Eoliths: An Earlier Phase of the Stone Age?

In 1912, Edwin Ray Lankester (1847–1929), a well-regarded zoologist, was introducing some interesting and ancient flints to the academic world at a Royal Society soirée when he spotted Dawkins in the room. The two men started to quarrel over the stones. Soon afterwards, Lankester described the incident to a friend, explaining ‘Dawkins was there and I made him go over them with me’. Dawkins, though now elderly, was still outspoken. He proceeded to attack Lankester’s view that the flints in question were very early tools, arguing that they had not been flaked by human hands. Lankester recalled that Dawkins had ‘idiotically said that such conchoidal fractures as they showcould be produced by pressure’ and had placed the burden of proof on Lankester’s shoulders: ‘Well, unless you can show that these flints could not possibly be produced by natural agencies, I shall refuse to attribute them to man.’ Lankester had responded that this was ‘a preposterous & unscientific attitude’ and further informed Dawkins: ‘neither I nor any one who had studied the subject, attached any importance to his opinion!’ The kind of stones displayed by Lankester in 1912 aroused enthusiasm and irritation in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were claimed as the artefacts of tool-makers who had lived before the Palaeolithic period, in Eolithic times (from the Greek eos: dawn and lithos: stone). Lankester’s flints, which came from East Anglia, belonged to the second major group of eoliths to be discovered in Britain; the first group had been reported from Kent in the 1880s and 1890s. His arguments with Dawkins in the rooms of the Royal Society encapsulate the character of the British eolith debates. Lankester was trying to describe what he thought was an important new Stone-Age industry and was irritated by the suggestion that he should prove they were not produced by natural agencies. Dawkins could see only natural chipping in these stones; neither was convinced by the case of the other and the discussion grew heated. Nowadays, both groups of eoliths are usually regarded as the natural products of geological forces; in these chapters, though, the eoliths will occasionally be described as artefacts to retain the atmosphere of the arguments.