerical.
Names were first recorded in
1841. See
1851 -
1861 -
1871 -
1881 -
1891 -
1901 -
1911 -
1921 -
1931 -
[There was no census in 1941]
- See
1951 -
1961 -
1971 -
1981 -
1991 -
2001 -
2011 -
See
index history of statistics -
Vision of Britain -
Karen Berry's history
"
London had nearly 900,000 inhabitants, more than ten times the
population of its nearest rival in England, Manchester-Salford. Already
there were were 123,000 people living in the five outer parishes of
Kensington, Chelses, St Marylebone, Paddington and St Pancras, which a
hundred before had been
semi-rural
villages
with fewer than 10,000
inhabitants between them. By the year of the
Great Exhibition, the population of the present area of the
County of London had risen to 2,363,341."
(R.S.R. Fitter 1945 p.63)
|
October 1801 Having established the preliminaries of
peace with
the British, Bonaparte began preparation for a military
expedition to Haiti
to restore white rule. War between French forces and
Toussaint.
Autumn 1803 French forced to evacuate Haiti by the
black led
armies
1804
Immanuel Kant died
1.1.1804 First ever black republic established.
Called Haiti as
it had been before European conquest.
7.3.1804 The British and Foreign
Bible Society formed in London at a meeting of members of both the Church
of England and dissenting denominations. It sought to make cheap
(1611) bibles available in Britain and other countries "without
note or comment". The society was concerned about "recent attempts which
have been made on the part of Infidelity to discredit the evidence, vilify
the character, and destroy the influence of Christianity".
21.3.1804 The French civil code promulgated. Became the Napoleon
Code in 1807.
"My true glory will not result
from the forty battles that I have won. These will fade away because of
Waterloo. My
true glory will reside in my Civil Code, which will never be forgotten. It
is my Civil
Code, which will live eternally" (Bonaparte on
Sainte-Hélène. See
Catherine Delplanque)
May 1804 Napoleon became Emperor.
8.10.1804 The black leader of Haiti, Dessalines,
crowned himself
emperor as Jean Jacques 1st.
1805
Thomas Malthus became the first
Professor of
Political
Economy
|
In 1805 Mary Jane Godwin and William Godwin opened M.J. Godwin & Co.
Juvenile Library, a bookshop and publisher of mainly children's books.
They were joining a growing market. Their significant contribution, along
with
Mary and Charles Lamb, was to publish books that fed children's
delight in fiction and imagination.
|
1805 Collection at Lund University (Sweden) divided into
natural things, which became the foundation for the Zoological and
Botanical Museums; and ethnographic and archaeological artefacts, which
became the foundation of the Historical Museum. Lund was "the centre of
gravity in scientific archaeology in Sweden" until the middle of the 19th
century. (Gräslund, p.14). See
Bror Emil Hildebrand
1806
1806 A portraiture of Quakerism : as taken from a view of the
moral education, discipline, peculiar customs, religious principles,
political and civil oeconomy and character of the Society of Friends
by
Thomas Clarkson
published in London.
20.5.1806 John Stuart
Mill, co-author of
the future of the
labouring classes, born. (early
life)
Harriet Taylor was born 10.10.1807 (life and
ideas).
|
October 1806, Napoleon won the
battle of Jena against the Prussians. Hegel described him as
"the soul of
the
world"
The picture (1810) by French artist Charles Meynier of Napoleon's entry in
Berlin is described by
Rene Girard as the symbolic beginning of the Franco-German
enmity - See symbolic
end
|
1807
|
22.5.1807 Oldsagskommissionen (The Antiquities Commission)
established in Denmark. Members of the (University) library commission were
begining to organise a collection of antiquities in the roof of
Trinitatis Church, Copenhagen. They were allowed to start a
collection rune stones at the Round Tower. These were steps towards a
future "Nazionalmuseum". (See Thomsen). Det Kongelige Museum for Nordiske
Oldsager opened
to the public in 1817.
|
|
|
In 1832 the museum moved to Christiansborg Palace
and later moved it to the Prince's Palace. The Nationalmuseet,
incorporating the collections, was established by Royal Decree of
28.12.1892.
|
25.3.1807 British Parliament prohibited slave trade. (1807 Abolition
of the Slave Trade Act
became law) -
National Archives weblink -
Wikipedia
|
In Thomas Rowlandson's
cartoon (from which the pictures are taken), a gentleman explains that coal
is steamed, producing tar or paint for the outside of houses, and then the
smoke is passed through, removing its substance and then burns "as you
see".
|
|
The chemical
combination of
different atoms in different proportions producing substances
qualitatively
different from each other - although the constituent atoms
remain the same.
The experimental power of this theory (related to the
calculation of
weights) laid the foundations of modern
chemistry - And put an end to any idea that qualities can only
be explained
as a result of the merging of constituent qualities.
(external link)
a precise and
beautiful
theory
|
1808 Charles Fourier
Théorie des quatre mouvements
et des destinées générales -
(Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies)
"As a general thesis: Social progress and
historic changes occur by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty,
and decadence of the social order occurs as the result of a decrease in the
liberty of women."
(external source - See
Engels and Marx
1845
-
Compare with John Stuart Mill)
1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's
Philosophie zoologique, ou exposition des considérations
relatives à l'histoire naturelle des animaux. (Zoological
Philosophy. An Exposition with
Regard to the Natural History of Animals) - One of the books in which
Lamarck set out his theory of
evolution. -
External link to extracts in English
1810
12.2.1810 French
Code pénal de 1810
1810 Sun Life Assurance Society founded
as part of the
Sun Fire Office to provide life insurance. It became part of
Friends Life in 2010.
1810 Great Rutland
Cavern -
at Matlock Bath
opened to the public as a tourist attraction.
Developed from part of the Nestus Mine, which has written records
from the
15th century. The Duke of Rutland owned mineral rights in the
area. The
Great
Masson Cavern
was opened in 1844. Rutland remained (1920s) the largest of the Matlock
caverns open to the public, it had room for a thousand people and was
"extremely rich in fossils and minerals". At some stage,
after 1838, it was gas lit.
Its
"Roman Hall" claimed to show traces of Roman lead mining.
March 1811: Percy Byshee Shelley, a young aristocrat, expelled
from
Oxford University
for publishing a pamphlet on The Necessity of
Atheism and
challenging the clergy to debate it with him. In the following
years he
distributed pamphlets to the working class calling for
revolution in the
cause of liberty, equality and justice.
The first two volumes of Barthold Georg Niebuhr's Römische
Geschichte (Roman History) were published in Berlin in 1811-1812. The
full three volume set was published in Berlin between 1811 and 1832. They
were translated into English from 1827 onwards.
1811 Antiqvitetskommissionen (Antiquities Commission) for Norway
established. This was the origin of the Oldsaksamlingen (Antiquities
Collection) at the University of Oslo.
(Norweigan Wikipedia)
1811 Joseph Anning found the scull like a crocodile in the rocks at
Lyme Regis. In 1811 Mary and Joseph found the rest of the body. In
1814 named Proteosaurus and from 1817
Ichthyosaurus. See
1820 -
1823 -
1828 -
Dorset page -
Bristol -
Torrens
1812
1812 to 1814 Robert Owen wrote his four
Essays on the Formation of Human Character
1812 Étienne-Géry Lenglet's
Introduction à l'histoire, ou Recherches sur les dernières
révolutions du globe et sur les plus anciens peuples connus
(Google books
offline)
-
(Introduction to History, or Research on the recent revolutions in the
globe and the oldest known peoples). Révolutions du globe (upheavals
of the world?) referred to cataclysmic events that may have structured the
earth's geology. These might include
Noah's flood, but the theorising is much broader.
1813
1813 Humphry Davy engaged Michael Farady as his assistant at
the Royal
Institution and entrusted him with performing the experiments
which led to
the condensation of gases into liquids by pressure.
1813 First edition of
James Cowles Prichard's
Researches into the Physical History of Man
1813 Essay on the Theory of the Earth translated from, the
French of M. Cuvier, by Robert Kerr with Mineralogical Notes, and an
Account of Cuvier's Geological Discoveries, by Professor Jameson.
Edinburgh. Cuvier text is a translation of the Discours preliminaire . . .
from Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles . . . Paris .. Second edition
(1815)
online.
|
End of the Napoleonic Wars
April 1814: Napoleon abdicated
Restoration of monarchies
throughout continental Europe. Louis 18th King of France.
|
18.6.1814 The Czar of Russia and King of Prussia, Britain's allies
against Napoleon, were received at the Guildhall in London. A reenactment,
called 'End of the Great War',
concluded the history of London and Empire in the
1911 Pageant of London.
"The world believed that the war had come to an end". [See
1910 and
First World War]
|
Humphry Davy patented the miners' safety lamp
1814 Jacob Berzelius' "Essay on the Cause of Chemical Proportions,
and on Some Circumstances Related to Them; together with a Short and Easy
Method of Expressing Them" in the Annals of Philosophy laid the
basis of using letter, or letter combinations, derived from Latin names, as
chemical symbols. For example, Pb from Plumbum for
lead. See
Peter van der Krogt
1814 First edition of The Matlock, Buxton and Castleton Guide,
containing concise accounts of these and other remarkable places and
objects, chiefly in the northern parts of the interesting County of
Derby, by Rev. Richard Ward who was the Anglican minister at Cromford
from before 1799 to 1839 and lived in Matlock (See
Oakhill). Second edition 1818. Sixth
edition 1825. In 1818 the three caverns near Matlock Bath are
Rutland, Cumberland, and
Fluor. By 1825, Devonshire and one at the base of High Tor had been
discovered. Devonshire, like Great Masson discovered later, was a natural
cavern.(See
John Mawe 1828).
1815 Napoleon returned, but was defeated at Waterloo
(18.6.1815).
|
1815 Corn Law. During the Napoleonic Wars farmers
flourished
because corn from abroad could not undercut their prices. Once
the war was
over foreign corn could come in and bring down the price of
corn. To
protect the rents of the landed aristocracy Parliament passed
the Corn Law
(repealed 1846)
which put taxes on imported corn.
This rise in the price of
the people's
staple food coincided with a period of widespread poverty and
unemployment,
following the end of the war. The cost of poor relief soared,
leading to a
movement to reform the Poor Laws
1815 William Smith's map A Delineation of the Strata of England
and Wales with part of Scotland was the first
geological map to
identify the layers of rock based on the
fossil they contained rather than
on their composition.
(external link) - See
Zhu Xi
18.8.1816 The Observer reported a project in
which a balloon
the
shape of a dolphin, powered by steam and with wings that would
act as
rudders would "carry the nobility and gentry to Paris, and
subsequently
elsewhere" in ten hours or less. [I do not know what
happened]. Balloons
for flight, carrying humans, had been demonstrated in France
in
1783, and used by Napoleon as military observation
platforms.
1817 Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy
and
Taxation published. People, like
Malthus
and Ricardo, who wanted to abolish any
form of poor relief were known as the Abolitionists. They
argued that poor
relief perverted the market, undermined incentive, reduced the
mobility of
labour and encouraged overpopulation. Such arguments were at
the strongest
about 1817. Between 1817 and 1834, when the
Poor Law Amendment
Act
was passed, they were modified considerably.
Wealth and Poverty: Malthus and
Ricardo
1818
|
1818
Chapter 18: Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval travel from London to
Scotland, avoiding "the great road to Edinburgh" in order to visit Windsor,
Oxford,
Matlock, and the
Cumberland lakes. The country around the village
of Matlock "resembles, to a greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but
everything is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of
distant white Alps ...
We visited the wondrous cave, and the little cabinets of natural history,
where the curiosities are disposed in the same manner as in the collections
at Servox and Chamounix. ... From Derby, still journeying northward, we
passed two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland. I could now almost fancy
mr self among the Swiss mountains.
|
1819 Our Village sketches by Mary Mitford in The Lady's
Magazine. Idyllic pictures of an English
village, its cottages and
gardens and village green. Book form 1824 - 1826 - 1828 - 1830 - 1832.
John Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery was
published in 1820 and his The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems in
1821.
1819 Adam Sedgwick (1785-
1873), newly appointed Woodwardian Professor of Geology at
Cambridge and John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861) , newly
graduated,
went on a geological walking tour
of the
Isle of Wight, during which they conceived a project to
institute a society in Cambridge "as a point of concourse for scientific
communication". On their return they founded the Cambridge Philosophical
Society. Henslow became Professor of mineralogy in 1822 and of Botany in
1825, combining this with being a vicar from 1832. From 1837 he was Rector
of Hitcham in Suffolk, where he lived from 1839.
See
1842. An account that the
Isle of Wight Philosophical
Society was founded in 1810 and established a collection in 1819
is referenced to work by
Jackson in the 1940s.
The Isle of Wight Tourist, and Companion at Cowes (1830) by "Philo
Vectis" says the society was formed about 1822.
Martin Munt (2008) says "Collecting of geological specimens for
museum collections is documented as early as
1825". A
history was provided as part of the
Portsmouth Symposium's field excursion to the Isle of Wight on Saturday
2.9.2000.
16.8.1819 Peterloo. Troops fired on demonstrators in
Manchester.
(External Link- Spartacus
schoolnet)
The Times, 10.10.1819 page 4.
1819 Act for the Resumption of Cash Payments led to bank notes being
convertible to gold from 1.5.1821. Convertibility had been suspended in
1797. It was fully resumed
over a period of three years (1821-
1824)
JAMES MILL'S ESSAY ON GOVERNMENT
1820
James
Mill's
Essay on
Government
first
published in
the supplement to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. See
1825
1821 London sale of
Anning
fossils raised up to £400, which
rescued the family.
Monday 28.5.1821:
Third
British Census
Population of England and Wales: 12,000,000; Scotland:
2,092,000
|
1821 Discovery of
Kirkdale Cave
[Wikipedia]
- 1822 "Account of an Assemblage of Fossil
Teeth and Bones of Elephant, Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, Bear, Tiger, and
Hyaena, and Sixteen Other Animals; Discovered in a Cave at Kirkdale,
Yorkshire, in the Year 1821: With a Comparative View of Five Similar
Caverns in Various Parts of England, and Others on the Continent" by
William Buckland. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London, Volume. 112 (1822), pp. 171-236. Available
online
-
(offline) - "many small balls
of the solid
calcareous excrement of an animal that had fed on
bones".
Discussion - Buckland: See
Anning -
1823 -
1825 -
1828 -
1829 -
1845
1822
John Stuart Mill
and his
friends formed a Utilitarian
Society (broken up 1826).
Utilitarianism
was the dominant theory of Social Science in nineteenth
century Britain. It
was challenged by the French Sociologist,
Emile Durkheim,
in the 1890s.
July 1822
Lyell wrote to
Mantell with details of
the "anticlinal axis and order of superposition of the strata at Sandown
Bay" and their correspondence with the
wealden and cretaceous
systems of Sussex and Surrey with "a section from
Culver Cliff to Shanklin
Down" and a "suite of specimens".
(Mantell 1847)
1823
David Ricardo died
About 1823
John Stuart Mill allegedly arrested
distributing birth control leaflets to working class women. [I heard he was
dropping them into the "areas" of rich people's houses, where the servant
girls would pick them up.] See 1886 - 1934 -
1950s -
1957 -
1961 -
1964 -
1987 -
2008
|
1823
Whitby
Literary and Philosophical Society in with the prime
purpose to setup a
Museum. George
Young (1777 1848), a Presbyterian
minister, and John Bird (1768-1829: artist), two members, published A
geological survey of the Yorkshire coast : describing the strata and
fossils occurring between the Humber and the Tees, from the German ocean to
the plain of York in 1822
(online
offline), with a substantial revision in 1828
(online
offline). John
Bird became the museum's first curator.
(website)
Among the specimens was
Teleosaurus chapmani
catalogue
|
|
A second Whitby
crocodile
like
fossil was found
in the
lias between Staiths and Runswick in 1791, and better skeleton
in the
alum-shale
of the lias at Saltwick in 1824. This was eighteen feet long and became one
of the best known exhibits in the museum.
|
|
The drawing "Teleosaurus Chapmanni: Crocodilian remains from the Lias at
Whitby", of the specimen discovered in 1824, is from Buckland's
Bridgewater Treatise (1835), plate 25, but based on John Bird's
drawing in the 1828 edition of the Geological Survey (Plate 16. Two
page
spread. Hand coloured). Buckland's notes say this appears to be the
same species as that presented to the
Royal Society in
1758, and so Mr. Konig [of the
British Museum]
"has applied to it the name of Teleosaurus Chapmanni".
|
|
10.12.1823
Mary Anning discovered a fossil with a "remarkable long
neck and a small head", not resembling an
Ichthyosaurus. 26.12.1823 Letter with sketch suggests it
is a
Plesiosaurus (nearer to a saurus). Plesiosaurus was 9 feet long,
but its
head was only 4 to 5 inches long.
|
Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus appear to do battle in sketch for the
1854
exhibition
|
|
On 20.2.1824 a Geological Society meeting heard
a report on this find and one from
William Buckland on his
Megalosaurus.
The three images below, from the Oxford Museum of Natural History, show
Megalosaurus developing from
a waddler to a runner.
|
1824
German historian
Franz Leopold Ranke (21.12.1795 -23.5.1886) wrote that
rather than "judging the past" would seek "only to show what actually
happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen)
1824
Comte
and
Saint-Simon
fell out over the way
Comte's
Systeme de Politique Positive was to be
presented in Saint-
Simon's Catechism Des Industriels
The Athenaeum club for leading artistic, literary and scientific men and
for patrons of the arts and sciences was founded in 1824.
Michael Faraday was secretary, and
Humphry Davy
chairman. The
Athenaeum literary and scientific periodical was first published in
1828.
|
Charles Babbage (1791-1871) thought of the idea of a
machine considerably more complex than an
abacus to calculate and print
mathematical tables in 1812. He wanted to eliminate the inaccuracies of
hand calculations by large numbers of human "computers". Cogs would be more
reliable. He began his first machine in 1824 and it was put together in
1832 by Joseph Clement, a skilled toolmaker and draughtsman. It was a
decimal digital machine - the value of a number represented by the
positions of toothed wheels marked with decimal numbers.
|
about 1824-1825 Organisation of
Antiquities in Copenhagen on his three-age-
system, by
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen completed. The system was
described in 1836
1825
1825 Michael Faraday isolated and identified
benzene
from the oily residue derived from the production of
illuminating gas. He called it bicarburet of hydrogen.
In 1836, the French chemist Auguste Laurent named it
phéne. This is the word root of phenol and
phenyl. [See
phenothiazine]. Phenol is also known as
carbolic acid.
1825 James
Mill's Essay on
Government
(1820)
distributed in a free edition with other
essays. William
Thompson's Appeal on
Behalf of Women
written in collaboration with
Anna
Wheeler
criticised this essay.
. Thompson and Wheeler were
Irish Owenites who developed socialist theories from
Benthamism. See
Radicals, Socialists and Early
Feminists and
Thompson and Wheeler weblinks
December 1825: Two Lombard Street (London) banks failed
with
consequent failures of country banks. Over one hundred banks
failed in a
few weeks. The bank
crisis was stabilised by greater reliance
on gold, but
this was the start of the first world wide economic
depression.
"From the time of the resumption of cash payments by the Act of
1819, and especially
since
the commercial crisis of 1825, the favourite explanation of every rise or
fall of prices has been 'the currency;'"
(Mill, J.S.
1848 book three, chapter 8 "Of the value of money, as dependent
on demand and supply".
|
1825 Reverend Gerard Smith recovered fragments of fossil bones of
reptiles from Sandown Bay on the east of the
Isle of Wight. In 1829 James Vine found many near Brook
Point on the south-west coast, at the other end of the same
iron-stone
strata. They were numerous at "Bull-face Ledge", where "the
iron-stone
is
abundantly loaded with
prostrate trunks of fossil trees". (fossils sent to
the collection of the
Geological Society of London). In 1834 John Smith, of
Yaverland Farm, near Sandown,collected several large vertebrae
of the Iguanodon, portions of two thigh bones,
and many fragments of smaller bones, which were presented to the Oxford
Museum.
(Buckland 1829 and Mantell 1847)
1826 Benjamin Disraeli's Vivian Grey explored the relation of
birth, wealth and intellect to power, stating that "to enter into high
society, a man must either have blood, a million, or a genius". Vivian Grey
regrets that he is not the "son of a millionaire, or a noble". The word
millionaire had entered English from French in the late 18th
century. Here it is associated with the new rich finacial and industrial
classes. See also Marx and Engels 1848
paragraph 1.9 and
cotton millionaires in 1850.
|
Sometime in 1826: "Breast-feeding mother" by Willem Bartel van der Kooi
(1768-1836), a Dutch artist famous for pictures of family and childhood.
The mother is a Frisian woman from the countryside.
John Stuart Mill's melancholy winter of 1826/1827. Autobiography paragraphs
5.2c -
5.6
|
9.4.1827 was the end of the Liverpool Tory Government (The
only English
government to last longer than Mrs
Thatcher's).
30.4.1827 A foundation stone laid in Gower Street of
what became
London University, the first "godless" university in England.
Although many
who supported it were very religious, the University was
founded on the
principle that religious tests would not be required of staff
or students.
For the first time, dissenters and
jews
(in particular) could
study for a
degree without travelling to Scotland or continental Europe.
(external link) - The first academic sessions
started in October 1828 - On 28.11.1836 the university, renamed University
College, was united with King's College as the University of London. King's
College was a rival university founded by the established church. The North
London Hospital was opened opposite the university in 1834. It became
University College Hospital in 1837. See
1840s -
1846 -
1869 -
1871 -
1878
Michael Farady succeeded Humphry Davy in the chair of
Chemistry at the
Royal Institution. He published the first edition of
Chemical
Manipulation
August 1827 First edition of Popular Lectures on the Study of
Natural History and the Sciences, Vegetable Physiology, Zoology, the Animal
and Vegetable Poisons: And on the Human Faculties, Mental and Corporeal, as
Delivered Before the Isle of Wight Philosophical Society edited by
William Lempnere (a vice-President). A second edition was published in
1830. The curators of
the museum were Delabere [Pritchett] Blaine, author
of the Encyclopiedia of Field Sports, who died in the Isle of Wight
on 1.4.1845, aged 74 and Rev Edmund Kell (born 18.1.1799, died 17.1.1874)
Unitarian Minister at Newport since 1823. The Society met monthly during
the winter season, when a lecture was usually delivered at the Townhall by
one of the members upon any subject of natural history, or of general
literature. It was linked to the Portsmouth Philosophical Society. See
1847.
1828 John Stuart Mill established contacts with
Saint-Simonians
at the London Debating Society.
26.10.1829 Death of John Mawe (born 1764) minerologist owner of a
"Free Museum" at
Matlock Bath. See
Wikipedia.
The second edition of The Panorama of Matlock and its environs: with the
tour of the Peak was published in 1828.
The Matlock Tourist in 1838 says Mawe wrote this.
The Panorama says the
Devonshire Cavern "on the Heights of
Abraham, (Mount Parnassus)" was "discovered about four
years ago" (page 18). "It is visited by every curious resident; and, on
comparison
with the others, is greatly preferred, being a natural cavern,
and of very great extent, and presenting an ininite number of
'water icicles', (a most appropriate local term,) some of which
line the sides,
and others are pendant from the roof" "The Proprietor"
had "been at considerable expense" to provide easy access and
"driving a gallery through it to the open air".
winter 1828
Mary Anning discovered the first British example of a
"flying dragon" or
Pterodactylus, which caught the public's
imagination more than any other of her finds.
Dimorphodon macronyx (Buckland, 1829) PV R
1034 - Two articles by
William Buckland in
Transactions of the Geological Society of London, followed one
another: "On the discovery of a new species of
pterodactyle in the lias at Lyme Regis" and "On the Discovery of
Coprolites, or Fossil
Faeces, in the Lias at Lyme Regis,
and in other Formations" in 1829. (In
series 2, volume 3, 1835, see pages 217-240 and plates at end).
(offline)
"In the same
blue lias formation at Lyme Regis, in which so
many specimens of Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus have been discovered by
Miss Mary Anning-, she has recently found the skeleton of an unknown
species of that most rare and curious of all reptiles, the Pterodactyle, an
extinct genus, which has yet been recognized only in the
upper Jura
limestone beds of Aichstedt and Solenhofen, in the lithographic stone,
which is nearly coeval with the
chalk
of England"
|
Buckland thought the Pterodactyle might be able to fly, swim, creep, or
climb, or suspend itself from trees. He compared it to Milton's description
of
the devil: "The Fiend, O'er bog, or steep, through straight,
rough, dense, or
rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way. And swims, or
sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."
Paradise Lost, Book 2. line
947.
|
|
1829
1829 Thomas Babington Macaulay's review of James Mill's
Essay
on Government criticised it for using
deduction
rather
than
induction.
1829
John Stuart Mill read Comte for
the first time.
1829
Robert Owen returned to England to find he is a guru of
the labour
movement.
May 1829: The British Association for Promoting
Cooperative Knowledge
founded in London.
4.12.1829
William Buckland read a paper "On the discovery of Fossil Bones
of the
Iguanodon, in the
Iron Sand of the
Wealden
Formation in the
Isle of Wight, and in the
Isle of Purbeck" Finds (by
local fossil collectors) helped to
connect "the geological structure of ... parts of the Isle of
Wight and
Isle of Purbeck ... with the Weald of Sussex and Kent".
|
Two views (drawings) of Metacarpal bone of Iguanadon from Sandown Bay, Isle
of Wight. The vision of Iguanadon was initially deduced from such pieces.
Mantell used the
proportions
of eight different fossil bones compared with
those of "the recent Iguana" to calculate prehistoric Iguanadon's as
70 feet long (including 52.5 feet of tail) and 14.5. feet in body
circumference.
|
Mantell, in 1847,
noted that "the largest toe-hone of the Iguanodon now in my possession was
obtained from a row of stones placed round the flower-plot of a cottage
near
Brixton".
Swanage, in Dorset, is
located where
iron-sand divides the
Purbeck limestone to the south, from the greensand and chalk of Ballard
Down to the north. From Swanage bay. a Rev. F.O. Bartlett and Colonel White
had collected bones of fossils for Bartlett's museum, including ones from
Iguanodon, Plesiosaurus, crocodiles, and possibly Megalosaurus. Washed
from cliffs, the fossils had been rolled up and down the beach and
partially
eroded.
1830
5.7.1830 Start of French invasion of Algiers. "The invasion marked
the end of several centuries of Ottoman rule in Algeria and the beginning of French
Algeria" (Wikipedia). This is considered te beginning of the second French
Empire. The occupation of French Indo-China took place under Napoleon 3rd.
See Roland Barthes
the signification.
9.8.1830 Louise Philippe proclaimed king of France. On
16.8.1830 ex-king Charles 10th left for exile in England.
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28.8.1830 First threshing machine destroyed in the "Swing Riots" in
England.
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15.9.1830 Railway opened between the port of Liverpool and the
cotton town of Manchester.
George Stephenson (9.6.1781 - 12.8.1848) constructed the line and his son
Robert Stephenson (16.10.1803 - 12.10.1859) designed and built the steam
locomotives.
The painting (a detail) of open carriages on the first day was painted by
A.B. Clayton in 1830
(Wikimedia Commons)
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Charles Tayleur and Company at Newton Le Willows
opened in 1832 to produce girders for bridges, switches and
crossings, and other ironwork following the opening of the railway. Robert
Stephenson was a partner for a few years. Became The Vulcan Foundry Company
in (or by)
1847.
[See mythology Vulcan]
See
1854 -
1899 - and
Festivalof Britain 1951
and
Vulcan 1951 -
before 1960.
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15.11.1830 was the end of the Wellington Tory Government in the
United Kingdom. 17.11.1830 was the start or Grey's Whig Government.
1830: Royal Geographic Society founded. It
incorporated the
African Society (founded in 1788), in 1831. From 1830 to
1840 it met
in the
rooms of the Horticultural Society.
[external link to history]. The
National
Geographic
Society of
the United States was founded in 1888.
1830 At
Lund, Bror Emil Hildebrand arranged exhibits according to
Christian Jürgensen
Thomsen's three age system. He did the same at
Stockholm between 1831 and 1837. Rudolf Keyser
applied the system in
Christiania (Oslo), Norway, between 1833 and 1836.
So, by the time Thomsen published his guide to the system in
1836, it was already
known and accepted in Scandinavia. (Gräslund, p.20).
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1831
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September 1831 British Association for the
Advancement of
Science founded. A brief (pdf) history on the
British Association's website
implied that an
objective was to make science more open, and less elitist. The
focus of the
Association's activities was its Annual Meeting "which was an
important
forum for major scientific announcements and debate". - There is now
a web brief history.
(archive)
Major scientific announcements the brief history lists are
"Joule's experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat in the
1840s, Bessemer's steel process
(1856), the discovery of the first of the inert gases, argon, by
Rayleigh and Ramsay
(1894), the first public demonstration of wireless transmission
over a few hundred yards by Sir Oliver Lodge
(1894), and J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron
(1899)." It also mentions the debate on
Darwin's theory in
1860. As can be seen, the
emphasis is on the natural sciences, and the new
statistical section (1835) was told not to be political.
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The Spirit of the Age
Georg Friedrich
Hegel, the philosopher of history as the
development of ideas, died in Germany in 1831.
German
"idealism" and French
"positivism"
provided English speakers with alternative approaches to
social science to
utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill's articles on the
Spirit of the Age (1831) showed the influence of
Saint-Simon
in his
explanation of the way different ideas fit different periods
of history.
Mill was a utilitarian arguing that there is a cultural
difference in what
gives pleasure. He adapted utilitarianism to the philosophy of
history.
Thomas Carlyle argued against utilitarianism in a fiction
called Sartor
Resartus (Latin for "clothes maker repaired"), which he
wrote in 1831
(published later). This argued for a social science based on
the analysis
of symbols. Clothes are typical social symbols. We are
naturally naked, but
in society we use clothes to convey meaning to one another.
Although the
movement of planets may be described on the model of a
machine, Carlyle
said social science requires the analysis of meanings.
Religion had
provided this, but, like old clothes, it no longer fits. The
times require
new clothes. Utilitarianism will not do, because it removes
the
significance of symbolic meanings, reducing them all to
degrees of pain and
pleasure in an effort to imitate the machine model used by
physics.
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1832
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1832
Michael Faraday
(England) Joseph Henry (USA) reported their
separate conversion of electricity into magnetism and back into
electricity.
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Faraday sent a current through a coil of wires,
creating a magnetic field which induced a momentary current in a second
coil.
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This discovery of electromagnetic induction led to the development of
electric motors, generators and dynamos.
1832
Friends Provident Institution founded, on the proposal of Samuel Tuke and
Joseph Rowntree, "to provide the security of life assurance" to Quakers.
Office above a sweet shop in Bradford. See
online history.
1.2.1832 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws appointed. It
reported in
1834
14.4.1832
Robert Owen's penny paper
The Crisis began publication. "It is now evident to every
one who observes passing events .., that a momentous
Crisis is at hand".
June 1832 Insurrection républicaine à Paris en juin
1832 -
Wikipedia
6.6.1832
Jeremy Bentham died.
He left his body to medical science and you can still visit
his corpse at
the University of London.
30.6.1832 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge announced
planned publication of a Penny Cyclopaedia. When it commenced (1833?) there
were six penny numbers per month. On 13.11.1833 these were offered bound
together in cloth at 7/6d as Volume 1 - A to Andes. Price and numbers later
increased but the same publication plan continued until completion in 1843/1844. (See
article by James Carlile
Open Court
1919)
In 1832 a Whig Government passed a
Parliamentary Reform
Act (Royal Assent 7.6.1832). This did not add many
voters, but it spread
the vote more
evenly over
the country. There was a marked shift in the balance of power
from the
landed aristocracy to the urban middle classes.
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1833
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Emancipation of
Slaves: In August 1833, the British
Parliament
passed an Act prohibiting slavery in British colonies. This
Act came into
force on Friday 1.8.1834,
which was treated as a day of celebration by the people of
Britain. As in
France in 1794,
the
common people of the slave-owning country identified with the
freedom of
the slaves. This is how the novel John Halifax,
Gentleman (D.M.
Craik, 1856) described the celebrations:
"what a soft, gray, summer morning it was, and how it broke
out into
brightness; how everywhere bells were ringing, club
fraternities walking
with bands and banners, school-children having feasts and
work-people
holidays."
1833 The Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius coined the term polymer
(many parts), originally for a compound with a formula that was a multiple
of another. (A definition still used in dictionaries). It has evolved into
a word for a compound with a large number of similar units bonded together,
with special reference to
plastics, resins and
rubbers formed of such organic compounds. See
nylon.
1833 A Topographical Dictionary of Great Britain and Ireland:
..., Volume 1 Compiled by John Gorton.
"Bristol, until eclipsed by
Liverpool, was the
principal port on the western coast of England. Its
lead-branch of foreign commerce is with West Indies, which it
supplies with
every sort of article necessary to the black and white population; and
receives back vast quantities of rum, cotton,
sugar, and other West India
produce in return.
Sugar
is the most important article,"
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Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar was published in Berlin in six part
in 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849 and 1852. The full title being
Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen,
Litauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit,
Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic and German). It is the comparative
study of languages that is thought of as the origin of scientific as
distinct from literary philology and linguistics.
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May 1833 "Joseph Whitworth, Tool-Maker from London" established in
Manchester. Whitworth produced the machine tools which made the development
of railways and steamships possible. "He is best remembered for his
promotion of true plane surfaces and the Whitworth screw thread. His
promotion of standard measures and interchangeability brought about an
engineering revolution".
(Whitworth Society)
Statistical
Societies
formed
Members of the
British Association for the Advancement
of Science,
meeting at
Cambridge in the summer of 1833, formed a
statistical
section. - See
history on website of the
Royal Statistical Society). The Belgian mathematician
Quetelet was invited and presented a paper on the
relationship between the statistics of
crime and age in France and Belgium to a small private meeting
which included Thomas
Malthus and
Charles Babbage. Crime statistics were figures that European
states
had only recently begun to generate.
State generated numbers opened a bright new window through which
society could be looked at scientifically. Babbage proposed a statistical
section of the British Association (section F) and this was agreed on the
condition that it was non-political.
Manchester Statistical Society was established before
the end of
1833.
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1833 In volume three of Principles of Geology,
Charles Lyell compared the
fossil record in succesive strata of
rocks to the records in a succesion of registers left by
census officials:
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"Let the mortality of the population of a large country
represent the successive extinction of species, and the births of new
individuals the introduction of new species. While these fluctuations are
gradually taking place everywhere, suppose commissioners to be appointed to
visit each province of the country in succession, taking an exact account
of the number, names, and individual peculiarities of all the inhabitants,
and leaving in each district a register containing a record of this
information. If, after the completion of one census, another is immediately
made after the same plan, and then another, there will, at last, be a
series of statistical documents in each province. When these are arranged
in chronological order, the contents of those which stand next to each
other will differ according to the length of the intervals of time between
the taking of each census." (Lyell, C. 1833, p.32)
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1834
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The Statistical Society of London, which had been projected at
Cambridge,
was established in the spring of 1834, and
"since that time the pursuit of this science has extended very
rapidly".
Journal of the
Statistical
Society of London,
Vol.1, no.1 May 1838 p.4
The decision to found was made at a meeting at Babbage's house on
21.2.1834 and the society held its first meeting within two weeks,
setting down its aims as 'the collection and classification of all facts
illustrative of the present condition and prospects of society, especially
as it exists in the British Dominions'. The Council was elected at a
meeting on 3.5.1834.
(Archive)
9.4.1834 Start of the second revolt of the canuts and la semaine
sanglante (week of blood) in France.
(external link)
1834 POOR
LAW
1834 Poor
Law
Amendment
Act. By this Act a Poor Law
Commission was created to regulate the poor law centrally.
Under its
influence local authorities were encourage to build workhouses
and to
refuse poor people any welfare payments unless they left their
home and
lived in the workhouse. The Act was hated by the working class
who called
workhouses the English "Bastilles". To erect some workhouses
the government
had to provide an army guard. Malthusianism was blamed for the
New Poor
Law. So evil were its motives thought to be that many thought
they would be
poisoned in the workhouse to control population.
See Social Science History, chapter five:
Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law
The Theories that Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Owen
made
England's Poor Law
Commissioners
and the Trade in Pauper Lunacy 1834-1847
and
Mental Health, for the effect of the Act on
the growth
of asylums.
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The Bridgewater Treatises On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God As
Manifested in the Creation - published in volumes between 1833 and 1836
1833 Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), On the Power, Wisdom and
Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the
Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man - John Kidd (1775-1851),
On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man:
Principally with Reference to the Supply of His Wants and the Exercise of
His Intellectual Faculties - 3 William Whewell (1794-1866),
Astronomy
and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology
Internet Archive
offline
-
Charles Bell (1774-1842), The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments
in Evincing Design
1834 Peter Roget (1779-1869) Animal and Vegetable Physiology:
Considered with Reference to Natural Theology -
William Prout (1785-1850) Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function
of Digestion: Considered with Reference to Natural Theology
1835 William Kirby (1759-1850) On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness
of God as Manifested in the Creation of Animals and in Their History,
Habits and Instincts
1836 6. William Buckland (1784-1856) Geology and
Mineralogy
Considered with Reference to Natural Theology
online
Internet Archive
plates
offline
plates
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1835
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The first volume of
Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America
published in French. The second volume was published in 1840.
John Stuart
Mill wrote a review in The Edinburgh Review, vol 72,
1840.
Tocqueville's
Recollections were written in 1850/1851.
His
The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution was published
in 1856. He died
in 1859
Farr in "Mortality
of lunatics" has the idea of a natural death rate as something
distinct from the (statistically) normal death rate - without using these words
1835
Roderick Impey Murchison and Adam Sedgwick's "On the
Silurian
and
Cambrian
Systems, Exhibiting the Order in which the Older Sedimentary Strata
Succeed each other in England and Wales" since described as the germ of the
modern geological time scale.
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1836
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James Mill died
1836 The post of Registrar General (births, deaths and marriages)
for England and Wales created by the
Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration
Act. Registration began in
1837.
William Farr was appointed (first) Superintendent of the
Statistical Department in
1838. The Registrar
General was responsible the census in England and Wales from
1841,
1836
Contrasts by Augustus Welby Pugin published.
Asserted that only a Roman Catholic Society could produce a truly
Gothic style.
1836
Edouard Biot (1803-1850) [in French] "The Population of
China and its Variations
since the year
2400 BC, until the
thirteenth century AD"
1836
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen's Ledetraad til nordisch
Oldkyndighed. Published in English as Guide to Northern
Archaeology in 1848
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1837
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1837 A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire:
Exhibiting its extent, physical capacities, population, industry, and civil
and religious institutions by John Ramsay McCulloch assisted by
numerous contributors, published in two volumes under the superintendence
of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
(Read online).
The chapter on
"Vital
statistics, or, The statistics of health, sickness, diseases, and
death"
was written by
Wiliam Farr. ["Vital Statistics" means "life statistics"]
1837 to 1839
Thomas Carlyle's two volume
The French Revolution established him amongst the chief writers
of the day.
February 1837 Digging began on the Clay Cross Tunnel in
Derbyshire,
to enable the Leeds to Derby railway to pass under Clay Cross Hill. It was
was completed in August 1839. Coal and iron deposits discovered during the
digging were the basis of the rapid expansion of Clay Cross as a mining
town. Its geology inspired the coal formation feature at the
1854 Sydenham display.
(History -
Domesday -
Clay Cross walk
May 1837 William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented their
electric telegraph which used a battery to send an
electric current down five wires to five needles which pointed to letters
and numbers on a panel. It was
first used by the Great Western Railway. [See drum telegraph]
1.7.1837
Registration of births, deaths and marriages in England and
Wales
required by law. - External link to
General Register Office
Poor Law Commission decide to extend the law to the north.
Opposition spread faster than the Commissioners. An Anti-Poor
law campaign
and a campaign to control factory working hours merged with
the campaign
for the Charter.
The Charter called for a vote for every adult male.
Chartists believed that if the working class could gain
control of
Parliament they would gain control of the welfare system and
of the
economy. Tied to the Charter was a plan to bring it about. A
large
demonstration would present a monster petition to Parliament
asking that
all men should have a vote. They would wait outside
Parliament and when
the petition was rejected they would declare themselves a
National
Convention -a kind of People's Parliament which would take
over from the
official Parliament - To enforce their will they would call a
sacred month
or national strike of the working classes. The use of the word
"Convention"
was seen as deliberate reference to the French Revolution. The
idea of the
"sacred month" was common amongst the Owenites.
Aborigines' Protection Society (London) founded in the
aftermath of
British emancipation of
slaves. The Ethnological Society of London was
founded in
1843
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A young portrait of Victoria was used from her first coins of 1838 until
1887 for
gold
and
silver
coins, but continued in use until as late as 1895
on some
bronze
coins.
Victorian (and subsequent) pennies were legal currency in the United
Kingdom until
1971. The early Victorian ones were worn very thin by over a
century of use.
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Isambard Kingdom Brunel (9.4.1806 - 15.9.1859) designed the first steamship
purpose-built for
regularly scheduled trans-Atlantic crossings. The ship was part of a
project that would link London, England to New York in the USA. This was
completed on 30.6.1841 when the Great Western Railway from Paddington to
Bristol opened.
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The
Falmouth Art Gallery has this
wood engraving by W. Serjent
"The Great Western Steam Ship of Bristol"
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19.7.1837:
Listen to the news on the day the
Great Western Steamship
(archive -
new)
was
launched at Bristol. It left on its first voyage
for America in 1838. There is also a
feature on the lunacy commission described in the news bulletin.
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Hegel died in
1831.
The Doktorklub, later renamed Die Freien
of Young Hegelians met in Berlin in the late 1830s and early 1840s
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This cartoon of Die Freien is by
Engels. I do not have a date.
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1838
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1838 The Principles of General and Comparative Physiology by
William Benjamin Carpenter. Developed in different formats over many years.
1846 A Manual of Physiology, including physiological anatomy Second
edition 1851
[Internet Archive] refers to
"green scum,
which floats upon ponds, ditches...
which consists of the cells of a minute Cryptogamic Plant". [Cryptogram =
non-flowering. We would now call the green scum
green algae]. He considered the chemical processes triggered in
this by light, uniting carbon and hydrogen and releasing oxygen. Carpenter
carried out microscopical studies of the
Foraminifera, minute shelled creatures found in surface waters
and oceanic (and geological) deposits. In the 1860s he was involved in the
debate over 'dawn life' fossils
Eozoon canadense.
Objective statistics In an 1820 paper to the Royal Society,
Benjamin Gompertz criticised life assurance societies for
selecting mortality tables that they hoped would be favourable to them,
rather than seeking objectivity. In 1838 he was a member of a
committee formed by seventeen assurance offices to pool information in the
search for reliable statistics.
1838 William Ewart Gladstone
The State in its Relations with the
Church "We have no fear for the Church of England in her
competition
with the denominational bodies around her."
1838 Anselme Payen, a French chemist, isolated cellulose
from plant matter and determined its chemical formula. The purest natural
form of cellulose is cotton fibre. Explosive "gun cotton" was made by
treating cotton with nitric acid. This "nitrocellulose" formed the basis of
early synthetic
plastics from
1862. Registered as Celluloid in 1870. Celluloid film became
the basis of
home photography (1889) and
cinema (1895).
Cellulose from wood (mainly) was the basis of the
artificial fibre industry that came to be known as
rayon (1900).
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One spring morning 1838 A mirror
image of Boulevard du Temple, Paris
at "huit heure du matin" (8 a.m.) captured by Louis-Jaques-Mandé
Daguerre using a light-sensitised
silver
plate. The plate was exposed
in a camera for about ten minutes to take the picture. Moving objects were
not recorded but a shoe-shiner and his customer were still enough to be
immortalised.
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See
photograph
- photo 1856
- cabinet cards 1863
- street scene 1865 -
film 1895 -
film 1900 -
photo 1905 -
passing life 1909 -
forgotten grief
1916 - working class
families 1920s -
Picture Post
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September 1838 The London to
Birmingham Railway opened. The first main line in the world. [See steam and
commerce]
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In October 1838,
Charles
Darwin
read
Malthus on
Population. This eventually led to his
theory of
evolution by natural
selection.
23.11.1838 A "Natural-History Society" established in
Warrington, which "is
already in possession of a Phrenological Society".
1838 Charles Lyell The Elements of
Geology
- Originally planned as volume four of
Principles
1838 The Matlock Tourist, or guide through the Peak produced,
in connection with the Centre Museum of J. Valence and Benjamin Bryan of
the
Devonshire Cavern. Of the
caverns of Matlock the guide
says "so rich and rare an assemblage of Minerals, Fossils, Ores,
Stalactites, and Crystals, in an almost ininite variety of
formation, is
not to be met with in any other part of the kingdom".
Rutland, at this time,
used candles to illuminate its roof. Bengal lights (blue flares) were used
in
Devonshire.
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1839
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The speed of
the train may annihilate distance: The
first volume of
The Quarterly Review (January-March) for 1839 started with an
article in
which the author suggested the current speed of possibly 30 miles per hour
might increase to sixty or even a hundred.
"It will be evident that the first effect of this increasing
series is the gradual annihilation, approaching almost to the final
extinction, of that space and of those distances which have hitherto been
supposed unalterably to separate the various nations of the globe; and that
in proportion as this shall be effected, the centralisation, whether for
weal or woe, of the human family, must be accomplished. For instance,
supposing that railroads, even at our present simmering rate of travelling,
were to be suddenly established all over England, the whole population of
the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and
place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two-thirds
of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to
one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienates
them. If the rate were to be again sufficiently accelerated, this process
would be repeated ; our harbours, our dock-yards, our towns, the whole of
our rural population, would again not only draw nearer to each other by
twothirds, but all would proportionally approach the national hearth. As
distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it
were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger
than one immense city, and yet by a sort of miracle every man's
field would be found not only where it always was, but as large as ever it
was!"
7.5.1839 First presentation of the Charter to
Parliament.
12.5.1839 La Société des saisons launched an
usuccesful republican revolt against the July monarchy
(French Wikipedia)
9.7.1839 Completion of thirteen miles of
electric telegraph between the Paddington and West Drayton
stations of the Great Western Railway.
10.9.1839: John Frederick William Herschel to William Henry Fox
Talbot: I have not tried
Daguerre's process - But
I yesterday succeeded in
producing a photograph on glass ... The process ...
consists in depositing on the glass a perfectly uniform film of Muriate of
Silver - dry (by subsidence from water) - drying it - then
washing it with
Nitrate to render it sensitive... When placed glass foremost in the focus
of a Camera This takes the image with much greater sharpness than paper."
See also Fox
Talbot's paper based
salt print method.
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Hungry Forties
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The Hungry Forties; life under the Bread Tax was the
title chosen by
Jane Unwin, in 1904, for a collection of documents from the
1840s. The term
caught on as the British labour movement of the early
twentieth century
recounted to itself the struggles of its predecessors, and
British
communists studied the Communist Manifesto and tried to relate
it to the
decade that gave birth to it.
The "hungry forties", when a large part of the Irish peasantry
starved to
death and the condition of the English workers was also
miserable, had a
strong effect on the ideas about society of people of many
different
political persuasions.
But the date 1840 is artificial, the period really begins in
the 1830s. The
1830s and 1840s were a period of rapid industrial development,
social
distress and the emergence of open class conflict. A period
when Britain
came nearer to revolution than at any other time in recent
history.
It was also a period when people were thinking about how
society is
structured and how society changes. There was a great deal of
political and theoretical discussion, not only about class,
but also about
how we should think about men, women and children and their
position in
society.
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1840
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1840:
"In all ages woman may lament the ungallant silence of
the historian"
. The art of
needle-work from the earliest ages : including
some notices of the ancient historical tapestries by Mrs Elizabeth
Stone, edited by Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton, Countess of Wilton.
London: Henry Colburn 1840. ix and 405 pages. 1841 edition available at
Project Gutenberg
December 1840
An article
by Lord
Ashley
in the Tory
Quarterly
Review, discussed the employment of children in factories,
and argued
that society and the family in Britain were being destroyed by
the
industrial revolution. The way to restore a healthy society
was for the
rich to concern themselves with the welfare of the poor.
Brief note on Ashley
Ashley's
writings
Ashley in the 1830s and 1840s
Ashley as a Lunacy Commissioner
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1841
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1841
Ludwig Feuerbach,
in
The Essence of
Christianity argued that Christianity is a necessary phase
of human
culture whose essence is to understand human potenial in a heavenly rather
than an earthly form.
Feuerbach's earth-centred (rather than heaven-centred) view of religion has
been described as
anthropological and as humanist
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1841 A Huntley and a Palmer (both Quakers) became partners in
biscuit making in Reading. This advertisement is before 1846. (See
Reading
Museum). Huntley had sold biscuits to travellers on (horse
drawn) coaches since 1822. Tins to preserve them were manufactured by one
of his sons from 1832. The square shape of the tins had to be modified when
they were sent by the new trains.
More about
biscuits
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23.2.1841 The Chemical Society of London held its first meeting.
In 1980, the Chemical Society merged with the
Royal Institute of Chemistry, Faraday Society and the Society
for Analytical Chemistry to become the Royal Society of Chemistry.
15.4.1841 Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain founded by
leading London chemists and druggists "for the protection of their general
interests and the advancement of the art and science of Pharmacy." Proposed
by
William
Allen, who became its first President.
Sunday 6.6.1841/Monday 7.6.1841:
Fifth
British Census
This recorded names for the first time. People over 15
years old had
their age recorded to the lowest term of five. The place a
person was born in was partially recorded: Y for born in the
same county, N
for not. S for Scotland, I for Irelend. For the first time,
householders
could complete their own forms if they were able to.
(Census layout - external)
Population of England and Wales: 15,914,000; Scotland:
2,620,000
Suicide
statistics:
Emile Durkheim's table of
"Stability of suicide
in the principal European countries (absolute figures)" has
time series starting in
1841 for France, Prussia, Saxony and Denmark, in
1844 Bavaria, and in
1857 for England.
Chesnais (2003) says that
"some countries have
time series stretching back to the
18th century and
in some cases, point observations dating as far back as
the
13th century". However, to "To ensure coverage of a sufficient
range of countries" he uses data starting between 1845 and 1855.
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July 1841 Following on the Crocodilia, Richard Owen
introduced the
Dinosaurians (fearfully great lizards) in his "Report on
British fossil reptiles" to the British Association in Plymouth. There
were, he said, similarities in the "gigantic Dinosaur to the crocodilian
structure". "Owen used three genera to define the dinosaurs: the
carnivorous
Megalosaurus, the herviborous
Iguanodon and armoured
Hylaeosaurus" (Wikipedia).
September 1841 (London) Voice of Jacob launched by Jacob
Franklin. October 1841 Jewish Chronicle launched by Isaac
Valentine. The two papers merged in a complicated history.
Poems by Alfred Tennyson published. One that was soon
popular
(Locksley Hall), celebrates science and the march of
mind and
industry as the spirit of the age in Europe and contrasts it
with the
savagery of dusky races. (The words are Tennyson's, not mine).
"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of
Time;
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would
be -
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake
mankind.
Tennyson dreams of having children with a "savage woman" so
that they are
supple-sinewed, leaping brooks rather than poring over books,
but recoils.
"I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time -
Let the people
spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Better fifty
years of
Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
Compare
with Barry
Cornwall
The poet recognises mind in women as well as men: "Women is
the lesser
man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine are as moonlight
unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine". In 1847 Tennyson published
a poem in
which a royal princess founds a women's university. She falls
from the
chastity of thought when she falls in love, but the dominant
image is that
European men and women are both to be engaged in the
adventures of science
and thought.
But the march of mind and the march of hunger are in
competition. In
the immediate present "all things here are out of joint,
science moves, but
slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point: Slowly comes a
hungry
people, as a lion, creeping nigher". (Quotations all from
Locksley
Hall)
May 1842 Second presentation of the Charter to
Parliament.
May 1842 John Bennet Lawes, of
Rothampsted, applied for a patent for "chemically
decomposing for purposes of manure by means of
sulphuric acid of Bones, or
Bone Ash or Apatite or Phosphorite or any other substances containing
phosphoric acid". (Patent 9353, granted November 1842).
sometime 1842
Fossils thought to be
coprolites
(fossilised dung) discovered at Felixstow,
on the Suffolk coast, by
John Stevens Henslow,
rector of Hitcham, leading
to the development of extraction for phosphatic fertiliser. See
1843 -
1845 -
1861 -
1872. See
Friends of Darwin -
O'Connor 1993 -
Berridge Eve 2004
1842 The railway from Derby opening as far as
Ambergate made day trips from Midlands' industrial towns to
Matlock Bath in the Peak District possible. From Ambergate,
visitors were taken in boats along the canal to Cromford. They then walked
a mile to Matlock Bath. Many factories organised excursions
on the annual works holiday. Sometimes parties of as many as 500 people.
(Fact Sheet)
7.6.1842
Lord Ashley introduced a bill intended to
ban women and
children from working in coal mines.
10.8.1842 Coal Mines Act became law.
Summer 1842 Plug riots. English workers, striking
for the
Charter, roamed the Midlands and North of England setting
light to rich
men's houses and pulling out the plugs of factory boilers.
Parliament
thought that the revolution was upon them.
1842 Volume 24 of the
Penny Cyclopaedia (Taiwan to Titlarks) included
a long article on
Teleosaurus
that starts "Since the article
Crocodile was written" Owen's
Report on British Fossil Reptiles has covered a "family of
extinct crocodilians" divided into two genera: Teleosaurus and
Stensosaurus.
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1843
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Blackwood's Magazine volume 53, p.397 "These are to constitute a new
science, to be called Social Ethics, or
Sociology" - First use recorded in the Oxford English
Dictionary.
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1843 The Zoologist - A popular miscellany of natural history
a monthly magazine edited by
Edward Newman founded. Newman was editor in chief until his
death in 1876.
February 1843
Ethnological Society of London founded by members of the
Aborigines' Protection
Society. To be "a centre and depository for the
collection and
systematisation of all observations made on human races".
Divided over
racialist issues from early days, it split into an
Ethnological Society and
an
Anthropological Society in
1863.
Merging in
1870, it became
The
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in
1871. (Royal
from 1907). Now The
Royal Anthropological Institute (Link goes directly
to its
website)
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29.3.1843 Colchester railway station opened. This was the then
eastern terminus of the Eastern Counties Railway from London
(Shoreditch/Bishopsgate)
passing through Stratford, Romford, Brentwood, and
Chelmsford.
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1.7.1843 Gardeners Chronicle Advertisements for Guano and
for
J.Lawes's Patent Manures. Deptford Creek factory, opened 1843, later moved
to Barking Creek. Initial phosphate production from bones, but Lawes'
patent gave him a monopoly of manufacture from the new
coprolite.
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Autumn 1843
John Bennet Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert established the
Broadbalk experiment
on Lawes' Rothamsted Estate in Berkshire. This was the first of the long-
term "classic experiments", and it still exists today.
A winter-wheat crop was first sown in the autumn of 1843. A control strip
has received no fertiliser or manure since 1843. Other strips have received
farmyard manure or inorganic fertiliser. Lawes was the pioneer of
artificial fertilisers having established the manufacture of superphosphate
at his factory in Deptford, England in 1842. See
1919
Rothamsted Experimental Station
1986 Institute of Arable Crops Research: See
Long Ashton Research Station
1999 Rothamsted Research
October 1843
Henslow had "called attention to the occurrence
of phosphate of lime in pebbly beds of the
red crag at Felixstow, in
Suffolk; these nodules, though extremely hard, presented external
indications of an animal origin, and yielded, upon analysis, 56 per cent.
of phosphate of lime...
In 1843 Edward Packard made a bone-based
superphosphate at Snape in Suffolk, and shortly after used local
coprolites, ground in a mill, as a base. In 1847 he took over an old
flourmill on the quay at Ipswich, first grinding coprolites, later treating
them with acid, but the fumes were unpopular, so in 1851 he moved to a site
between the navigation and the railway at Brantham.
(bagseals and
O'Connor).
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Christmas 1843
The Song of the Shirt
Surrounded by comic characters, a poem about the misery of a
dressmaker appeared in the Christmas number of Punch, or the
London Charivari on 16.12.1843.
19.12.1843 A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of
Christmas by Charles Dickens published as an (expensive) gift book.
Scrooge is visited by the spirit of the past, of prisons, workhouses and
asylums - and the humanity within them. Then by the spirit of the present:
a jolly one with food and drink. Finally, the spirit of
things to be calls on him to change his selfish ways.
(Wikipedia)
20.12.1843. Completion of the Penny Cyclopaedia of the society
for the difussion of useful knowledge (Volume 27, 10/6d bound in cloth.
Wales to Zygophylacea) London: Charles Knight. Begun
1833. Copies
at
Hathi Trust
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1844
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1844 A natural cavern at
Matlock Bath
opened to the public, called Great Masson. (See
Devonshire). Owned by
Greatorex family in the 19th century.
Entered by 400 yards of an "old Roman
lead mine". The natural cavern had been discovered "in
following a vein of lead". Sides and roof covered with fossilshells and
encrusted with crystals of dog-tooth and flour spar. See also
Rutland mine.
21.12.1844 The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society opened a shop
"selling pure food at fair prices and honest weights and measures".
(Link
to museum)
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1845
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1845
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(external link -
archive)
"
Fifty years ago, science possessed no facts regarding the origin of organic
creatures upon earth ... all was a blank antecedent to the first chapters
of what we usually call
ancient history". [Since then] "researches in the crust of the
earth" [have shown that]... "strata of various thickness were deposited in
seas... The
remains and traces
of plants and animals found in the
succession of strata, show that, while these operations were going on, the
earth gradually became the theatre of organic being, simple forms appearing
first, and more complicated afterwards. A time when there was no life is
first seen. We then see life begin, and go on ; but whole ages elapsed
before man came to crown the work of nature.
"
1845 Johannes Japetus Steenstrup (1813-1897)
On the alternation of generations, or, The propagation and development
of
animals through alternate generations : a peculiar form of fostering the
young in the lower classes of animals.
Translated from the German version.
[Internet Archive
-
offline]
"I presuppose that my readers are
acquainted with the animals vulgarly termed
jelly-fishes or sea-nettles
and in scientific language Medusa". See
Darwin on jelly fishes -
Wikipedia
jellyfish -
Primordial soup.
Thomas Huxley's paper "On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the
Family of the Medusae" was published in 1849.
[Royal Society -
offline]
Tuesday 14.6.1845 at the 15th Meeting of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, at Cambridge, Section C: Geology and
Physical
Geography. Paper from
Professor Henslow "On Nodules, apparently
Coprolitic,
from the Red Crag,
London Clay, and
Greensand" about potential source of
phosphate, which occurred near the surface over many square miles in the
vicinity of Cambridge in strata never more than a foot thick.
Buckland
doubted the coprolitic origin of the nodules. (Report in The
Atheneum)
1845
The Claims of Labour. An Essay on the Duties of
the
Employers to the Employed, published anonymously, argues
for a new
order of society based on benevolence of employers towards the
employed.
John Stuart Mill's review of The Claims
of
Labour in the Edinburgh Review argues that a new
moral order
based on benevolence would undermine the independence and
self-
determination of working class people
Summer 1845 Engels:
The Condition of
the Working
Class in
England
October 1845 Beginning of the Great Famine in
Ireland. Potato
blight destroyed three-quarters of the crop.
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1846
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26.6.1846
Repeal of the Corn Law
In Dickens' 1838 satire on the Poor Law, Oliver Twist caused a
sensation by
asking for more food. In 1846 it seemed the satire had come
true. It was
revealed that in Andover Workhouse the residents were so
hungry that they
fought over rotten bones. The scandal of Andover led to the
replacement of
the Poor Law Commissioners, in 1847, by a Poor Law Board
responsible
directly to Parliament and, under new management, the poor law
became the
centre of a remarkably extensive pauper welfare state. Poor
law hospitals
laid the foundations for the National Health Service - and
many are still
in use.
12.8.1846 Term
"folklore" suggested for the culture and traditions of ordinary
people
Winter 1846/1847: John Stuart Mill laid aside work on
the
Principles of Political Economy to campaign for land
reform in
Ireland.
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1847
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27.1.1847 Institution of Mechanical
Engineers founded at a meeting
at the Queen's Hotel,
Birmingham. George Stephenson elected first President. The 70
founder members included representatives of nine different railways. The
Vulcan Foundry
was represented by Edward Tayleur and Henry Dubbs. (Vulcan Magazine
Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 1951-1952, p.18)
9.6.1847 Warrington Council met for the first time.
[See rail]. Its first Mayor, William Beamont (1797-1889), became
the first chairman of the
Museum and Library Committee in 1848.
July 1847 Poem
Song of the Famine
in Dublin
University Magazine
1847 Ridderstolp House
1847 Tancred; or, The New Crusade, a novel by
Benjamin
Disraeli, in which Sidonia says that "All is
race; there is no other truth". England
"A Saxon race, protected by an |
