ABSTRACT
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, northern Europe had become the hub of a slowly developing world economy. The scientific advances of the Italian astronomer Galileo and the Englishman Isaac Newton encouraged a growing belief that humanity had progressed through time. This viewpoint did not lead to evolutionary theories of human history; these came into being as part of the Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century, headed by French scholars such as Voltaire, and through the thinking of Scottish thinkers like John Locke and the notorious Lord Monboddo, who boldly declared that humans and orangutans belonged to the same species. This chapter examines ideas of human progress and how they affected thinking about the prehistoric past.
