Editing Three-age system (section)

=== Wallace's grand revolution recycled ===
When Sir John Lubbock was doing the preliminary work for his 1865 ''[[magnum opus]]'', [[Charles Darwin]] and [[Alfred Russel Wallace]] were jointly publishing their first papers "[[On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection]]". Darwins's ''[[On the Origin of Species]]'' came out in 1859, but he did not elucidate the [[theory of evolution]] as it applies to man until [[the Descent of Man]] in 1871. Meanwhile, Wallace read a paper in 1864 to the [[Anthropological Society of London]] that was a major influence on Sir John, publishing in the very next year.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Wallace |first=Alfred Russel |year=1864 |title=The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced From the Theory of "Natural Selection" |url=http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S093.htm |journal=Journal of the Anthropological Society of London |volume=2 |access-date=20 May 2011 |archive-date=21 July 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110721165220/http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S093.htm |url-status=live}}</ref> He quoted Wallace:<ref>{{harvnb|Lubbock|1865|p=481}}</ref><blockquote>From the moment when the first skin was used as a covering, when the first rude spear was formed to assist in the chase, the first seed sown or shoot planted, a grand revolution was effected in nature, a revolution which in all the previous ages of the world's history had had no parallel, for a being had arisen who was no longer necessarily subject to change with the changing universe,—a being who was in some degree superior to nature, inasmuch as he knew how to control and regulate her action, and could keep himself in harmony with her, not by a change in body, but by an advance in mind.</blockquote>
Wallace distinguishing between mind and body was asserting that [[natural selection]] shaped the form of man only until the appearance of mind; after then, it played no part. Mind formed modern man, meaning that result of mind, culture. Its appearance overthrew the laws of nature. Wallace used the term "grand revolution". Although Lubbock believed that Wallace had gone too far in that direction he did adopt a theory of evolution combined with the revolution of culture. Neither Wallace nor Lubbock offered any explanation of how the revolution came about, or felt that they had to offer one. Revolution is an acceptance that in the continuous evolution of objects and events sharp and inexplicable disconformities do occur, as in geology. And so it is not surprising that in the 1874 [[Stockholm]] meeting of the [[International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences|International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology]], in response to Ernst Hamy's denial of any "break" between Paleolithic and Neolithic based on material from [[dolmen]]s near Paris "showing a continuity between the paleolithic and neolithic folks," Edouard Desor, geologist and archaeologist, replied:<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Howarth |first=H. H. |year=1875 |title=Report on the Stockholm Meeting of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology |url=https://zenodo.org/record/2452603 |journal=Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland |volume=IV |pages=347 |access-date=16 September 2019 |archive-date=20 June 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210620100222/https://zenodo.org/record/2452603 |url-status=live}}</ref> "that the introduction of domesticated animals was a complete revolution and enables us to separate the two epochs completely."

A revolution as defined by Wallace and adopted by Lubbock is a change of regime, or rules. If man was the new rule-setter through culture then the initiation of each of Lubbock's four periods might be regarded as a change of rules and therefore as a distinct revolution, and so ''[[Chambers's Journal]]'', a reference work, in 1879 portrayed each of them as:<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Chambers, William and Robert |date=20 December 1879 |title=Pre-historic Records |journal=Chambers's Journal |volume=56 |issue=834 |pages=805–808}}</ref><blockquote>...an advance in knowledge and civilization which amounted to a revolution in the then existing manners and customs of the world.</blockquote>
Because of the controversy over Westropp's Mesolithic and Mortillet's Gap beginning in 1872 archaeological attention focused mainly on the revolution at the Palaeolithic–Neolithic boundary as an explanation of the gap. For a few decades the Neolithic Period, as it was called, was described as a kind of revolution. In the 1890s, a standard term, the Neolithic Revolution, began to appear in encyclopedias such as Pears. In 1925 the [[Cambridge Ancient History]] reported:<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Garašanin |first=M. |year=1925 |title=The Stone Age in the Central Balkan Area |journal=Cambridge Ancient History}}</ref><blockquote>There are quite a large number of archaeologists who justifiably consider the period of the Late Stone Age to be a Neolithic revolution and an economic revolution at the same time. For that is the period when primitive agriculture developed and cattle breeding began.</blockquote>