Chronometric dynamite. Bones and fossils between temporal disruption and epistemological dis:connection

sina steglich

No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race, —whether or no  we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or ‘diluvium’, to prove former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia.[1]

With these words, British geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) began his book The Antiquity of Man in 1863. Looking for the antiquity of man, Lyell was interested in the origins of human life on Earth. The problem had become increasingly urgent for him and his contemporaries since the discovery of human and non-human remains in caves and rock strata. Scientific discoveries and attempts to date and interpret them were coming into competition and conflict with the answers that Christian cosmology had long taken for granted. New origin stories had to respond to these findings.

Origin stories…

Origin stories are human coping mechanisms. Not only dating origins but also narrating them and thereby imbuing them with meaning are effective remedies against the overwhelming implacability of contingency. Those who sought to tame chance could always fall back on meaning through origin. In Judeo-Christian cosmology, this origin story is Genesis. Elaborated in the Old Testament with kinship relations, the age of the world and of humanity could be traced back genealogically to the progenitors Adam and Eve. According to the calculations of the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656), Creation could be dated to 23 October 4004 B.C. This ‘Ussher chronology’ relied solely on biblical passages, substantiating their validity with regard to Genesis as the record of Creation. But this cosmology began crack when one considered the world beyond scripture and the evidence of observation. What if the world itself were to object to the narrative of its own origins?

… as Thanatos stories

This is precisely what happened to the early geologists of the 18th century, who interpreted rock layers as chronologically stratified sedimentary deposits and, through their calculations, not only pushed back the age of the Earth but also applied entirely different time scales from those suggested by the Bible. As a result, the roughly 6000 years of the Christian narrative were no longer sufficient, so this cosmology required correction. The discovery of older fossils and bones was no less than a temporal disruption of the Christian chronological order.[2]

Beyond the question of origins, the more important issue, however, was that these rock layers contained evidence pointing to prior life. Prior life, that is, not pertaining to individuals but to the entire species. And that, in turn, was the real challenge for anyone raised in the Christian faith: death could not be conceived of solely in individual terms, but had to be applied to entire species in the form of extinction. Fossils pointed to a history of death and told not stories of life, but stories of death.[3] The  problem cut far deeper than merely dating: how could the extinction of species be reconciled with the Christian conception of Creation, in which everything was already in place and which, at most, was perpetually approaching perfection.

Expanding scales, shifting grounds

This problem bore twin children. First, this challenge intensified the more precisely geologists and palaeontologists defined Earth’s geological and biological history through their dating of rocks, fossils and bones. The constant correction and extension of the scales not only pushed back the assumed origin ever further back into the past but also required an ever finer division of time into geological periods and epochs.

Such a provisionally defined origin, once set in motion and continuously adjusted, could hardly provide any relief. It was not a reliable foundation, but a shifting ground.

Second, an abundance of empirical evidence, including relics of prior life that no longer had any surviving counterpart, constituted proof of the unthinkable: God gave life to creatures only to let them die out. This increasingly challenged the idea of perfectibility and thereby undermined a cosmology derived from the Bible or intended to be reconciled with it.

But once discovered, the fossils and bones of extinct species remained in the world. They could not be denied as material evidence.[4] Consequently, it was not enough to merely extend the age of the world and adjust the geological time scale. Rather, Christian cosmology needed a narrative that took these findings into account.

(Missing) evidence: marginalisation strategies

One strategy was offered by the Scottish Catholic theologian Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) who explained in the preface to his Bible translation in a manner that was as pragmatic as it was explosive: ‘The writer does not amuse or tire his reader with long metaphysical discussions, about the nature of the universe, the generation of matter, cause and effect, time and eternity, and other such subtile and insolvable questions’, only to state, without further ado, that the ‘planet, called Earth, [may] have rolled in its little orbit for millions and millions of years; and have undergone […] millions of revolutions; before it was made the habitation of man’.[5] First, he refused to engage with the discussion of the origin of the world by framing it as an unsolvable problem, only to go on to admit that, in any case, one must assume it was several million years old and that humans had arrived and settled there only later. This theory did not quite fit with Genesis, a translation of which followed on the subsequent pages. Although this was an inconsistent and provocative twist, Geddes had taken a stance on the contemporary debates and responded to them. He attempted to integrate the issue while simultaneously marginalising it.

Some years later, the German naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860) stumbled across the same problem and came up with his own marginalisation. In his work Views from the Dark Side of Science (Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1808), he tried to reconcile the fossils with the parallel existence of human life: ‘But even if there were […] no human remains to be found at all, that would still not be sufficient to prove that there were none at all at that time’.[6] His explanation for the lack of physical remains of humans was simple, yet difficult to refute: ‘In addition to this, the greater fragility of the human body — a quality that distinguishes humans from all larger animals — may also have prevented the remains of those ancient peoples from being discovered by later explorers’.[7] He considered them as more ephemeral and reversed the burden of proof: not missing testimonies were proof of the non-existence of man, rather their existence had to be assumed because the opposite could not be verified. Seen this way, the narrative of the Bible could hold true, because fossils and other creatures’ bones simply did not reveal the entire past.[8] Fossils and bones required that Creation be redated, but man could have been there from the very beginning. For the time being, Genesis was rescued.

From new narratives to new epistemologies: separating history from its ‘pre-‘

But these strategies never solved the conundrum because they only concealed the underlying questions and were unable to resolve the epistemological core of the problem: the contradiction between Christian concepts of time and material evidence provided. Eyewitness accounts remained in conflict with faith. And faith was thus shaken. New narratives based on a different interpretation of the findings were therefore necessary cope. One such a strategy was separating human history from the history of the Earth. In the course of ‘inventing’ prehistory, sources from the past were strictly divided into those of human origin, namely, written records and ‘natural’ ones.[9] Thus, the understanding of the general historicity (of man) became disconnected from that of the Earth and all things natural.

This separation was further solidified as a disciplinary distinction in the course of professionalisation and scientification during the 19th century. From then on, there was the history without a prefix, exclusively referring to humans who left written traces, and many siblings with prefixes, such as ‘natural-‘, ‘pre-‘ and ‘early-‘.[10] The latter was the province of research into bones, fossils, cave paintings and archaeological finds, which were not to be read but excavated. This disciplinary distinction based on source types mitigated the temporal disruption. In this interpretation, humans were no longer de-centred as latecomers by the fossils; rather, the exact opposite occurred: the fossils were excluded as prehistory from ‘proper’ history and relegated to a preliminary phase.

However, effacing the temporal disruption gave rise to an epistemological disconnection, producing immense path dependencies.[11] For by restricting history to written history, it diachronically excluded everything that came before, for which there was no written record, and synchronically everything beyond the world of the written word, especially in regions beyond Europe and its expanding colonial spheres of influence. Our current effort to break up and diversify the monolith of history and to incorporate sources other than written records, such as oral history and material culture, into our understanding of the past is also a consequence of the disciplinary specialisation that necessarily resulted from the confrontation with fossils and bones around 1800 and the expanded timescales they required.

Fossils and bones are chronometric dynamite first because they disrupted the Christian temporal order, which was bleeding plausibility. In a more fundamental sense, their evidence lit the fuse that eventually blasted the fissure between written history and its marginalised preliminary stages. As a result, anything that did not conform to this exclusive understanding of history was excluded from historical time. Africa as the continent without history is the most prominent stereotype of this epistemological closure.

Engaging with these early geologists’, palaeontologists’, theologians’ and historians’ attempts to make sense of excavated traces of past lives, therefore, is not only of interest to historians of science. Every historian would do well to reflect on the fundamentals of the discipline and see its epistemological constraints not only as a Eurocentristic pitfall to be criticised and rejected, but as a coping mechanism of our disciplinary predecessors around 1800. Historicising this mechanism as a breach in modern historiography could initiate a deeper discussion of the discipline’s own stories of origin.[12]

 

[1] Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation (London: John Murray, 1863), 1.

[2] See Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976); Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (New York: Science History Publications, 1976).

[3] On Thanatos (hi)stories, see Peter Schnyder, ‘Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens’, in Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, ed. Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards, and Maximilian Bergengruen (Freiburg: Rombach, 2012), 119.

[4] See David Schulz, Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 58.

[5] Alexander Geddes, The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. (London: J. Davis, 1792), ii. Emphasis in original.

[6] Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnold, 1808), 214. Author’s translation.

[7] Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite.

[8] See Lena Kugler, ‘Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit’, in Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Bies, Sean Franzel, and Dirk Oschmann (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017).

[9] See Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (New York: Liveright, 2024).

[10] See Sina Steglich, ‘Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das “Prä-” vor die Geschichte kam’, Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022) https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003; Martin Deuerlein, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah, ‘Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der ‘Tiefenzeit”, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025).

[11] See David Černin, ‘Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory’, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, ed. Aviezer Tucker and David Černin (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).

[12] See Marianne Sommer, ‘Experimenting with Bones’, in Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, ed. Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis (Boston: Brill, 2016).

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