JOHN LUBBOCK WAS the Richard Dawkins of his day. He was one of Darwin’s earliest and closest adherents, and set himself up as an ‘expositor of science’ and ‘mentor to the general public’. Of all the great range of hs polymathic works whch crowded the shelves of booksellers, none was more influential than Prehistoric Times (1865). In it he propounded a cultural counterpart of the theory of evolution: Tasmanians and Fuegians were ‘to the antiquary what the opossum and the sloth’ were to biologists – throwbacks to an earlier phase, living evidence (albeit doomed to extinction) of the antiquity of humankind and of the savagery of archaic humans. Despite his revulsion fiom ‘rude’ humanity, Lubbock remained a liberal and a philanthropist: he took the title of Lord Avebury fiom the site of the famous megaliths, which he saved for the nation by purchasing them when they were due for demolition.

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