These rudely shaped flints were first championed by Abbé Louis Bourgeois
in 1863; but his finds were in strata far too old to win scientific
recognition. This was not the case with Benjamin Harrison, who
recognized eoliths in later formations almost one hundred years ago.
Harrison was one of that variegated and comradely group of country
“antiquaries”—noblemen and shopkeepers, vicars and village laborers—who
founded and developed the study of the prehistory of England. Harrison
left his old-fashioned general store and its cakes, fruits, and
draperies, to walk the High Downs of Suffolk, searching with utter
conviction for traces of early man in the glacial gravels. He began as a
youth, when Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes had only just won his
battle, and in 1865 he recognized his first eoliths. In 1889 the
distinguished scientist Sir Joseph Prestwich gave them his backing. It
took twenty more years, however, for the eolith to win anything like
respectable recognition, and some still deny that these flints were
worked by men.
[Illustration: THE “DAWN STONES” OF EARLY MAN
_Upper left, a borer. Right, two sides of a scraper. Below, side
view and bottom of a rostrocarinate. (After Peake and Fleure, 1927;
Moir, 1927; and Lankester, 1912.)_]
The fact that some eoliths were found in geological formations much
older than man—so far as we know his history—was an argument against all
of them, because the older and the more recent looked so much alike.
Another cogent objection was that eoliths could have been made by
natural forces, such as a landslide, the pressure of heavy strata, or
one stone knocking against another. A heavy cart can make an eolith when
it rolls over a smooth flint. But in spite of arguments and antagonisms,
which still persist, there were two things that seemed to establish the
eolith as the work of man.
To begin with, some kind of tool, some form of experiment, had to lie
behind even the crudest hand ax. At first man must have picked up a
natural eolith and used its cutting edge. A little later he must have
improved the edge. In any case he threw the stone away when he had
finished the job, and later looked for and improved another one.
Gradually he developed his dawn-stone technique and made tools that he
would use until he lost them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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