Louis Laurent Gabriel de MortilletBorn 29 Aug 1821; died 25 Sep 1898 at age 77.French anthropologist who was the first to organize man's prehistoric cultural developments into a sequence of epochs. Based on the idea that older specimens of man were more primitive structurally and culturally, he created a ladder-like model of the evolution of man. This model was the basis for the idea of linear evolution of men. This classification system was further detailed in 1882, in Le Prehistorique: antiquite de l'homme (The Prehistoric: Man's Antiquity). His classification system continued to be the basis for anthropological classification into the 1900's. For example, he ordered the Paleolithic (Stone Age) epochs into Chellean, Acheulian, Mousterian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and so on. |
