Finding Time For The Old Stone Age: A History O... May 2026

O'Connor highlights that the history of this field was built not just by professors and museum keepers, but by a "colourful cast" of everyday professionals:

Before these debates, knowledge of the distant past was often limited to biblical chronologies, such as James Ussher’s 17th-century calculation that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. The work of these forgotten individuals eventually shifted the focus toward a scientific, evolutionary understanding of our human heritage. John Lubbock (1865) Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: A History o...

Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: A History of Palaeolithic Archaeology and Quaternary Geology in Britain, 1860-1960 O'Connor highlights that the history of this field