What did all these finds mean, these jumbles of stone axes, skeletons, bronze ornaments, and clay pots?

Danish museum curator Christian Jurgensen Thomsen took a bold, but logical, step in 1807. He arranged the displays of the Royal Museum in Copenhagen in three separate rooms coinciding with three prehistoric ages:

• STONE AGE - "very little or nothing was known of metals."
• BRONZE AGE - bronze metallurgy, no iron tools.
• IRON AGE - iron replaced bronze.

Thomsen's Three Age System was the first classification of prehistoric times.The Three Age System was soon shown to have actual chronological validity, with layers of Stone Age tools underlying those with metals. But the whole of human existence was shackled within 6,000 years of Biblical chronology.

Three events were to establish a much greater antiquity for humankind --

• The development of uniformitarian geology,
• The discovery of humanly manufactured tools in association with bones of extinct animals,
• The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.