- John Frere
John Frere (
10 August 1740 –12 July 1807 ) was an English antiquary and a pioneering discoverer ofOld Stone Age orPalaeolithic tools in association with large extinct animals atHoxne ,Suffolk in 1797.Frere was born in Roydon Hall,
Norfolk . In 1766, Frere received his MA fromGonville and Caius College , where he was Second Wrangler and was elected to a fellowship. He subsequently held several political offices, and was aMember of Parliament from 1799 to 1802.An interest in the past, instigated by observing worked stone tools in a clay mining pit, led him to become a Fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries of London and theRoyal Society and to conduct excavations at Diss, near his home. According topaleoanthropologist Mary Leakey , he wrote a letter to the Society of Antiquaries about flint blades and large bones of extinct animals that he had found at a depth of approximately twelve feet (four meters) in a hole that had been dug by local bricklayers, and he described them as "...weapons of war, fabricated by a people who had not the use of metals... The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world..." The Society published the letter in 1800, but his interpretation was so radical by the standards of his day that it was overlooked for six decades. Mary Leakey was a direct descendant of John Frere on her mother's side. [Mary Leakey, "Disclosing the Past: An Autobiography", Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984, p. 15.]Notes and references
*Robert Beatson, "A Chronological Register of Both Houses of Parliament" (London: Longman, Hurst, Res & Orme, 1807) [http://books.google.com/books?vid=024wW9LmFc5kXY0FI2&id=Gh2wKY2rkDUC&printsec=toc&dq=Return+of+Members+of+Parliament&as_brr=1&sig=SK5GVtGLfWQ9ovZDbyZObAyIO5I#PPP9,M1]
* "Dictionary of National Biography"
*External links
* [http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~sfreer/jfrere.html Information on Frere and his relatives]
* [http://www.bookrags.com/sciences/sciencehistory/john-frere-discovers-prehistoric-to-scit-041.html Stone tools excavated by Frere]
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