page_title: Thunderstone (folklore)
section_title: Decline of thunderstone mythology
hierarchical_section_title: Thunderstone (folklore) / Decline of thunderstone mythology
caption_attribution_description: Jacques Boucher de Perthes, 1833,
context_page_description: A thunderstone is a flint tool or fossil turned up by farmer's plow that was thought to have fallen from the sky. They were often thought to be thunderbolts. It was not until travelers returned from far-away places where these implements were in use among primitive cultures that the origins of these objects became known. Even then, these travelers' tales received little popular credence.
context_section_description: Andrew Dickson White described the discovery of the true origin of thunderstones as a "line of observation and thought ... fatal to the theological view". In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of early races of men; but for some reason his book was not published until the following century, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same idea. 
  In 1723 Antoine Laurent de Jussieu addressed the French Academy on "The Origin and Uses of Thunder-stones". He showed that recent travellers from various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as "thunderstones". A year later this fact was firmly embedded in the minds of French scientists by the Jesuit Joseph-Francois Lafitau, who published a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of ethnology. 
  It was only after the French Revolution of 1830, more than a century later, that the political climate in Europe was free enough of religious sentiment for archaeological discoveries to be dispassionately investigated and the conclusion reached that human existence spanned a much greater period of time than any Christian theologian had dreamt of.
caption: Boucher de Perthes
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