Decline of thunderstone mythology
Even as late as the 17th century, a French ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in the museum at Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Verdun, and claimed that it had healing properties.
- McNanamara, Kenneth (2007). “Shepards’ crowns, fairy loaves and thunderstones: the mythology of fossil echinoids in England”. Myth and Geology. 273: 289–293.
Andrew Dickson White described the discovery of the true origin of thunderstones as a “line of observation and thought … fatal to the theological view”. In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried to prove that the “thunder-stones” were weapons or implements of early races of men; but for some reason his book was not published until the following century, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same idea.
In 1723 Antoine de Jussieu addressed the French Academy on “The Origin and Uses of Thunder-stones”. He showed that recent travelers from various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as “thunderstones”. A year later this fact was firmly embedded in the minds of French scientists by the Jesuit Joseph-Francois Lafitau, who published a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of ethnology.
It was only after the French Revolution of 1830, more than a century later, that the political climate in Europe was free enough of religious sentiment for archaeological discoveries to be dispassionately investigated and the conclusion reached that human existence spanned a much greater period of time than any Christian theologian had dreamt of.
- White, Andrew D. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. New York: George Braziller, 1955. 266–283
Boucher de Perthes
In 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de Perthes, published in Paris the first volume of work on Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of typical flint implements and weapons, of which he had discovered thousands upon thousands in the high drift beds near Abbeville, in northern France. So far as France was concerned, he was met at first by what he calls “a conspiracy of silence”, and then by a contemptuous opposition among orthodox scientists, led by Elie de Beaumont.
In 1863 the thunderstone myth was further discredited by Charles Lyell in his book Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. Lyell had previously opposed the new ideas about human antiquity, and his changing sides gave further force to the scientific evidence.
- White, Andrew D. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. New York: George Braziller, 1955. 266–283
In his novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Jules Verne makes reference to Boucher de Perthes after Professor Lindenbrock, Axel and, Hans discover “antediluvian” human heads on a beach near the center of the earth. In 1954, the Museum Boucher de Perthes was opened in Abbeville, with collections covering a wide range of materials and periods.
