From Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick
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From Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick |
Johann Jakob Scheuchzer was a Swiss naturalist with a wide breadth of knowledge — at least for the early 18th century. In his day, it was customary to regard the Old Testament as a perfectly accurate description of the history of the earth, and Scheuchzer was certainly a man of his time.
Trained as a physician, Scheuchzer traveled extensively and put together one of the largest fossil collections in early 18th-century Europe. He described many of the fossil plants he collected in 1709 in Herbarium of the Deluge. He believed the plants had all perished in the biblical flood, and his book was among the first devoted to that topic. Fossil plants, however, were small potatoes compared to what he found in 1725. That year, he examined what he believed was the fossil of a human flood victim, a 4-foot-long vertebrate skeleton found in the Ohningen quarry near Lake Constance. Scheuchzer named it Homo diluvii testis.
Early on, there were skeptics of Scheuchzer's description. In 1758, another Swiss naturalist, Johannes Gessner, questioned Scheuchzer's interpretation and suggested that the "flood victim" was a large fossil fish. The matter was settled in 1811 when the great comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier cleaned the specimen. He pronounced it a giant salamander. The fossil is now understood to date from the Miocene Epoch, roughly 23.5 to 5.3 million years ago, long before humans evolved.
Ironically, before his own mistake, Scheuchzer accurately cast doubt upon other "flood relics" commonly displayed in churches. Many of the relics were just pieces of stone that resembled human bones, or teeth belonging to elephantine animals. In addition to his large salamander, however, he erroneously identified vertebrae from large fish as human remains.
By the time Cuvier resolved the status of Homo diluvii testis, Scheuchzer had left behind a substantial body of biblically based work. In 1731, he published a description of the alleged victim in his masterwork: Sacred Physics, which recounted the formation of the earth and the creation of all life along with the deluge. (The creation of man is shown here.) Based on the 1611 King James Bible, and published in Latin, German and French, the book became well known to the reading public. Another of Scheuchzer's works was Complaints of the Fishes. This pamphlet playfully relayed the grumblings of fish killed by the flood brought on by humanity's sins. (Considering fish can swim, how a flood would have killed them is a little puzzling. Maybe the floodwaters were really violent.) Part of the pamphlet's aim might actually please modern paleontologists; it was to defend the fossils' status is evidence of earlier life, as opposed to inorganic formations which some savants believed the fossils to be.
For more information:
Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
Measuring Eternity by Martin Gorst
Fossil Revolution by Douglas Palmer
Cradle of Life by J. William Schopf
The Meaning of Fossils by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated January 26, 2008