Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes (10 September 1788 – 5 August 1868), sometimes referred to as Boucher de Perthes, was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 archaeologist and antiquary notable for his discovery, in about 1830, of flint tools in the gravel

Gravel

Gravel is composed of unconsolidated rock fragments that have a general particle size range and include size classes from granule- to boulder-sized fragments. Gravel can be sub-categorized into granule and cobble...

s of the Somme

Somme

Somme is a department of France, located in the north of the country and named after the Somme river. It is part of the Picardy region of France....

 valley.

Life

Born at Rethel, in the Ardennes

Ardennes

The Ardennes is a region of extensive forests, rolling hills and ridges formed within the Givetian Ardennes mountain range, primarily in Belgium and Luxembourg, but stretching into France , and geologically into the Eifel...

, he was the eldest son of Jules Armand Guillaume Boucher de Crèvecœur, botanist and customs officer, and of Etienne-Jeanne-Marie de Perthes (whose surname he was authorised by royal decree in 1818 to assume in addition to his father's). In 1802 he entered government employ as an officer of customs. His duties kept him for six years in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, but upon his returning in 1811 he found rapid promotion at home, and finally was appointed, in March 1825, to succeed his father as director of the douane (customs office) at Abbeville

Abbeville

Abbeville is a commune in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France.-Location:Abbeville is located on the Somme River, from its modern mouth in the English Channel, and northwest of Amiens...

, where he remained for the rest of his life.

His leisure time was chiefly devoted to the study of what was afterwards called the Stone Age

Stone Age

The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period, lasting about 2.5 million years , during which humans and their predecessor species in the genus Homo, as well as the earlier partly contemporary genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, widely used exclusively stone as their hard material in the...

 and antediluvian

Antediluvian

The antediluvian period meaning "before the deluge" is the period referred to in the Bible between the Creation of the Earth and the Deluge . The narrative takes up chapters 1-6 of Genesis...

 man, as he expressed it. About the year 1830 he had found, in the gravels of the Somme valley, flints which in his opinion bore evidence of human handiwork; but not until many years afterwards did he make public the important discovery of a worked flint implement with remains of elephant

Elephant

Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct...

 and rhinoceros

Rhinoceros

Rhinoceros , also known as rhino, is a group of five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. Two of these species are native to Africa and three to southern Asia....

 in the gravels of Menchecourt. This was in 1846.

In 1847 he commenced the issue of his monumental three volume work, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes, a work in which he was the first to establish the existence of man in the Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

 or early Quaternary

Quaternary

The Quaternary Period is the most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the ICS. It follows the Neogene Period, spanning 2.588 ± 0.005 million years ago to the present...

 period. His views met with little approval, partly because he had previously propounded theories regarding the antiquity of man without facts to support them, partly because the figures in his book were badly executed and they included drawings of flints which showed no clear sign of workmanship.

In 1855 Dr Jean Paul Rigollot of Amiens

Amiens

Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...

 strongly advocated the authenticity of the flint implements; but it was not until 1858 that Hugh Falconer

Hugh Falconer

Hugh Falconer MD FRS was a Scottish geologist, botanist, palaeontologist and paleoanthropologist. He studied the flora, fauna and geology of India, Assam and Burma, and was the first to suggest the modern evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium...

 saw the collection at Abbeville and induced Sir Joseph Prestwich

Joseph Prestwich

Sir Joseph Prestwich FRS, was a British geologist and businessman, known as an expert on the Tertiary Period and for having confirmed the findings of Boucher de Perthes of ancient flint tools in the Somme valley gravel beds....

 in the following year to visit the locality. Prestwich then definitely agreed that the flint implements were the work of man, and that they occurred in undisturbed ground in association with remains of extinct mammalia.

Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell

Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...

 not only confirmed the enormous geological time periods of the stratifications, but indicated that the chalk

Chalk

Chalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Calcite is calcium carbonate or CaCO3. It forms under reasonably deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....

 plateau of Picardy, France had once been connected to the chalk lands of Kent

Kent

Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 and that the Strait of Dover

Strait of Dover

The Strait of Dover or Dover Strait is the strait at the narrowest part of the English Channel. The shortest distance across the strait is from the South Foreland, 6 kilometres northeast of Dover in the county of Kent, England, to Cap Gris Nez, a cape near to Calais in the French of...

 or Pas de Calais was the recent result of very long term complex erosion

Erosion

Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...

 forces.

In 1863 his discovery of a human jaw, together with worked flints, in a gravel-pit at Moulin-Quignon near Abbeville seemed to vindicate Boucher de Perthes entirely; but doubt was thrown on the antiquity of the human remains (owing to the possibility of interment), though not on the good faith of the discoverer, who was the same year made an officer of the Légion d'honneur

Légion d'honneur

The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...

. However, the 'Moulin-Quigon jaw' was a hoax, planted by one of Boucher de Perthes' workers in response to an offer of a reward of 200 Francs for findings of human remains.

Although Boucher de Perthes was the first to establish that Europe had been populated by early man

Human evolution

Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...

, he was not able to pinpoint the precise period, because the scientific frame of reference did not then exist. Today the hand axes of the Somme River

Somme River

The Somme is a river in Picardy, northern France. The name Somme comes from a Celtic word meaning tranquility. The department Somme was named after this river....

 district are widely accepted to be at least 500,000 years old and thus the product of Neanderthal

Neanderthal

The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...

 populations, while some authorities think they may be as old as one million years and therefore associated with Homo erectus

Homo erectus

Homo erectus is an extinct species of hominid that lived from the end of the Pliocene epoch to the later Pleistocene, about . The species originated in Africa and spread as far as India, China and Java. There is still disagreement on the subject of the classification, ancestry, and progeny of H...

.

Boucher de Perthes displayed activity in many other directions. For more than thirty years he filled the presidential chair of the Société d'Emulation

Société d'émulation

Société d'émulation is a name given from the 18th century onwards to some learned societies of men in France and Wallonia wishing to study together in the arts, science and letters and often to publish the results of their reflections and their works in a bulletin, review or Acts. They were also...

 at Abbeville, to the publications of which he contributed articles on a wide range of subjects. He was the author of several tragedies, two books of fiction, several works of travel, and a number of books on economic and philanthropic questions.

In 1954, the Museum Boucher de Perthes was opened in Abbeville, with collections covering a wide range of materials and periods.

Published writings

• Novels
• Romances, Légendes et Ballades
• Chants Armoricains ou Souvenirs de Basse-Bretagne (Armorican songs, or, Souvenirs of Low-Brittany)
• Opinions de M Christophe, I. Sur la Liberté du Commerce. (On Free Trade)
• Opinions de M Christophe, II. Voyage Commercial et Philosophique. (Commercial and Philosophic Journey)
• Opinions de M Christophe, III. M. Christophe à la Préfecture. (M. Christophe at the Préfecture)
• Opinions de M Christophe, IV. Le Dernier Jour d'un Homme. (A Man's Last Day)
• Satires, Contes et Chansonettes (Satires, Stories and Little Songs)
• Petit Glossaire, Esquisses de Moeurs Administratives. (Little glossary, Examples of Bureaucratic manners)
• De La Création, Essai sur L'Origine et la Progression des Êtres (On Creation, An Essay on the Origin and Development of Entities)
• Petites Solutions des Grands Mots (Little Solutions to Great Words).
• Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes (with 106 plates illustrating 2000 figures) (Celtic and pre-Flood Antiquities).
• Hommes et Choses (Men and Things).
• Sujets Dramatiques (Dramatic Subjects).
• Emma ou Quelques Lettres du Femme (Emma, or Some Letters from a Woman).
• Voyage a Constantinople. (Journey to Constantinople)
• Voyage en Danemarck, en Suède, etc. (Journey in Denmark, Sweden, etc.).
• Voyage en Espagne et en Algérie. (Journey in Spain and Algeria).
• Voyage en Russe, en Lithuanie, en Pologne. (Journey in Russia, Lithuania and Poland).

See also

• Thunderstone (folklore)
  Thunderstone (folklore)
  Throughout Europe, Asia, Polynesia, in fact in almost all parts of the world where their use had been forgotten, flint arrowheads and axes turned up by the farmer's plow are considered to have fallen from the sky, are often thought to be thunderbolts and are called "Thunderstones".It was not until...