Stone Tools in Europe Were Misinterpreted

For hundreds of years Europeans appear to have been oblivious to the existence of stone tools. Presumably many people saw them. At least it is hard for me to believe that no stone axes, spear points, or arrowheads turned up in plowed fields, dried streambeds, or eroded hillsides. But, as William Stiebing observes, there is no mention of them prior to the 16th century. People apparently “did not notice them. To them such things were just so many more rocks.”3 Writings from the 16th century indicate that people were noticing anomalies, for example, that rocks which we would now recognize as stone tools, differed substantially from others in the landscape. These objects were widely referred to as fairy arrows or elf-shot or, by those less given to specifying a cause in terms of personal agency, thunderbolts. In his classic book The Idea of Prehistory, Glyn Daniel quotes an explanation offered by Ulisse Aldrovandi in the mid-16th century. Aldrovandi described objects we would now label stone tools as “due to an admixture of a certain exhalation of thunder and lightning with metallic matter, chiefly in dark clouds, which is coagulated by the circumfused moisture and conglutinated into a mass (like flour with water) and subsequently indurated by heat, like a brick.”4 And “these rather surprising words,” as Daniel puts it, “were written by a man who has been described as the greatest zoologist of the Renaissance period.”5 I cannot resist quoting one more example in which the use of jargon also seems inversely proportioned to useful information conveyed; a man named Tollius from about the same time period “claimed chopped flints to be ‘generated in the sky by a fu

Even while such things were being pondered, other scholars were proposing that these objects were ancient tools. The reasoning these proto-archaeologists offered in support of such a view turns out to be very important—an analogy with similar tools used by the Native Americans. Once the connection was made, it is no surprise that this view rapidly became the standard one. Ethnographic analogy saved the day in this case, as it often does, and in the process represented a major step toward what would become the academic field of prehistory

In one sense this is not good news for SETI—that it could require analogies with known activities of specific cultures to correctly interpret these rocks as products of intelligent human activity. But I suggest this is only half the story. If we dig a little deeper, we see that even those who did not recognize them as tools did understand that something about the rocks needed to be explained. In retrospect, the superstitious common people who dubbed them elf-shot or fairy arrows were, in an odd sort of way, more perceptive and closer to the core truth than those who concocted naturalistic or mechanistic explanations. For they recognized the most important point, namely, that these items are indeed the products of intentional beings, purposeful agents.