Towards a New Intellectual History: The Reception of the Antiquity of Man in Britain, 1859-1869

A.H. Thompson (Trans. of the Kansas Academy of Science, 1877) wrote that, in 1859, ‘the theory of the antiquity of man burst upon the scientific world with an irresistible force’. Although many gentlemen archaeologists had argued for decades, on the basis of paleontology, that man had lived with extinct mammals, and thus inferred great time depth for ou…