Eolith

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Eolith

An eolith (from Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
"eos", dawn, and "lithos", stone) is a chipped flint

Flint

Flint is a hard, sedimentary rock cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as a variety of chert. It occurs chiefly as Nodule s and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones....
nodule

Nodule (geology)

A nodule in petrology or mineralogy is a secondary structure, generally spherical or irregularly rounded in shape. Nodules are typically solid replacement bodies of chert or iron oxides formed during diagenesis of a sedimentary rock....
. Eoliths were once thought to have been artefacts, the earliest stone tools, but are now believed to be naturally produced by geological

Geology

Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitute the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structural geology, physical properties, dynamics, and History of the Earth of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed....
processes such as glaciation.

The first eoliths were collected in Kent

Kent

Kent is a Counties of England 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 River Thames estuary....
by Benjamin Harrison, an amateur naturalist

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards the observational than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research that is published in magazines than in academic journals....
and archaeologist

Archaeology

Archaeology, archeology, or arch?ology is the science that studies Homo cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, Artifact , features, Biofact s, and cultural landscape....
, in 1885 (though the name "eolith" wasn't coined until 1892, by J.

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Encyclopedia

An eolith (from Greek

Greek language

Flint

Nodule (geology)

Geology

Kent

Natural history

Archaeology

Joseph Prestwich

Joseph Prestwich Fellow of the Royal Society, was a United Kingdom geologist and businessman, known as an expert on the Tertiary and for having confirmed the findings of Boucher de Perthes....
in 1891, and eoliths were generally accepted to have been crudely made tools, dating from the Pliocene

Pliocene

The Pliocene epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 1.806 million years before present.The Pliocene is the second epoch of the Neogene period in the Cenozoic era....
. Further discoveries of eoliths in the early 20th century – in East Anglia

East Anglia

East Anglia is a region of eastern England. It was named after one of the ancient Heptarchy, the Kingdom of the East Angles, which was in turn named after the homeland of the Angles, Angeln, in northern Germany....
by J. Reid Moir and in continental Europe

Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
by A. Rutot and H. Klaatsch – were taken to be evidence of human habitation of those areas before the oldest known fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or trace fossil of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous Rock formations and sedimentary rock layers is known as the fossil record....
s. Indeed, the English

England

Piltdown Man

The "Piltdown Man" is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and Mandible collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex, in England....
.

Because eoliths were so crude, concern began to be raised that they were indistinguishable from the natural processes or erosion

Erosion

For morphological image processing operations, see Erosion 'For use of in dermatopathology, see Erosion Erosion is the removal of solids in the natural environment....
. M. Boule

Marcellin Boule

Marcellin Boule was a France palaeontologist.He studied and published the first analysis of a complete Homo neanderthalensis. The fossil discovered in La Chapelle-aux-Saints was an old man, and Boule characterized it as brutish, bent kneed and not a fully erect biped ....
, a French

France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
archaeologist, published an argument against the artifactual status of eoliths in 1905 , and S. Hazzledine Warren provided confirmation of Boule's view after carrying out experiments on flints .

Although the debate continued for about three decades, more and more evidence was discovered that suggested a purely natural origin for eoliths. This, together with the discovery of genuine late-Pliocene tools in Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km? including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area....
(the Olduwan

Olduwan

Oldowan is an anthropology designation for an industrial complex of stone tools used by prehistoric hominins of the Lower Paleolithic. The Oldowan is the first known industrial complex in prehistory....
tools), made support for the artefact theory difficult to sustain.