Rise of Prehistory

The "antiquity of man" was confirmed by the evolutionary ideas that emerged and began to prevail in the nineteenth century. Darwinism, preceded by the naive evolutionism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Robert Chambers, and Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, gave systematic and scientific basis to age-old organistic and biological analogies. It joined all human races, however defined, in one general process, and in this way extended the field of comparisons to the entire globe, which had been the scene of the ages of stone, bronze, and iron. With the emergence of written culture, however, the uses of archaeology diminish, so that, as Worsaae acknowledged, "monumental records and ancient relics become mere illustrations of the internal and external contemporary conditions of civilisation, the main features of which are already known in history" (The Pre-history of the North, p. 181). Later archaeologists, such as Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–1898), likewise insisted on the priority of cultural over narrowly paleontological criteria.

Evolutionism became commonplace in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and the work of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) in Germany. The connection with prehistory became more direct in the work of Ratzel, who extended the views of Herder into the new discipline of "anthropogeography" and who published works on "the prehistory of European humanity." A philosophical emphasis was added by Otto Caspari, who, investigating "the prehistory of humanity with a review of its natural development" followed the anti-Kantian critique of Herder by insisting on the growth of human reason rather than the structure of "pure" reason. By the later nineteenth century prehistory was not something that students of world history (or indeed national history) could ignore.