from 1600 to 1800 European physics and
chemistry went through revolutions that
made them quantitative or numbers based
meanwhile biology remained with Natural
History and stuck with observation based
knowledge what about the study of the
earth in this field natural philosophers
were asking questions like what's up
with the fossils are they remains of
extinct organisms are they so-called
sports of nature rocks that just happen
to look like living things but don't
mean anything and most importantly how
old is everything I gotta say as
disciplines of science go this one has
pretty much everything awesome in it
vast eons Czech mega floods and super
volcanoes got those dinosaurs aha a hunt
for living mastodons buddy you know it
geology paleontology oceanography
meteorology and others the Earth
Sciences are fascinating and so is their
history let's rock
if you're looking for the foundations of
geology one place to start is with
mining archeologists have shown for
example that indigenous populations
around the Great Lakes mined and used
the copper near modern-day Lake Superior
for over 6,000 years and in Europe
mining took off along with colonization
in the 16th century colonial empires
exploited the precious metals of Central
and South America relying on the
geological knowledge and technical
skills of indigenous communities not to
mention their labor but despite
gathering a lot of new data about the
earth in this way natural philosophers
kept banging their heads against one
question how can we reconstruct the
Earth's history or geo history no one
could confidently know the age of the
earth before the discovery of
radioactivity and the development of
radiometric dating in the early 20th
century today by the way we're pretty
sure that the earth is around 4.5 for 3
billion years old but since at least the
17th century people have compared layers
of rock and declared them younger or
older depending on their positions
relative to other layers this was a
qualitative or value based practice it
was hard to date rocks just by looking
at them but this didn't stop people from
trying in 17th century Europe it was
commonplace to believe that the age of
the earth and the age of the human
species were about the same so to know
the age of the earth historians tried to
create a quantitative chronology of
human history
this meant comparing all known ancient
sources such as texts from China Greece
or Babylonia as well as things like the
records of eclipses in comets all of
these events were placed into a detailed
chronology a linear narrative that ran
from the creation of the universe to the
present in 1654 bishop James Ussher a
scholar and the top religious leader of
Ireland calculated the age of the earth
to be about 6,000 years old based on
textual evidence from the Bible other
historians reached different conclusions
and argued over the reliability of
different sources but in general they
reached a date for the beginning of time
somewhere around 4000 BCE by the late
17th century some European naturalist
such as polymath Robert Hooke argued
that natural objects like fossils should
also be used like historical texts
to shed light on early human
environments for example many believed
that the Biblical Flood had scattered
organic remains globally which explained
why we can find seashells on the tops of
mountains this attention to fossils
would set the stage for new theories of
organic development such as those of
Charles Darwin but between Hooke and
Darwin's several 18th century French
thinkers played a critical role in
speculating about fossils and finding
ways to calculate the age of the earth
these were the Transformus natural
historians who developed proto
evolutionary theories the Comte de
Buffon for example argued that the earth
was progressively cooling according to
MUFON during this cooling process the
earth underwent phases or epochs which
were roughly parallel with the six
biblical days of creation from the book
of Genesis and since humans only
appeared in the seventh and final epoch
before history of the earth was mostly
pre-human
which was a totally new idea to
determine the age of the earth Buffon
conducted what might be described as
cooling experiments he timed the rate at
which heated balls of different sizes
and materials cooled down publicly
Buffon estimate of the earth was around
75,000 years old but privately based on
his experiments he speculated that it
was up to ten million years old so
although most European geologists in the
1700s were devout Christians they found
like Buffon that the Genesis narrative
could be read as more of a metaphor that
complemented rather than contradicted
scientific evidence this allowed
Christian thinkers to come to terms with
a vast pre-human history still fossils
remained a questionable form of evidence
for understanding the history of the
earth do they represent the remains of
pre-human worlds or were those creatures
still roaming around wild spaces
somewhere George Cuvier thought he had
the answer help us out thought-bubble
Cuvier argued that each epoch of Earth's
history had its own distinctive flora
and fauna and these epochs were
separated by global catastrophes such as
tsunamis meteorites or earthquakes
life-forms did not persist after the
catastrophe he thought they went extinct
with the end of their worlds we call
this theory catastrophism and according
to it fossils reveal
linear sequence which can be used to
reconstruct the Earth's past this wasn't
a new idea in 1696 for example William
Whiston published a new theory of the
earth from its original to the
conservation of all things and in it he
attempted to explain the history of
Earth in terms of catastrophes - like
Whiston thought that a comet hitting the
earth must have caused the flood of Noah
what Cuvier did differently was a mass
fossil evidence of changes in organisms
studying the geology of central France
Cuvier noticed gaps where the fossils
would simply disappear only for new
kinds of fossils to appear a little bit
higher up in new layers of rock he
recognized these gaps as extinction
events some make things easier cuvee I
decided to focus on really big bones
Mastodon and mammoth skeletons he
figured that these animals would be hard
to miss if they were still roaming the
earth spoiler they were in fact extinct
but Cuvier compared the teeth of
elephants and those of other animals
like them and in doing that he
established that African and Indian
elephants are different species and that
mammoths were not the same thing as
either of thanks thought-bubble
now how did Cuvier get all of these
fossils well the new Revolutionary
Government in Paris secured Cuvier a
position at the Museum of Natural
History which gave him the power to
establish a global fossil delivery
service for other natural philosophers
so those big mastodon fossils that he
studied came from North America and it's
worth pointing out that because of that
Cuvier became fascinated with Native
American ideas about creation and
extinction he went out of his way to buy
fossils from tribes such as the Iroquois
Shawnee and Lenape to learn what they
thought about these old gigantic bones
in the ground
Cuvier couldn't have come up with new
theories about fossils or even collected
so many fossils without the help of many
indigenous knowledge makers so by 1800
or so geologists had reached a consensus
on some wild ideas the earth had
undergone gradual change over an
incredible amount of time before the
appearance of humans and Earth's history
was punctuated by sudden episodes of
violent change life had either adapted
to new environments or gone extinct and
so the fossil record was progressive
wimpy little trilobite died out and the
hume
came into the story at the end ready to
build robot musicians but not everybody
loved cuvee A's theories Scottish
geologist - Charles Lyell instead argued
for a slow steady state theory of
geological change that would become
known as uniformitarianism he famously
had two specific bones to pick with
Cuvier first wild thought the French had
relied too much on catastrophes to
explain geological history
he argued that observable geological
processes like erosion and deposition
caused by winds rivers or rain or the
occasional volcanic eruption were the
only explanations that geologists should
consider reasonable or scientific second
Lyell argued that extinctions were
spread evenly across geological time not
clustered together in mass extinction
events this steady extinction rate was
balanced he thought by the study
creation of new species according to
global climate conditions
so for Lyell geo history wasn't linear
but cyclical and uniform it pretty much
worked the same in each epoch miles big
book principles of geology published
from 1830 to 1833 became a Principia for
earth scientists and I should note here
that we've been saying Principia for the
whole history of science so far but one
of our writers is in the room and has
told us it's Principia in principles of
geology he argued that the earth is
immensely old and that as he put it the
present is the key to the past the
debate between catastrophism and
uniformitarianism would go on for a long
time but while a ELLs position on
extinctions was dismissed by older
geologists as too extreme his emphasis
on the power of gradual change inspired
many younger scientists one of them was
Charles Darwin who read Lyle's books and
later became his good friend Ohio could
never quite figure out how fossils and
living organisms were related but like
for now get out of here Chuck we're
gonna get to you in a couple of episodes
another influence on Darwin in the realm
of fossil collecting was Oxford
geologist William Buckland Buckland that
led trips to caverns and abandoned mines
where he found remains like cave bear
bones from the Pleistocene for evidence
of even more ancient life we turned to
English paleontologist Mary Anning
anning walked the beaches after storms
to find and excavate fossils which she
then sold mostly to Buckland in 1811 she
even found a spectacularly
well-preserved
ik Thea sore Anning was a keen observer
and a talented nature writer an 1830
painting of ancient Dorset based on her
work brings to life an entire Jurassic
world Universal Studios please don't sue
me
filled with marine and flying reptiles
in the vision of Buckland and Anning the
reptilian past was separated from the
modern world by the flood after which
humans were created the new theories
about the earth circa 1800 all required
what is perhaps the most important idea
of earth science deep time or geological
time this is the notion that before
humans the earth had already been around
for an unimaginably long time and this
great expanse of time is like human
history full of sudden events and
patterns that persist over epochs so
deep time implies that geo history can
be reconstructed in the same way that
historians reconstruct the human past
except instead of relying on vases ruins
and letters geo historians rely on
fossils volcanoes and rocks this
epistemic mode of thinking about the
Earth's history emerged thanks to the
techne industrializing Europe and so the
Earth Sciences became more regular as
professions in the late 1700s and early
1800s in industrializing nations
governments and landowners started
investing in geological surveys and
mining academies and these academies
earth scientists were trained to
generate new ways to satisfy a world
increasingly dependent on one mineral
resource coal new visual technologies
for geological mapping and a new system
for tracking rock groupings across vast
distances emerged from the works of
Abraham Gottlob Verner and his students
at the mining Academy in Freiburg
Germany in the 1770s in Britain mineral
surveyors in civil engineers such as
William Smith and John ferry started
using fossils to improve the accuracy of
geological maps this technique soon
became standard practice Smith was also
one of the first people to use a
thematic map a map showing something
about the earth other than its shape to
classify different rocks
Britain and he was one of the first to
use fossils to map rock formations for
practical ins like civil engineering and
mineral prospecting his maps were hugely
useful to geologists reconstructing the
Earth's history
they helped fossil hunters arrange their
finds according to rock strata and thus
age innovations created by Smith and
others like him set off a wave of
geological exploration around the world
backed by governments and industries and
by the early 1800s the industrial world
was gobbling up coal at an unprecedented
pace quick note that this episode would
not have been possible without the
expert advice of gustav lester a PhD
candidate in the Department of the
history of science at a Harvard
University
thanks Gustav next time the history of
technology is gonna get steamy that's
right it's the Industrial Revolution
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