Flint arrowheads, spearheads, and axe heads made by prehistoric Europeans were generally considered before the eighteenth century to be a naturally produced stone that formed in storm clouds and fell with lightning. These stones were called ceraunia, or thunderstones, and it was not until the sixteenth century that their status as a natural phenomenon was challenged. During the seventeenth century natural historians and antiquaries began to suggest that these ceraunia were not thunderstones but ancient human artifacts. I argue that natural history museums, European contact with the stone-tool using peoples in the New World, and the close relationship between natural history and antiquarianism were critical to this reinterpretation of ceraunia. Once these objects were recognized to be ancient artifacts they could be used to investigate the earliest periods of human history from sources other than texts.

By the early twentieth century there was a growing need within palaeoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology to find a way of dating fossils and artefacts in order to know the age of specific specimens, but more importantly to establish an absolute chronology for human prehistory. The radiocarbon and potassium–argon dating methods revolutionized palaeoanthropology during the last half of the twentieth century. However, prior to the invention of these methods there were attempts to devise chemical means of dating fossil bone. Collaborations between Emile Rivière and Adolphe Carnot in the 1890s led to the development of the fluorine dating method, but it was not until the 1940s that this method was improved and widely implemented by Kenneth Oakley to resolve a number of problems in palaeoanthropology, including the Piltdown Man controversy. The invention of the fluorine dating method marked a significant advance in the quest for absolute dating in palaeoanthropology, but it also highlights interesting problems and issues relating to the ability of palaeoanthropologists and chemists to bring together different skills and bodies of knowledge in order successfully to develop and apply the fluorine dating method.

Palaeoanthropology is a relatively recent science when its history is compared to that of other natural sciences, but it has grown to become a prominent field of study that has produced many remarkable discoveries and important theories. It has constructed a professional identity and formed its own institutions, while still retaining close links with other natural and social sciences. Most significantly, it has revolutionized our understanding of human origins and prehistoric human culture. This paper is a historiographical study of recent scholarship in the history of palaeoanthropology and other sciences involved in human origins research that will attempt to outline some prospective new areas of enquiry as well as some promising ways of examining that history. Historically palaeoanthropology grew out of a number of different sciences and today it still encompasses a range of problems and sub-disciplines, and therefore in this paper I include within its scope human evolution, hominid palaeontology, and prehistoric archaeology, while acknowledging other fields that have contributed to the study of human origins. Indeed, examining this conception of palaeoanthropology is one of my objectives.The dramatic changes that have occurred in palaeoanthropology in recent decades have led some practitioners to become interested in the history of their discipline and a number of recent works examine the major discoveries and theoretical developments of palaeoanthropology in the twentieth century. 1 This is not the first time that palaeoanthropologists have taken a retrospective look at their past in order to assess the current state of their field following a period of rapid growth and upheaval. During the middle of the last century, just when palaeoanthropology was emerging as a distinct discipline, scientists and popularizers of science published historical surveys of the emergence and development of human origins research that usually begin with Darwin, evolutionary theory, and the first discoveries of human fossils in the nineteenth century. 2 Most of these early works portray the history of palaeoanthropology as consisting of a series of hominid fossil discoveries and models of human evolution that changed over time as the fossil evidence and biological theories changed. Only occasionally was the history of palaeoanthropology situated within the broader developments that were taking place in the other natural sciences, and rarely do they discuss the external social factors that helped shape the history of human origins research.Despite the prominent accomplishments of palaeoanthropology and its growing stature as a science, few general histories of modern science even mention

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.

Since the nineteenth century, hominid palaeontology has offered critical information about prehistoric humans and evidence for human evolution. Human fossils discovered at a time when there was growing agreement that humans existed during the Ice Age became especially significant but also controversial. This paper argues that the techniques used to study human fossils from the 1850s to the 1870s and the way that these specimens were interpreted owed much to the anthropological examination of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age skeletons retrieved by archaeologists from prehistoric tombs throughout Europe. What emerged was the idea that a succession of distinct human races, which were identified using techniques such as craniometry, had occupied and migrated into Europe beginning in the Ice Age and continuing into the historic period. This marks a phase in the history of human palaeontology that gradually gave way to a science of palaeoanthropology that viewed hominid fossils more from the perspective of evolutionary theory and hominid phylogeny.

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Modern scientific theories of human origins can be traced directly back to the discoveries, arguments, and theories of the seventeenth century. But as we have seen in the first part of this paper, a great many critical steps had been taken, ideas proposed, and discoveries made long before this. The scientific advances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owed much to ancient science, while still retaining many aspects of the medieval Christian world view. Yet both science and Christianity changed significantly as a result of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the voyages of exploration, and the changes wrought on European society as a result of industrialization. The question of human origins was directly affected by the archeological study of prehistoric ruins, new geological theories, the study of fossils, the discovery of “savage” peoples living in the New World, and the comparison of prehistoric stone implements from Europe with those collected in the New World. This proliferation of new discoveries, new theories, and the emergence of completely new scientific disciplines in the seventeenth century laid the foundation for the dramatic new discoveries and theories that came over the next three centuries.

Paleoanthropology emerged as a science during the late nineteenth century. The discovery of prehistoric artifacts in Pleistocene deposits soon led to the excavation of fossilized human bones. The archaeologists and geologists who unearthed them were primarily concerned with determining whether the human fossils and the artifacts found with them actually dated from the Pleistocene, thus offering evidence for the geological antiquity of humans. Prehistoric archaeologists reconstructed the way of life of prehistoric peoples through the artifacts found, while anthropologists examined the human fossils. They wanted primarily to identify the races of prehistoric humans. It was within this context that French anthropologists began to use the term "paléo-anthropologie" to refer to a new scientific discipline devoted to the study of prehistoric human races and human paleontology. This essay examines how paleoanthropology was defined as a science during the 1870s and 1880s. It shows that a tension existed between the objectives and methods of archaeologists and anthropologists. Paul Topinard criticized archaeologists and argued that a new type of scientist; the paleoanthropologist trained in anatomy or zoology, was needed to study human fossils properly.