From Atlantis to the Sphinx (24 page)

The man responsible, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, would have been horrified at the very idea. He was a devout Christian who believed that every word of the Bible is literally true. And it was while trying to prove this that he unleashed the flood that would become modern palaeontology, the science of ancient, extinct organisms.

The year seems to have been 1705—Scheuchzer never bothered to record the exact date—and he was taking a walk with a friend named Langhans. Both young men were students, and they had climbed Gallows Hill, at the top of which stood the town gibbet, and paused to survey the surrounding landscape, with its fields of hops illuminated by the golden evening sunlight. Then Scheuchzer’s attention was drawn to a large rock at his feet. The rock itself was grey, but clearly visible in it were a number of black vertebrae. Scheuchzer pointed at it.

‘Look! There’s a proof that the Flood really took place! That backbone is human.’

Langhans surveyed the rock with distaste.

‘I’m sure it is—some poor devil who was hanged centuries ago. For God’s sake put it down!’

And he knocked the rock out of Scheuchzer’s hand. It bounced down the hillside, hit another rock, and smashed. Scheuchzer chased after it with a howl of anguish. The impact had scattered fragments of the grey rock over a wide area, and Scheuchzer had to scrabble in the dust for a few minutes before he succeeded in finding two of the blackened vertebrae. Breathless, he carried them back to the gibbet.

‘Look, human bones! And you saw them
inside
the rock. How could the bones of a hanged man get inside a rock? These have been here for thousands of years, since Noah’s Flood.’

‘Why are they black?’

‘Because he was one of the sinners that God intended to destroy, like the inhabitants of Sodom.’

Ignoring his friend’s protest, Scheuchzer dropped the vertebrae into the capacious pockets of his frock-coat. It was his doctor’s coat, and he liked to wear it on walks, for he often picked up fragments of old bone or flint, to add to his collection of oddments that were supposed to prove the truth of the Bible.

Five years later, now the chief physician in Zurich, and a canon of the Church, Scheuchzer wrote a pamphlet to prove that the Flood had really taken place. He pointed out that many rocks with the shape of fishes inside them had been found hundreds of miles inland, and argued that they had been left high and dry when the Flood subsided. Then he went on to describe the two vertebrae he had found on Gallows Hill, embedded in a stone. How had they got inside the stone?

The pamphlet caused a considerable stir, and clergymen quoted it from their pulpits to prove the truth of the Bible. But scientists were hostile. Fossils had been known for centuries—a learned Arab named Avicenna had written about them around the year 1000, and explained that they were literally jokes—freaks of a mischievous Nature, which enjoyed imitating living forms, just as clouds imitate faces. Three centuries later, Leonardo—who often dug up fossils while directing the construction of canals—had suggested they were the remains of living animals, but no one took him seriously. Now scientists declared that Scheuchzer’s vertebrae were really pieces of rock.

But what enraged Scheuchzer most was a book recently published by a mineralogist named John Bajer, which contained a picture of some vertebrae exactly like those discovered under the Altdorf gallows. And Bajer had labelled them
fish
vertebrae. Scheuchzer published a pamphlet attacking Bajer, but Bajer stuck to his opinion. It would be more than another century before science proved them both wrong, and identified the bones as those of an ichthyosaurus, a sort of prehistoric crocodile that flourished in the Jurassic era, around two hundred million years ago.

Scheuchzer was determined to prove that fossils were the bones of Flood victims, and he had many disciples, who called themselves Floodists (or Diluvians). Sixteen years later, in 1726, the Floodists were triumphant when Scheuchzer produced conclusive proof of the reality of the Flood. This was a rock from the limestone quarries of Oningen, in Baden, and it contained some indisputably humanoid remains, with an almost complete skull, a spine, and a pelvic bone. Again, the pamphlet about it became something of a bestseller. And again, time would prove Scheuchzer to have been mistaken; long after his death, his early human proved to be the skeleton of a lizard.

Yet it had served its purpose. Scheuchzer’s pamphlet had caused widespread debate, and his supporters grew in number. They mostly agreed with Archbishop James Ussher, who, in the time of James I, had worked out that the world was created in 4004 BC (by adding together all the dates in the Bible), and constructed all kinds of amazing creatures from the bones and fragments they dug up, including a unicorn and a dragon. But some of the more perceptive noticed that fossils found at different depths were often quite unlike one another, which seemed to suggest that creatures might change from age to age...

Scheuchzer died in 1733, at the age of 61, still totally convinced that the Bible contained the full story of creation—as, indeed, was most of the Christian world of his time. Yet even by the early eighteenth century, one remarkable man of genius had grasped the truth. His name was Benoit de Maillet, and he was a French diplomat, born in 1656. In 1715, Maillet wrote a book called
Telliamed
(his own name spelt backwards) which suggested that the germ of life came from outer space, and gradually developed into marine organisms in the ocean. Fish had crawled on to the land, and developed into birds and animals. All this had happened over millions of years. But Maillet decided against publishing the book in his own lifetime, in case it jeopardised his standing as a government official. It appeared eleven years after his death, in 1749. But it had been read in manuscript by many cultured people, and widely discussed. Malilet—who is now forgotten—should be regarded as the creator of the theory of evolution.

Voltaire derided Malilet’s theory, as he also derided the notion that fossils are the remains of prehistoric organisms. His view was that fish fossils found in mountains were the remains of travellers’ meals. He did not try to explain why the bones had fossilised in rocks instead of rotting away. Voltaire’s type of scepticism was widespread in the late eighteenth century.

Nevertheless, things were slowly changing. In 1780, a German army doctor named Friedrich Hoffmann was walking in a chalk mine near Maastricht, in Holland, when he saw a gigantic ‘dragon’s’ skull in the chalk. He had discovered the first dinosaur skull. Hoffmann had the skull removed and taken back to the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, where it created a sensation. He and his fellow scientists decided to call it a ‘saurian’. Unfortunately, Hoffmann had neglected to ask the owner of the mine, a priest named Godin, for permission to remove the skull.

Godin sued for its return, and won. Deprived of his epoch-making discovery, Hoffmann grew depressed and died. Godin, who sounds an extremely unpleasant character, locked up the skull, and refused to allow scientists access to it. But in 1794, the French invaded, and—to Godin’s chagrin—seized the skull, even though he did his best to hide it. It was sent back to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and studied by the great naturalist Georges Cuvier.

Suddenly everyone began to dig for dinosaurs, and many ancient bones were uncovered. Cuvier became the great expert on extinct species—he boasted that he could reconstruct a whole skeleton from a single bone. But how had these species vanished from the face of the earth? According to Cuvier—who borrowed the theory from his predecessor Count Buffon—the answer was that the earth had been subject to a series of great catastrophes, like floods and earthquakes, and these had wiped out whole species. Then Nature had to start all over again. Man and his cousin the ape had been a product of the latest stage of creation, since the last catastrophe...

This meant, of course, that Cuvier was totally opposed to Maillet’s theory of evolution—which was now becoming popular with many younger scientists, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Species did not ‘evolve’. They were created, and then wiped out by catastrophes, like the dragon discovered by Hoffmann.

A young Englishman named William Smith had been crawling around in British mines, and announced that he had identified no less than thirty-two ‘layers’ containing fossils—he gave them names like Carboniferous, Cretaceous and Devonian. And these layers were quite distinct. You did not find Devonian fossils in the Carboniferous layer. That seemed to mean that each geological epoch came to an abrupt end—with a catastrophe.

It is true that Cuvier was momentarily worried by a discovery made by one of his most faithful disciples, Baron Ernst Schlotheim, in 1820. Searching among some mammoth bones in Thuringia, Schlotheim found human teeth. According to Cuvier, that was impossible—mammoths belonged to the last age of creation. Cuvier explained soothingly that probably a gravedigger had buried a body in soil belonging to the pre-diluvial age, and Schlotheim breathed a sigh of relief—he was too old to start changing his mind. Two more lots of human remains turned, up among bones of extinct animals; again, Schlotheim let himself be persuaded that this was a freak.

But in 1823, a human skeleton—lacking a head—was found in ancient strata at Paviland, in Wales; because it had been stained red by the earth, it was called the Red Lady of Paviland. (In fact, it turned out to be a man.) Inspired by this, a clergyman named McEnery found ancient tools among mammoth bones in Kent’s Cavern in Devon. This should have convinced Cuvier that he was wrong. He shrugged off the new discoveries as some kind of accident.

Cuvier was undoubtedly a great scientist, but he was also a dogmatic bully, who destroyed the career of his fellow professor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an evolutionist who not only believed that species gradually evolve, but that they evolve because they
want
to.

Cuvier was lucky; he died in 1832, just before the science of geology discredited his catastrophe theories.

The man responsible was a barrister who was also an enthusiastic student of geology, Charles Lyell. After ten years of careful study of the earth’s crust, he concluded that Archbishop Ussher’s chronology—still accepted by millions of Christians—was absurdly wrong, and that the earth had been formed over millions of years. Given this time scale, there was no need for catastrophes to thrust up mountains and flood valleys; it could all be explained by slow erosion. His
Principles of Geology
(1830-33) was one of the most epoch-making books in the history of science. He concluded that the Flood had been real, but that it had been the result of melting ice at the end of the last great Ice Age, some fifteen thousand years ago. Landscapes had been slowly carved by glaciers over hundreds of thousands of years. And fish fossils found in mountains
had
once been at the bottom of prehistoric seas. Lyell was opposed by Catastrophists, Floodists and religious fundamentalists alike, but his views slowly prevailed.

The theory of earth history that would gradually emerge over the next fifty or so years was roughly as follows.

Our earth has been in existence for about four and a half thousand million years, but during the first thousand million, it was a red-hot cinder that gradually cooled. Sometime during the next thousand million years, the first living organisms developed in the warm seas—tiny cells that were birthless and deathless. The first fossils are of these unicellular organs, dating back to three and a half thousand million years ago.

A mere 630 million years ago, the first truly living organisms appear—organisms that can reproduce themselves, and therefore afford to die. Life developed its method of handing on the torch to the next generic ation, which would hurl itself afresh at all the old problems.

Another forty million years passed before the first invertebrate organisms, like trilobites, appeared in the seas. We call this the Cambrian era—about 590 million years ago—and it was also the era of the first fish. Some of the first plants also appeared on land.

In the Devonian period, about 408 million years ago, fish who found the sea too dangerous began to drag themselves on to the land, and as flippers changed into legs, became amphibians. Reptiles appeared in the Carboniferous periods, 40 million years later. This first great period in Earth’s history—known as the Palaeozoic—ended with the Permian era, 286 million years ago.

The second of the three great periods, the Mesozoic, is the age of mammals, then of dinosaurs, and extends from about 250 million years ago to a mere 65 million. We also now know that Buffon and Cuvier’s catastrophe theory was not altogether incorrect. It seems that some great object from outer space struck the earth 65 million years ago, and destroyed 75 per cent of its living creatures, including the dinosaurs. Whatever it was—perhaps a vast meteor, perhaps a comet, perhaps even an asteroid—probably filled the atmosphere with steam, and raised the temperature enough to kill off most of the larger creatures. But for this catastrophe, it is unlikely that human beings would now exist.

For at the beginning of the third great age in the earth’s history—known as the Cenozoic era—there was a warm, moist world of vast tropical jungles that extended far into northern Europe. Without the great flesh-eating predators—like Tyrannosaurus Rex and the gigantic toothed bats—it was a fairly placid place, with feathered birds, and squirrel-like rodents that leapt from tree to tree and fed on grubs and birds’ eggs. These rodents gave birth to their young from their bodies, instead of laying eggs, and they nurtured and protected theirmyoung, so increasing the survival rate.

Sometime in the middle of the Cretaceous era—which began about 144 million years ago—there developed a tiny shrew-like creature that probably lived in the roots of trees and ate insects. Shrews are incredibly fierce little animals (which is why we call bad-tempered women shrews), like tiny mice; their hearts beat 800 times a minute, and they eat several times their own body weight per day. (Because they are so tiny they cannot retain heat.) In the peaceful Cenozoic era that followed, these shrews felt confident enough to take to the trees, where they ate seeds and tender leaves, and a new evolutionary development called fruit. In the trees they developed a ‘hand’, with a thumb and four fingers, to cling to branches. Many shrews were exterminated by their cousins the rodents, who had teeth that never stopped growing, so never wore out. But they survived in Africa—or rather the vast continent that then included Africa and South America—and became monkeys, with eyes that were side by side, instead of on either side of the head, making them a better judge of distance. We human beings are a descendant of the tree shrew.