Review by Steven Mithen of

Earths Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters by Martin Rudwick
ISBN 978 0 226 20393 5
I chose the perfect place to read Martin Rudwicks book: the Isle of Islay, off the coast of
Western Scotland. The archaeology of Islay is a long-standing interest of mine, especially the
earliest traces of human settlement, which my excavations suggest took place 12,000 years
ago or very soon afterwards. Thats nothing compared to the age of the bedrock of the island,
much of which is Precambrian, dating to 1.8 billion years ago. For years Ive walked across
that bedrock with my mind fixed on the human past, neglectful of the rocks and the way they
came to be dated and embedded in the history of the Earth. And so my New Years walk
across the Lewisian Gneiss, the sandstones and the dolerite dykes of the island, was enriched
by Rudwicks demonstration that the science of such rocks is every bit as important as
archaeology in defining who and what we are. Rudwick is the pre-eminent historian of earth
sciences, and Earths Deep History, a grand sweep from the 17th to the 21st century, is a
thrilling story of discovery and debate, insight and interpretation.
Archbishop Ussher is the starting point. In his Annals of the Old Covenant (Annales Veteris
Testamenti, 1650-54), Ussher drew on the genealogies in the Bible to trace the date of
Creation to 4004 bc. I recall my university tutors ridicule: Ussher had even specified a date in
mid-October. But Rudwick offers a more considered view, explaining that Ussher was simply
deploying the best scholarly practice of his time. Todays earth scientists may use radiometric
dating, but they are driven by the same motive as Ussher: the quest for an accurate and
detailed chronology.
Rudwick emphasises the positive, or at least unobstructive, role of religion since Ussher,
correcting the received idea that the 19th century in particular saw a great ideological clash
between science and religion. The Bible was not a barrier to scientific thought: instead,
Rudwick argues, the coherent sequence of events described in Genesis pre-adapted European
culture to think about Earth and life on Earth in a similar historical way. As early as the 17th
century it was recognised that each day in the Creation story might represent something far
longer, preparing the way for the notion of geological epochs. Many scholars were aware of
the difficulties of interpreting texts written in ancient languages. Rather than seeking to
demonstrate the literal truth of Genesis, geology would amplify or clarify the biblical account.
In this way, one could be both a devout Christian and a scientist, as William Buckland and
Adam Sedgwick, the two leading British geologists of the 19th century, were. Of course,
biblical literalism resurged periodically, notably in the US. But the majority of scientists just
got on with their geology, leaving others to worry about its implications for religion. What they
were revealing about the sheer scale and unanticipated strangeness of the Earths long
history was often treated as welcome new evidence for Gods Creation.
Ussher had been entirely reliant on written texts, but those who followed him began to study
fossils, confused though they were by these strange objects. Was their resemblance to living
things a clue to their origin or were they the product of a process of mineralisation
underground? Robert Hooke made early use of microscopy to identify cells in what could
thereby be identified as fossilised wood, and Nicolas Steno dissected a sharks head to
demonstrate that the well known fossils called glossopetrae, tongue-stones, found
embedded in rocks on land, had once been sharks teeth, and must have come from sharks
much larger than any currently alive. The biblical Flood provided a convenient explanation for
the discovery of fossil shells on mountains, but the Flood was itself thought of in a variety of
ways. Writing in 1695, John Woodward, an English physician and fossil collector, proposed that
it resulted from a temporary suspension of gravity, during which all the materials of the Earth
were churned up into a thick suspension. When gravity returned, the materials settled into the

successive layers of rock strata within which fossils were embedded. Although fossils provided
evidence for life before the Flood, in Woodwards model they would be randomly distributed
between the strata, and could offer no evidence for past environments.
In describing the work of Hooke and other 17th-century scholars, Rudwick introduces a second
key theme, the influence of historical scholarship in shaping the discipline of geology. In a nice
reversal of the common wisdom that the flow of ideas is from the sciences to the humanities,
he shows how historians methods were transposed for use in the study of the natural world.
The collection and study of human antiquities provided a ready source of analogies for natural
relics: fossils were natures coins, stratigraphy was natures archive and the bones of extinct
mammoths natures monuments. All such antiquities, whether from the human past or from
nature, required deciphering. Nicolas Desmarest described his explorations of extinct
volcanoes in central France as analogous to the excavations at Herculaneum. The 17th and
18th centuries saw a series of coups dtat and revolutions, some that swept governments
from power and some that didnt. Was the history of the Earth, too, a sequence of
unpredictable events rather than a steady state or a predictable evolution in one particular
direction?
This question pervaded scholarship two hundred years ago, and remains pertinent today in
debates about the extent and significance of comet strikes on Earths development. In the
17th century, Descartes and James Hutton supported the idea of a steady-state system, or at
least that the Earth goes through regular patterns of change such that its future state can be
predicted, while others such as Jean-Andr Deluc, who first introduced the term geology
believed the Earths past and future were as unpredictable as human history. By this time,
there was growing recognition that almost all of the Earths history occurred before humans
came along; Georges Leclerc suggested a sudden origin for the Earth 75,000 years ago,
thanks to a close encounter between a comet and the sun, since when the Earth has been
gradually cooling an idea that persisted throughout much of the 18th and 19th centuries.
During the later 18th century, the focus turned away from grand and ultimately untestable
theories towards fieldwork, helped by the development of the mining industry and
governments need to know what was underground. A series of discoveries, not least of the
diversity and thickness of the rock formations, suggested much longer timescales for the
Earths history. The fossil record was now growing rapidly, and large mammals were becoming
important. Georges Cuvier, the leading expert, drew on comparative anatomy to reconstruct a
large bestiary of extinct species. Both he and William Buckland assumed that a major
catastrophe a deluge had killed off these species, forming a sharp boundary between the
human and the antediluvian world.
Cuvier worked with Alexandre Brongniart, director of the state porcelain factory at Svres, just
outside Paris, to create a three-dimensional map of the rock formations of the Paris Basin.
They saw that different formations were characterised not only by the minerals they
contained but also by particular fossils. One of Cuviers key contributions was to establish that
many of the bones found in the lower geological layers came from reptiles not mammals; he
showed, for instance, that what had been classified as a toothed whale found in chalk
deposits near Maastricht was in fact a huge marine lizard, later named Mosasaur; he was also
the first to identify flying creatures in geological deposits as neither birds nor bats but flying
reptiles that he named ptro-dactyle, wing-fingered.
The recognition that there had been a succession of animals from reptiles to mammals
indicated a directional history of life on Earth. By the early 19th century, stratigraphy was the
staple work of geologists, and the familiar terms for geological periods were introduced: the
Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian and Carboniferous, underlain by the Silurian, Cambrian,
Ordovician and Devonian. By the end of the century a consensus had emerged: the Earth had

a long history of gradual cooling; life forms were adapted to changing environments and
would appear and disappear accordingly, but life was linear and progressive, though
punctuated occasionally by periods of sudden and violent change; humans made their
appearance at the very end.
In 1837, Louis Agassiz, taking a break from his specialism in fish fossils, proposed that the
Earth had relatively recently been in the grip of an ice age. A static ice sheet had once
covered the whole of the northern hemisphere, he argued, which explained such phenomena
as erratics, boulders found far from their geological source. Agassiz suggested that erratics
found in northern France had once slid along an ice sheet descending from the Alps; others,
notably Jean de Charpentier, saw that in fact they had been dragged below moving glaciers,
causing the deeply scratched rock surfaces documented in northern Europe and the ridges of
rock debris (moraines) that marked where such glaciers had come to an end.
The notion of an ice age was initially met with much scepticism. The consensus was that the
Earth had been cooling slowly and steadily throughout its long history: it was difficult to adjust
to the idea that there had been a sudden cold period and then a return to comparative
warmth. But the idea gradually gained ground, helped along by the results of polar
exploration. Where once the Alps had been the reference point when thinking about what
North America and northern Europe may once have looked like, now it was Greenland and
Antarctica. Eventually it was accepted that there hadnt been just one ice age, but a sequence
of them, raising questions about their possible role in what appeared to be mass extinctions of
mammoths and other large mammals, and in the origin and early history of human beings.
Increasingly reliable evidence of human fossils accumulated during the early 19th century but
was given a rough reception, not least by Cuvier. In 1833, Philippe-Charles Schmerling found,
buried deep in the floor of a cave in Belgium, what he took to be two human skulls, close to a
mammoth tooth and intermixed with stone artefacts and the bones of extinct animals. His
case was rejected even by such distinguished scientists as the geologist Charles Lyell, who
should have appreciated Schmerlings careful fieldwork and attention to stratigraphy.
Ultimately, however, the evidence became irresistible: in the 1840s Jacques Boucher de
Perthes discovered stone tools buried in the gravel of the Somme valley alongside the bones
of extinct animals, and in 1858 stone artefacts intermingled with the bones of hyena and
rhinoceros were found sealed below a crust of stalagmites in Brixham Cave near Torquay. The
Brixham Cave excavation was overseen by Lyell himself, who then, together with Boucher de
Perthes, began a co-ordinated campaign to improve scientific opinion regarding human
antiquity.
Its formal acceptance coincided with the publication of Darwins On the Origin of Species in
1859. Rudwick firmly places the debates about the evolution of species in historical context:
the issue could be raised only once it had been established that the Earth itself had a history.
Darwins great challenge was to explain why there was no evidence in the fossil record for the
process of gradual change within species that he proposed. He was fully persuaded by Lyells
geological uniformitarianism: a belief in the slow and steady pace of change driven by the
same natural laws and processes observable in the world today. As such, the discovery of
Archaeopteryx, which seemed to represent a missing link between reptiles and birds and
therefore suggested that evolution happened by sudden macro-evolutionary leaps rather than
tiny steps, was unhelpful to Darwins cause. The spectre of human evolution haunted the
debate. For Lyell and other savants the problem was not so much Darwins proposal that the
physical form of human beings had evolved but that so too had their moral sense. That there
had indeed been human evolution became evident when the first Neanderthal fossils were
discovered, closely followed by Java Man in the Far East, which prompted questions that

havent gone away about the evolutionary relationships between such species but also about
their intelligence, language and ways of life.
As the 19th century came to an end, there was no longer any doubt that the Earth was many
millions of years old, though just how many millions was unclear. Darwin had suggested 300
million, John Phillips a mere 96 million; the physicist Lord Kelvin initially suggested a billion
years based on a projected rate of cooling, but later reduced his estimate to forty or fifty
thousand. The discovery of radioactivity in the early 20th century put an end to the
speculation. It was recognised that heat was being generated by radioactive decay inside the
Earth, and radiometric dating methods soon established that the Earth was an order of
magnitude older than anyone had supposed. In 1953 the American physicist Clair Patterson
used such methods to derive an estimate of 4.5 billion years, a figure still thought reliable.
This great age for the Earth made it plausible to assume that its history included a greater
range and diversity of events than would otherwise have been possible. The idea had been
around for a long time that mountain ranges were the result of movements of sections of the
Earths crust, though the assumption was that the movements had been purely vertical. In the
1870s, geologists in India proposed that Africa, Australia and India had once been part of a
single massive landmass, Gondwana Land. In tracing the development of the theory of plate
tectonics, Rudwick notes that it wasnt helped by its early characterisation as continental
drift: the key physical units tectonic plates are not continents, and they dont drift
randomly but are dragged by huge underground convection currents. He also notes an
intriguing collective volte-face on the part of US geologists, who were at first opposed to
tectonic theory (the Americans are about the toughest isolationists in existence, geologically
as well as politically, a South African geologist remarked), but turned into its most ardent
supporters when the theory became universally accepted from the 1960s onwards.
The fossil discoveries made in the late 20th century were no less thrilling than those made by
Hooke looking down his microscope or by Buckland discovering a hyena den in southern
England. But the new finds were fossils of much older and much smaller creatures:
microfossils and Ediacara, soft-bodied fish, found in Precambrian rocks. These showed that the
so-called Cambrian explosion was not of life itself but merely of animals with large bodies and
then with hard shells. Fossils of life-forms even older than the Ediacara were discovered
subsequently: stromatolites, literally rocky pillows, dating back 3.5 billion years. These
appear to have been formed by microscopic life secreting or trapping mineral material and
slowly growing upwards to form large mounds. Modern equivalents have been discovered that
generate oxygen as a waste product, suggesting the possibility that ancient stromatolites
were responsible for what has become known as the great oxygenation event, which allowed
larger-bodied organisms, and eventually humans, to evolve.
One of Rudwicks achievements in Earths Deep History is to show that much of our current
understanding of causal process strongly resonates with ideas that emerged long before there
was any hard evidence. There has, for instance, been a constant dialogue between
catastrophism and uniformitarianism; the former had a late 20th-century revival in the talk of
meteorite impacts and mass extinctions, echoing Cuviers suggestion of a catastrophic end to
the antediluvian world. In 1875 James Croll argued that glaciation took place in cycles
determined by minor variations in the Earths orbit around the sun; this idea was dismissed
but then revived by Milutin Milankovi in 1930 and finally shown to be correct in a paper by
two American climate scientists and a geophysicist in 1976. Equally striking is the
foreshadowing of the modern theory of plate tectonics in Athanasius Kirchers view in the 17th
century that large parts of the continents had once been under the sea, and by Delucs
suggestion in the 18th century of an interchange between continents and oceans.

Finally in the late 20th century earth scientists began to spend more time looking upwards, at
the moon. Although evidence had been accumulating that comets had occasionally struck the
Earth, it was only when the pockmarked surface of the moon was studied that the likely
extent of such bombardment was appreciated. By the 1980s more than two hundred
terrestrial impact sites or astroblemes had been identified on Earth. There is substantial
support for the theory that the impacts were responsible both for the origin of life on Earth, by
delivering the constituents of DNA, and for one or more of the mass extinction events. By the
early 21st century, the history of the Earth was conceived as just one of a divergent set of
possible planetary histories one in which a complex set of contingencies had resulted in
living organisms and then intelligent life.