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R. Harrison (1928, p. 87) informs us: “He walked to examine a bed of gravel lying on High Field, at the head of the gorge of the Shode. In this gravel, far above the present level of the stream, he found a palaeolithic implement. His thoughts, on making this discovery, must have been somewhat as follows. The gravel was a very ancient gravel, even in a geological sense, and in it was an implement that had been made by man and carried down afterwards by a stream running at a much higher level than the present stream, to the position in which it was found. So man was older than the very old gravel. Harrison sent news of his find to Prestwich, who came at once to Ightham to see for himself the geological position in which the implement had been found.” Prestwich pronounced it a very old bed and advised further research. Prestwich himself and workers under his direction made similar finds.

As word of the newly discovered stone implements spread, James Geikie, one of England’s leading geologists, wrote about them on May 2, 1881 to G. Worthington Smith: “They will yet be found in such deposits and at such elevations as will cause the hairs of cautious archaeologists to rise on end. I hope other observers will take a hint from you and search for paleolithic implements in places which have hitherto been looked upon as barren of such relics” (E. Harrison 1928, p. 91).

Geikie’s remarks about searching for stone tools “in places which have hitherto been looked upon as barren of such relics” help clarify why modern scientists do not often report finding evidence for a human presence in very ancient times. Because of their preconceptions, they do not look for such evidence in all the places where it might be found. For example, since modern scientists do not accept a fully human presence in the Pliocene, they do not look for advanced stone tools in Pliocene deposits. And if they do find such tools in unexpectedly old deposits, they explain them away. But in the nineteenth century, it was not clear to scientists that they should not be looking for evidence of a human presence in the Pliocene and earlier. So they looked for it, and when they found it, reported it straightforwardly.

In 1887, Harrison read an article by Alfred Russell Wallace on human antiquity in America and then wrote Wallace a letter. Wallace, famous for publishing a scientific paper on evolution by natural selection before Darwin, wrote to Harrison: “I am glad you find my article on ‘The Antiquity of Man in America’ interesting. It is astonishing the amount of incredulity that still prevails among geologists as to any possible extension of the evidence as to greater antiquity than the paleolithic gravels. The wonderful ‘Calaveras skull’ has been so persistently ridiculed, from Bret Harte upwards, by persons who know nothing of the real facts, that many American geologists even seem afraid to accept it” (E. Harrison 1928, p. 130).

The Paleolithic gravels referred to by Wallace are equivalent to those of the Somme region, in which Boucher des Perthes found stone tools. These belong to the Middle Pleistocene period of the Quaternary. The Calaveras skull as well as many stone tools were found in far older Tertiary strata in California. The Tertiary includes the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene, and Paleocene periods. We shall discuss the Calaveras skull and several related discoveries later in this book (Sections 6.2.6, 5.5). The tactic of persistent ridicule mentioned by Wallace was, however, so effective that a good many modern students of paleoanthropology have never even heard of the California finds.

Prestwich and Harrison considered some of the stone implements found near Ightham to be Tertiary in age. The geological reasons for this opinion were discussed by Prestwich in a paper presented to the Geological Society of London in 1889. In preparation for his report, Prestwich asked Harrison to catalog and map his finds. Harrison did so, with the following results: 22 flint implements had been found at elevations over 500 feet, 199 at elevations between 400 and