John Frere

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For the English poet and diplomat, see John Hookham Frere.

John Frere (1740–1807) was an English antiquary and a pioneering discoverer of Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic tools in association with large extinct animals at Hoxne, Suffolk in 1797.

Frere was born in Roydon Hall, Norfolk. In 1766, Frere received his MA from Gonville and Caius College and subsequently held several political offices.

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 the Royal Society and to conduct excavations at Diss, near his home. According to paleoanthropologist 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.^[1]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past: An Autobiography, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984, p. 15.

[edit] External links

• Information on Frere and his relatives
• Stone tools excavated by Frere