Stone Age

Stone Age is the novel’s archaeological label for a remote human past, tied to stone hatchets and worked flints and invoked when the explorers encounter a recognizable human skull in the subterranean world. It gives the Professor a framework for interpreting the remains, but the scene also exposes the distance between the evidence before him and the limits of what he can explain.

Material signs of a distant age

In the Professor’s account, the Stone Age is made legible through objects. At Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville, a jawbone discovered fourteen feet below the surface lay near stone hatchets and carved flints. The finds entered a scientific dispute over whether humans had lived in the Quaternary period: Professor Hardwigg supported the antiquity of the remains against Elie de Beaumont’s challenge to their geological dating. Further discoveries of human bones and tools strengthened the case for Quaternary humans, while worked fossil animal bones were used to argue for a still greater antiquity of human activity.

The novel thus presents prehistoric time not as an abstract scale alone, but as something inferred from material traces whose context and classification matter. A tool can support an argument about human presence, yet the age assigned to that presence depends on competing readings of the deposits in which evidence is found.

Geological time made visible

During the descent, the narrator reads changes in the rocks as a passage through geological history. He identifies a transition into Silurian formations, then recognizes fossils associated with a more developed order of ancient animal life in the marbles and strata. The sequence gives the underground journey a temporal direction: the explorers encounter evidence that appears to move from rudimentary life toward later forms, while the Professor presses onward despite the narrator’s sense that these geological signs carry warnings.

This progression is not a simple chronology of human eras. The rocks and fossils establish deep time on a scale far older than human history, while the Stone Age belongs to the later human past. The novel’s imaginative leap comes when human artifacts and a human body appear in the same subterranean setting as ancient geological and fossil evidence.

The skull and the Professor’s inference

In the fossil-bearing amphitheater, the Professor finds a human skull with stretched, parchment-like skin, intact teeth, and abundant hair, amid bones attributed to mastodons. He calls it a fossil human contemporary with the mastodons and points to the hatchets and carved flints as evidence of human workmanship. He cannot explain how the body and surrounding strata came to rest in the vast cavity; he offers ancient fissures, landslides, and chasms only as a possible geological explanation.

His more daring interpretation is that the person, like the explorers, visited the centre of the earth. That conclusion turns the Stone Age artifacts from museum-like remains into evidence within the adventure’s central possibility: that an earlier human traveler had reached this hidden world. The narrator applauds the Professor’s argument, but the account preserves its boundary as well as its force: the skull and tools are before them, while the precise process that brought them there remains unexplained.

A category under pressure

The Stone Age label also sharpens a later disagreement over a steel dagger. The narrator wonders whether it belonged to an antediluvian warrior, but rejects the idea that it is a weapon of the “stony period”; its steel construction places it beyond that category. The Professor identifies it as a Spanish-made sixteenth-century dagger and rules out the living beings they have encountered as its owners. The object therefore complicates any attempt to treat the subterranean world as a single, undifferentiated prehistoric time: stone tools, fossil humans, and a much later metal weapon carry different chronological implications.

Across these scenes, Stone Age is both a historical term and a narrative instrument. It links archaeological objects to claims about human antiquity, then tests how far those claims can be carried when the explorers confront evidence that seems to collapse geological remoteness and human presence into one place.