Geology Site Account
In the report of the Essex Field Club's excursion to the Rayleigh area in 1906, amateur geologist A.E. Salter expressed the opinion that ‘eoliths’ were likely to occur in the ancient high level gravels that cap the Rayleigh Hills and that he had obtained one. Extremely controversial at the time, eoliths were flints that some people claimed showed human workmanship yet they occurred in gravels that were deposited long before humans were thought to have lived in Britain. Others maintained that natural geological processes were responsible for shaping these flints and prominent among those holding this view was Essex amateur geologist Samuel Hazzledine Warren.
The eolith debate was ignited by the discovery of supposedly humanly worked flints in gravels on the North Downs of Kent, the altitude of the gravels suggesting great antiquity. Later, human workmanship was claimed for flints in the basement bed of the Red Crag in Suffolk. Chief among the advocates of ‘sub-crag man’ was James Reid Moir, a gentlemen’s outfitter and amateur archaeologist, and the biologist Sir E. Ray Lankester. Moir and Lankester carried out scientific experiments to try to prove that Nature alone could not have produced the fractures seen. However, the more rigorous experiments performed by Warren and his colleagues demonstrated that the forces of Nature are infinitely varied and that all eoliths can be matched exactly with stones chipped by natural agencies. Warren’s most convincing argument was the ‘power of selectivity’ where the process of selection from the labourer to the collector and thereafter to a more specialist collector involved each time discarding less favoured specimens. In the course of years this process inevitably results in an assembly of flints of almost identical shapes. Eventually the debate subsided and a pre-Palaeolithic or ‘Eolithic’ era of human occupation was finally discredited.
The Rayleigh Hills specimen cannot now be traced but in Southend Central Museum is a flint that was described as an eolith when it was found on the beach at Thorpe Bay in 1928. Although eoliths are now considered to have been merely accidents of nature, the controversy is a fascinating part of the history of geology and archaeology and the surviving specimens in museums are therefore of great historical interest.
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Reference: Cole 1907 (p.267), Pollitt 1953 (pp 10 & 50), Oakley 1972 (p. 5-12), O’Connor 2003.
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