title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" is ABC's first attempt at a traditional late-night talk show since its attempt to revive "The Dick Cavett Show" in the 1980s. ABC had earlier attempted to directly compete with NBC's "Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" in the 1960s and 1970s with "The Les Crane Show", which was more of a serious interview program than light entertainment, "The Joey Bishop Show" (1967–1969), featuring Rat Pack member Joey Bishop with Regis Philbin as sidekick, the original "Dick Cavett Show" (1969–1975) with Dick Cavett in a show that featured a mixture of cultural, popular entertainment and intellectual figures and was considered more highbrow than Carson and even a short-lived revival of NBC's "Tonight Starring Jack Paar" under the name "Jack Paar Tonite", which alternated weeks with Cavett in 1973. While Cavett was the longest-lasting and best remembered of these attempts, none seriously threatened the domination of the "Tonight Show". ABC's long-running "Nightline" series which premiered in 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis and continued at 11:30 until 2013 was able to compete with the "Tonight Show", however, particularly on days when there were major news events or ongoing crises. The growth and development of cable news and the emergence of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle eroded "Nightline"s originally unique, and later preeminent position as a source for late evening national and international news and its value as a counterprogramming against "Tonight" and other late-night talk shows. As a result, in 2012, "Nightline" switched places on ABC's schedule with "Jimmy Kimmel Live!". At the start of 2019, when Hearst Television's newest affiliation agreement for their ABC affiliates kicked in and forced them to give up their ability to delay the program for extended local newscasts or syndicated programming, the show now airs across the network on most stations at 11:35 p.m. ET/10:35 p.m. CT.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Despite its name, the show has not regularly aired live since 2004, when censors were unable to properly bleep censor a barrage of swearing from actor Thomas Jane. For special nights such as the Oscar show, it does air live, but with a broadcast delay of a few seconds.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: The show's house band is Cleto and the Cletones, led by saxophonist Cleto Escobedo III, a childhood friend of Kimmel. The other "Cletones" of the band are Cleto Escobedo Jr., the bandleader's father, on tenor and alto saxophone, Jeff Babko on keyboards, Toshi Yanagi on guitar, Jimmy Earl on bass, and Jonathan Dresel on drums. Like other talk shows with live bands, Cleto and the Cletones play the show's opening and closing themes and play into and out of commercial breaks. (They usually play through the entire break for the studio audience.) The show's opening theme was written by Les Pierce, Jonathan Kimmel and Cleto Escobedo III and sung by Robert Goulet.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: The show originally had guest co-hosts each week who would sit at the desk with Kimmel and participate in skits and questioning each night's guests. The show also featured guest announcers, until comedian Andy Milonakis took over as the show's announcer from late 2003 to 2004. He would also appear in comedy bits for the show. Then in 2004, Mighty Mighty Bosstones singer Dicky Barrett took over as the show's announcer when the Bosstones went on hiatus. The band has since become active again, and performed live on the show in 2009.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Francis "Uncle Frank" Potenza, Kimmel's real-life uncle, served as a security guard for the show, and appeared regularly in bits on-camera with Kimmel and other employees of the show. He was a New York City police officer and a personal security guard for Frank Sinatra. Potenza did not appear regularly from December 2009 through March 2010, due to illness. (In the interim, he did appear on the seventh anniversary show on January 26, 2010.) However, he later returned as a semi-regular. Potenza died on August 23, 2011, at the age of 77.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Guillermo Rodriguez is the parking lot security guard for the show, and frequently serves as a celebrity gossip correspondent in a segment called "Guillermo's Hollywood Round-Up." Veatrice Rice was another parking lot security guard who had several of her own segments on the show until her death from cancer on January 21, 2009.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Frequently at the end of the show, Kimmel thanks the guests as usual, but then adds, "Our apologies to Matt Damon, we ran out of time." Kimmel told TMZ.com that he says this "for no good reason at all," continuing, "A star like Matt Damon would never be scheduled to appear near the end of the show where he can be bumped." Damon told "Parade" magazine that Kimmel said he first did it at a low moment at the end of a show which had substandard guests. The show's producer liked the joke, and Kimmel continued to do it on subsequent shows for their amusement.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: “The first time I met Jimmy was when I went to do the prime-time show. For a year he’d been saying, ‘My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.’ So he came backstage, and I asked him what that was about. And he was like, ‘You want to know what happened? I was doing a particularly lame show; I think my guests were a ventriloquist and a guy in a monkey suit. We were wrapping it up, and there was a smattering of applause in the audience. I was having kind of a low moment, and I just said, ‘My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.’ My producer was right off camera and he doubled over laughing. It was just gallows humor. Nobody else got the joke. But it made us laugh, so we started doing it every night. I have no idea why I said you; it could have been anybody.’" - Matt Damon


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On September 12, 2006, Damon appeared on the show. A montage of clips demonstrating the numerous times Kimmel performed the bit was shown and, after a very lengthy introduction by Kimmel, Damon appeared on stage. After a few seconds, Kimmel apologized and stated that the show was out of time. He asked Damon if he could return the next night, to which Damon replied, "Go f**k yourself." An infuriated Damon continued to curse at Kimmel throughout the rolling of the credits, ultimately slapping the desk and walking off the set. In the December 17, 2006, issue of "USA Weekend", Kimmel acknowledged that the Damon incident was a joke. In the show which aired on June 5, 2007, Kimmel sent his sidekick Guillermo to the "Ocean's Thirteen" premiere to interview Damon, though when he started the interview, he said that they were out of time, at which point Damon assumed that Kimmel sent him. In the August 2, 2007, episode, Kimmel then announced that Guillermo was taking on the role of Jason Bourne, who was played by Damon, for "The Bourne Ultimatum". A clip was shown in which Guillermo was playing Bourne, until Damon showed up and thought that Kimmel was now trying to bump him from his movie. Damon tried to chase Guillermo but Guillermo slapped him and jumped through a wall. In Kimmel's 2010 post-Oscar show, he featured a clip called "The Handsome Men's Club," which ended with Damon telling Kimmel, "We're all out of time," then bursting into evil laughter after Kimmel was ejected from the club for not being handsome enough. However, it turned out to be a dream, as he wakes up next to Ben Affleck.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Damon was part of the all-star cast assembled by Kimmel for his 2012 Oscars parody, which was a mock trailer for a non-existent blockbuster called "Movie: The Movie". Damon appears briefly in a full grape suit, only to be informed his scene had been cut from the "film" after which he is shown storming out of the studio (as part of the trailer), cursing at Kimmel. In the mock trailer for the sequel, 'Movie: The Movie 2', Damon appears again as an alien who is munching on a sandwich only to think he is munching something else. He walks out cursing Kimmel again. However, it later shown to just be a toy.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In August 2013, Guillermo crashed a Matt Damon interview, about his upcoming movie "Elysium", by promoting his own movie called "Estupido", about a stupid man, which poster had an arrow pointing towards Matt Damon. At the end of the interview, Matt removed the poster, revealing on the other side the name of another Guillermo movie called "Ass Face", also with an arrow pointing towards Matt. Matt accuses Guillermo of acting on Kimmel's orders and, facing the camera, starts to say "you...", at which time it cuts to Guillermo's promo which ends with Matt's face turning into an ass.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In February 2014, Damon was invited with the cast of "The Monuments Men". Damon sat in another seat. A fake fire was activated at the end of the show when Kimmel asked Damon a question.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: During Kimmel's 2016 post-Oscar special, Ben Affleck wore a very large coat for his appearance, and Damon emerged from the coat for the interview. However, he was removed from the studio by an enraged Kimmel, who then moved on to interview Affleck. Later, Damon appeared in a sketch about the movie that Affleck stars in, "," reprising his role as astronaut Mark Watney.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: When Kimmel hosted the 89th Academy Awards on February 26, 2017, he renewed his feud with Damon, first in a skit harshly criticizing Damon's film "We Bought a Zoo", having the announcer introduce him as only the unnamed "guest" of Ben Affleck, and personally conducting the orchestra to play him off while Damon was talking (before announcing the nominees and award winner).


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On an appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon", Damon praised Fallon for his speedy invitation process, which Kimmel poked fun of.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic when Kimmel was hosting the show from his house, Damon emerged from one of Kimmel's bedrooms, revealing to have been there during the whole pandemic and demanded to be on the show, when Kimmel wanted to take a break. Then it was revealed Kimmel's wife, had been cheating on him with Damon again. This resulted in Kimmel telling Damon he is not on the show.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On April 1, 2022, with Jimmy Fallon hosting in place of Kimmel for April Fools' Day, Fallon announced Matt Damon as a guest on the show. Instead, Justin Timberlake emerged wearing Boston Red Sox apparel and carrying a Dunkin' Donuts coffee cup, loosely in character as Matt Damon. The interview ended with Timberlake spray painting "I <3 Matt Damon" on the front of Kimmel's desk.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In a segment that aired on January 31, 2008, Kimmel's then long-time girlfriend Sarah Silverman appeared on the show and announced, via a music video, that she had been "fucking Matt Damon." Damon took an additional jab at Kimmel's long running gag by telling Kimmel at the end of the video, "Jimmy, we're out of time. Sorry."


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On February 24, on Kimmel's third post-Oscar show, he debuted his rebuttal video, announcing that he was doing the same to Ben Affleck. Kimmel introduced his star-studded musical by addressing Damon and vowing, "You take something I love from me, I’m gonna take something you love from you." Affleck is Damon's longtime acting and writing collaborator; the two first became prominent as such for "Good Will Hunting" and later channeled this collaboration into "Project Greenlight".


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In addition to Affleck, the video featured Robin Williams, Don Cheadle, Harrison Ford, William Shatner, Hynden Walch, Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, Benji Madden and Joel Madden from Good Charlotte, Dicky Barrett, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Lance Bass, Dominic Monaghan, Meat Loaf, Pete Wentz, Joan Jett, Huey Lewis, Perry Farrell, Macy Gray, Rebecca Romijn, Josh Groban, Jessica DiCicco, and unnamed choir singers as recording booth singers, along with Brad Pitt as a delivery man. The video gained widespread media attention, with Kimmel jokingly telling the "New York Times," "Every once in a while, Hollywood rallies itself for a worthy cause." On its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, "Entertainment Weekly" put Damon as an action star at No. 60 and the Silverman video on No. 62, writing, "A talk-show host's famous comedian girlfriend confesses in a catchy song that she's shtupping No. 60? Yeah, that'll go viral."


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: For the 10th anniversary episode on January 24, 2013, Damon took over hosting duties; for the occasion, the show was renamed "Jimmy Kimmel Sucks!" The episode began with a sequence of clips showing Kimmel "bumping" Damon, and continued with Damon taking command of the show, while Kimmel was tied to a chair and gagged for the remainder of the episode. Damon then replaced Guillermo with Andy Garcia and bandleader Cleto with Sheryl Crow, before bringing in Robin Williams to do the monologue.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: The show had numerous guests, including Nicole Kidman, Gary Oldman, Amy Adams, Reese Witherspoon, Demi Moore, and Sarah Silverman, along with an on-screen cameo by Ben Affleck during Damon's monologue. There were also numerous taped pieces congratulating Damon on hosting, including by Jennifer Lopez, Sally Field, John Krasinski, Robert De Niro, Don Cheadle, Oprah Winfrey, and Kimmel's parents. Damon also "revealed" that Kimmel keeps "bumping" Damon out of jealousy: a clip shows Kimmel's unsuccessful attempts to audition for all movie roles that Damon played. At the episode's end, Damon turns the "We ran out of time" joke on Kimmel after asking Kimmel if he had anything to say. The episode was the highest-rated late night show that evening, and ABC elected to rebroadcast it in primetime the following week.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: During the 2010 "Tonight Show" conflict, Kimmel donned a gray wig and fake chin, performing his entire January 12, 2010, show in character as Jay Leno. With his bandleader, Cleto Escobedo, parodying Leno's bandleader Kevin Eubanks, Kimmel started out his monologue with "It’s good to be here on ABC. Hey, Cleto, you know what ABC stands for? Always Bump Conan." He also referenced the "People of Earth" letter written by Conan O'Brien, noting how O'Brien declined to participate in the "destruction" of "The Tonight Show", commenting as Leno that "Fortunately, though, I will! I'll burn it down if I have to!" Leno called Kimmel the next morning to discuss the bit, and at the end of the call, Leno suggested he come over and appear on his show. When his booking department called to confirm his appearance on a "10 at 10" segment, Kimmel agreed immediately. When he received the questions for his January 14 appearance—such as "What's your favorite snack junk food?"—he realized Leno intended to neutralize the scathing parody and paint the two as friends.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Kimmel, however, was upfront with wanting to discuss the fiasco at hand, and upon his appearance, attempted to steer the questions that way: when asked about his favorite prank, he responded, "I think the best prank I ever pulled was, I told a guy once, 'Five years from now I'm going to give you my show.' And then when the five years came, I gave it to him and I took it back, almost instantly." Another example came from when Leno asked, "Ever order anything off the TV?" Kimmel replied, "Like when NBC ordered your show off the TV?"


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Following similar remarks to more questions, Kimmel closed the segment with this comment: "Listen, Jay. Conan and I have children. All you have to take care of is cars! We have lives to lead here! You've got eight hundred million dollars! For God's sakes, leave our shows alone!" Leno never fought back and accepted the bit as comedy (he ascribed it as Kimmel attempting to score some publicity), but Leno's producer, Debbie Vickers, was furious.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Kimmel discussed the appearance during an interview with Marc Maron for the latter's podcast in 2012. Kimmel stated that he felt O'Brien was not given a proper chance, but that he was also motivated by his own history with Leno. According to Kimmel, Leno had some years prior been in serious discussions with ABC about the possibility of jumping ship from NBC. During this period, Leno initiated a friendship with Kimmel, wanting to ensure that they would be on good terms if the move was made. (Under that scenario, Leno would have taken Kimmel's time slot and become his lead-in.) However, after Leno made the arrangement to remain at NBC, "those conversations were gone," according to Kimmel. Realizing that Leno's relationship with him had been artificial, Kimmel felt "worked over," reasoning that Leno was using the ABC discussions as a bargaining tactic to try to get his old job back.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: The stage where the show is taped has gone through many changes, from the addition of a platform in front of the stage for Kimmel to do his monologue, to various stage backgrounds. In January 2005, the show's original set, at the TV studio in the Hollywood Masonic Temple (now known as the El Capitan Entertainment Centre), which had video screens in the background and the band performing on the left side of the stage, was replaced with the current set, which has a city in the background. The band now performs on the right side of the stage.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In the special February 25, 2007, episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" (the second "After the Academy Awards" show), the second set was slightly tweaked when an illustrated picture of a city, which was seen in the background from January 2005 to February 2007, was replaced with a 3D collage of Los Angeles and Hollywood (including the adjacent Dolby Theatre (formerly Kodak Theatre) across from the studio where his show is broadcast from). The 3D image, which was first used during Lionel Richie's outdoor stage performances in the September 16, 2006, episode, was created by artists Colin Cheer and Brian Walters.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: A brand-new set was unveiled January 8, 2013, coinciding with the show's move to the earlier 11:35 p.m. timeslot. The new set is similar to the previous one, though the desk and chairs are no longer a stationary set element, and are only brought out for the guest interviews. Later, the traditional city duratrans was replaced with a large floor-to-ceiling curved video display known as the "Wall of America", which most of the time displays the traditional background, but is now also able to be used for video pieces and bits, along with interviews (including ones where Kimmel is not at his desk; an instance of this was an interview through Cisco's Jabber Guest with actress Viola Davis after the first-season finale of "How to Get Away With Murder" in February 2015 where she was unable to fly to Los Angeles from the East Coast due to weather issues) which are branded under Cisco Systems's telepresence technology. The desk/chairs component of the set is also not permanently staged unlike most talk shows, being quickly built on-stage only after Kimmel has finished his monologue, skits and bits at center stage, a build-out seen every episode in a 'split' commercial break where Kimmel is seen interacting with the audience during it.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: The "Jimmy Kimmel Live Concert Series" segment comprises a musical performance at the end of the show, which is performed either in a more intimate space on the second floor of the Masonic Temple, or a nearby outdoor stage, along with rare on-location performances, and since the pandemic, more often remotely performed. the musical performance was perform by numerous musician including Slayer, Cypress Hill, Backstreet Boys, and Happa-tai from Japanese TV show, Warau Inu. Coors Light sponsored most of the show's musical performances from 2004 to 2006. In June 2005, the show partnered with Pontiac for its concerts, which were held on the "Pontiac Garage" outdoor stage in Hollywood. the "Pontiac Garage" campaign was created Leo Burnett Worldwide for the show including The Super Bowl XL Roadtrip in a Pontiac G6, and the live advertisements to coincide with the launch of the Pontiac G8 (a rebadged Holden VE Commodore). Pontiac was sponsored for 4 years until the sponsor's parent company, General Motors, filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and announced the termination of the brand. Beginning in October 2009, Anheuser-Busch's Bud Light (initially Bud Light Golden Wheat in 2009–10) replaced Pontiac as the segment's sponsor. In January 2013, Sony took over sponsorship. In 2014, AT&T took over sponsorship, then in 2015 Samsung replaced AT&T as the segment's sponsor, in 2016 Cîroc replaced Samsung as the segment's sponsor and in 2017 Mercedes-Benz became the segment's sponsor.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: When the show aired at 12:05 ET, the show began with a two-minute segment before the theme song and actual show. Originally a miniature monologue and preview of the guests, the segment expanded to include miniature skits and other ways to plug a product from one of the show's sponsors. (These, better known as "integrated commercials," are rarely repeated.) The cold open device was later adopted by "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson", and it also remains in use by James Corden for occasional segments for his version. These segments were dropped when the show moved to 11:35. For ABC's O&O stations and some affiliates, Kimmel does tape a promo introducing the night's guests and bits meant to be bedded into a late segment of their local newscasts.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: The show's original opening sequence was a fly around of Hollywood all the way to a shot of Hollywood Boulevard before transitioning to Kimmel entering the theater as he flips the switche from the left side after he was supposed to enter from the right side. It was later changed to a stop-motion piece which showcased Kimmel in casual gear with his dry cleaning stopping at various places in Hollywood until arriving at the theater.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On October 27, 2011, the show introduced a new opening sequence that shows Kimmel zip-lining through Hollywood until he arrives at the theater.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In January 2015, the show premiered a new opening, created by Industrial Light & Magic. The sequence begins with Kimmel turning on the lights of Los Angeles from the Hollywood sign before the background instantly changes to several locations in Los Angeles before transforming into the theater where Kimmel leads the camera in. It was later shortened with the Hollywood sign was already turned on and the background doesn't change. In 2016, after Kimmel grew out his beard, the sequence was modified slightly to remove Kimmel's presence.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: From March to August 2020, during the time the show is filmed from his home, Kimmel's kids created a unique opening sequence.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Starting in late September 2020, upon Kimmel's return to the studio, a picture of the classic 1962 ABC ID, fully recreated to fit the widescreen format, alongside the animated version in the October 30, 2020 episode, was used. It was previously used as a variant with the American flag being shown in the transition from 4:3 to 16:9 in the special episode, "Intermission Accomplished: A Tribute to Trump". The intro has been simplified with the shot of the stage before Jimmy comes to the stage. Starting from May 2021, upon the audience returning, the simplified intro now shows the show's logo from multiple angles.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: However, with every broadcast, the show's announcer, Dicky Barrett, then Lou Wilson starting in 2022, consistently starts off by saying, "From Hollywood, it's Jimmy Kimmel Live! Tonight..." and then listing the show's guests. At the end of the opening, Barrett comes up with a different introduction quip after "And now..." every time such as "without further ado..." or "I warned you..." and finishing with saying "Here's Jimmy Kimmel!" while elongating the "-el" sound just to give the show its own uniqueness. In the Game Night specials, Barrett doesn't do the introduction quips and will say "And now, here's Jimmy Kimmel!". Starting from 2020, Barret, then Wilson, with the latter being shown as he introduces Kimmel to the stage, the introduction quips were removed and will now say "And now, Jimmy Kimmel!". However, from September 2020 to May 2021, Barrett would say "And now, Jimmy Kimmel." to give a lighter tone to what he normally say.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In March 2012, in honor of Twitter's sixth anniversary, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" featured a segment called "Mean Tweets" with celebrities—including Will Ferrell, Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Roseanne Barr, Anna Faris, and Kathy Griffin—reading aloud actual tweets directed toward them by Twitter users while the song "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M. plays in the background. The segment was extremely popular, with more than 38 million views on YouTube by April 2015.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Additional "Mean Tweets" editions have aired, featuring celebrities including Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler, Britney Spears, Sofía Vergara, Jon Hamm, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Aaron Paul, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tim Robbins, Hugh Grant and Bill Murray. The tweets selected for the segment are invariably abusive, vulgar, or rude, often objecting to the celebrity's physical appearance or perceived lack of talent. In many cases, the celebrity is then afforded the opportunity for a brief (albeit scripted) response to the mean tweet. The show has also aired several themed editions of "Mean Tweets," including special NBA, NFL, college football, and music editions. In March 2015, President Barack Obama, who was a guest star, took part in a "President Obama edition" of "Mean Tweets," during which he read tweets from people mocking his jeans and blaming him for the high price of beer. The Obama segment attracted more than 10 million views in one day.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On occasion, Kimmel will introduce a surprise celebrity guest for a live on-stage "Mean Tweet", which was later made into a compilation. Celebrities who appeared on stage include Jeff Bridges, Dwayne Johnson and Halle Berry.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: A Thursday-night segment, which features clips of innocuous television shows (such as newscasts) deliberately edited (typically with bleeps) to make them appear offensive.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Kimmel will give out a challenge to viewers asking them to videotape themselves pulling a prank on a family member or significant other, and then revealing that "Jimmy Kimmel told me to do it". The best clips are then aired on the show.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: A correspondent not seen on camera will ask pedestrians on Hollywood Boulevard a fake question related to an actual current news event. Most of the people answering the question will usually play along, giving the impression that they believe that the so-called fake event really happened.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Kimmel will send a "correspondent" not seen on camera to ask a set of random pedestrians a question related to a certain theme. Kimmel will then have the audience guess the answer to the question, then will reveal the answer to the audience.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: Starting in 2011, every Halloween, Kimmel asks his viewers to take away their children's Halloween candy, videotape their kids' reactions once they tell their kids that they ate their Halloween candy, and post it on YouTube with the respective hashtag. Once his team has compiled all the YouTube videos, he airs them on his broadcast days later. These segments have attracted criticism for potential promotion of emotional abuse.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: This segment, a quiz show between different generations of family members was spun off into its own game show produced by Kimmel and Mark Burnett. Originally ordered in 2019, it premiered on July 7, 2022, and hosted by Kelly Ripa.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: At the end of some shows, there are comedians doing comedy. This is occasionally seen in place of the "Jimmy Kimmel Live Concert Series" segment. Another end-of-show segment is the rarely seen "Future Talent Showcase."


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On April 1, 2022, Kimmel swapped places with Jimmy Fallon as part of an April Fools' Day prank, with Fallon hosting "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" and Kimmel hosting "The Tonight Show".


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" airs worldwide on multiple outlets. In Australia, The Comedy Channel began airing the program in September 2009; however, it was replaced in March 2010 by the return of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." The Comedy Channel resumed airing the program from September 22, 2015.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In Canada, the show previously aired on BiteTV and CHCH. The show aired on Citytv from 2012 until September 20, 2014. Even after its move to 11:35, Citytv continued to tape delay the show to midnight to maintain its hour-long late night newscasts. "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" began airing on CTV Comedy Channel (formerly The Comedy Network) beginning on September 22, 2014, initially airing in simulcast with ABC. However, in January 2015, the program was yet again tape-delayed to midnight in favor of "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore". "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" aired on The Comedy Network until the end of August 2017. The following month, the show was added to CMT Canada's schedule, initially airing in simulcast with ABC. The show aired on CMT Canada until August 2018 and has not aired on a Canadian channel since. However, the show is still available to Canadians through imported ABC stations included in standard pay-TV packages. In 2022, the show returns tape delayed to Citytv.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In India "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" premiered with its 14th season, and has aired on weeknights since at 9:00pm (IST) STAR World India. The show airs 12 hours after the U.S. broadcast since September 23, 2015.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: During Game 2 of the 2004 NBA Finals in Detroit, Kimmel appeared on ABC's halftime show to make an on-air plug for that night's episode. He suggested that if the Detroit Pistons defeated the Los Angeles Lakers, "they're gonna burn the city of Detroit down ... and it's not worth it." Kimmel was referring to the violence that erupted in Detroit after the Tigers won the 1984 World Series. Officials at Detroit's ABC affiliate, WXYZ-TV, immediately announced that night's show would not air on the station. Hours later, ABC officials followed suit and pulled that night's show from the entire network. Kimmel issued a tongue-in-cheek apology at first, saying that if "the Lakers win, I plan to overturn my own car." WXYZ's then-news director Andrea Parquet-Taylor rejected the apology, saying that Kimmel "tried to turn it into another bad joke." Kimmel apologized again, saying he failed to take into account the embarrassment many Detroiters still felt about the 1984 violence. The second apology was enough for ABC to reinstate the program the following evening. Kimmel would later broadcast a series of shows from Detroit in an effort to make amends.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: During the October 16, 2013, episode, Kimmel held the "Kids Table" segment to invite several 6–7-year-old children to discuss the U.S. debt problem: "We owe the Chinese a lot of money, 1.3 trillion dollars." A boy immediately suggested to "kill everyone in China." This comment elicited some laughter from the audience and Kimmel laughed it off and commented, "That's an interesting idea." He later asked, "Should we allow the Chinese to live?" The boy stuck to his answer. The show has drawn fire from offended Asian Americans and Chinese citizens. An online poll showed that 90% of the respondents were angered, saddened or guarded about the show. Overseas Chinese communities and domestic Chinese citizens alike have rallied together and created a petition to the White House and a campaign on Facebook boycotting Kimmel's decision to air the comment on his show and asking that the show be investigated for its promotion of genocide and racism against the Chinese. The petition demanded that ABC should "cut the show and issue a formal apology." The petitioner argued that "[t]he kids might not know any better. However, Jimmy Kimmel and ABC's management are adults. They had a choice not to air this racist program, which promotes racial hatred." Meanwhile, not all viewers of the parody found it objectionable. Gu Xiaoming, a professor at the School of Humanities at Fudan University, believed that some were reading too much into comments from a child, and the show reflected Americans' anxiety on the debt crisis to some extent. The clip of this segment has since been removed from Kimmel's YouTube account, but can still be seen when viewing the entire episode. On November 7, 2013, the White House petition had drawn more than 100,000 signatures. The White House was expected to review the filing and issue some sort of public response for petitions that gather enough support to pass the 100,000 mark. With respect to the petition, White House spokesman said, "Every petition that crosses the threshold will be reviewed by the appropriate staff and receive a response."


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: ABC first sent an apology letter to the 80-20 Initiative, an organization promoting equal opportunities for Asian Americans, for allowing the comment "Kill everyone in China" to air. This letter, signed by ABC senior executives, read in part: "We would never purposefully broadcast anything to upset the Chinese community, Asian community, anyone of Chinese descent or any community at large. Our objective is to entertain." This letter also said that ABC had removed the controversial comment from all media platforms and would remove it from future airing. The chairman of the 80–20 Initiative, S.B. Woo, lodged the protest with ABC after he found out the segment was actually not live, and he considered this apology not a victory at all and could be more satisfactory for Asian-American communities. During the October 28, 2013, episode of his show, Kimmel addressed this issue, stating that "I thought it was obvious that I didn't agree with that statement, but apparently it wasn't, so I just wanted to say, I'm sorry, I apologize."


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: On October 28, 2013, Asian Americans marched through the streets of San Francisco protesting about Kimmel's show and his supposed condoning of genocide. They gathered around ABC headquarters in New York City and demanded a more elaborate apology and that an ABC representative come receive letters of protest. On November 1, 2013, Chinese American demonstrators, mainly from Houston, gathered outside ABC's local office building to protest the offensive skit the show aired "kill everyone in China." The crowds shouted slogans like "Shame on ABC," "Boycott ABC," and "Fire Kimmel". However, protesters were still not satisfied with ABC's apology and organized a nationwide protest against ABC on November 9 in 27 cities, including a rally outside ABC's headquarters in Burbank. The 80–20 initiative, however, accepted ABC's November 8 apology and has said it would like to "build bridges" with ABC.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: During the August 27, 2015, episode, Kimmel made a sketch parody making fun of the YouTube Gaming platform, and the "let's play" culture in general. He received a great deal of criticism from the members of the gaming community on YouTube. At one point, the upload of the sketch was the most disliked video on his channel until November 18, 2021, when YouTube hid the number of dislikes on videos. Kimmel received death threats in the video's comments section, which Kimmel made fun of with two other videos a few days later. The two reaction videos also received negative reception.


title: Jimmy Kimmel Live!

text: In an April 2018 segment, Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump's pronunciation of words while reading to children at an annual White House Easter celebration. The comments offended some viewers who objected to jokes about Trump's Slovenian accent. The comments led to a Twitter feud between Kimmel and pundit Sean Hannity (Hannity called Kimmel a "despicable disgrace" and "ass clown"; Kimmel rejoined that Hannity was the "whole ass circus"). Kimmel made comments about the relationship between Hannity and President Trump. Kimmel later said "By lampooning Sean Hannity's deference to the President, I most certainly did not intend to belittle or upset members of the gay community and to those who took offense, I apologize, I will take Sean Hannity at his word that he was genuinely offended by what I believed and still believe to be a harmless and silly aside referencing our First Lady's accent." Kimmel said that his wife and son were the subjects of "vile" death threats as a result of his comments.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: fantasy film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Jon Turteltaub, and released by Walt Disney Pictures, the team behind the "National Treasure" film series. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel with Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, and Monica Bellucci in supporting roles.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: The film is named after a segment in Disney's non-consecutive film pair the 1940 film "Fantasia" and the 1999 film "Fantasia 2000" called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" starring Mickey Mouse (with one scene being an extensive reference to it), which in turn is based on the late-1890s symphonic poem by Paul Dukas and the 1797 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ballad. Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage), a "Merlinean", is a sorcerer in modern-day Manhattan, fighting against the forces of evil, in particular his nemesis, Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina), while searching for the person who will eventually inherit Merlin's powers ("The Prime Merlinean"). This turns out to be Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel), a physics student, whom Balthazar takes as a reluctant protégé. The sorcerer gives his unwilling apprentice a crash course in the art of science, magic, and sorcery, in order to stop Horvath and Morgana le Fay (Alice Krige) from raising the souls of the evil dead sorcerers ("Morganians") and destroying the world.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" made its premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 8, 2010, and was theatrically released by Disney in the United States on July 14. The film received mixed reviews from critics and was a box office disappointment, grossing only $215 million against a $150 million budget.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: In 740 AD, in England, the mighty magician Merlin has three apprentices; Balthazar Blake, Veronica Gorloisen and Maxim Horvath. Horvath betrays his master by joining forces with the evil sorceress Morgana le Fay. Morgana mortally wounds Merlin before Veronica is able to rip Morgana's soul from her body and absorbs it into her own. As Morgana attempts to kill Veronica by possessing her from within, Balthazar stops her by imprisoning Morgana and Veronica in the "Grimhold", a magic prison in the shape of a nesting doll. Before dying, Merlin gives Balthazar a dragon figurine that will identify the Prime Merlinean, Merlin's descendant and the only one able to defeat Morgana. While he searches for his descendant throughout history, Balthazar imprisons Morganians, sorcerers who try to release Morgana, including Horvath, into successive layers on the Grimhold.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: In 2000, in New York City, the Prime Merlinean is revealed to be 10-year-old Dave Stutler, who encounters Balthazar in his Manhattan antique store, after straying from his school field trip. When Balthazar gives Dave Merlin's dragon figurine, the statue comes to life and wraps itself around the boy's finger to form a ring. When Balthazar goes to retrieve a book meant to teach magic, Dave accidentally opens the Grimhold, releasing the imprisoned Horvath. While battling for possession of the Grimhold, Balthazar and Horvath are imprisoned in an ancient Chinese urn with a ten-year lock curse. Dave is then ridiculed by his classmates when he claims he saw magic, only to find the shop empty. He is faced with severe bullying, and is misdiagnosed with hallucination caused by a "glucose imbalance", whilst nevertheless keeping the ring.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: Ten years later, Dave, now 20 years old, is a physics student at New York University, and meets his childhood crush Becky. He immediately becomes smitten with her, and repairs the transmitting mast of the radio station she works at after it is struck by lightning. The ten-year imprisonment curse of the urn ends, releasing Horvath and Balthazar. Horvath pursues Dave and the Grimhold. Balthazar rescues Dave, riding an animated steel eagle adapted from a Chrysler Building gargoyle. Dave initially refuses to help Balthazar, having been under psychiatric care since their first meeting, until Balthazar agrees to leave after finding the Grimhold. They track the Grimhold to Chinatown, where Horvath has released the next Morganian, Sun Lok. Dave defeats Sun Lok, and Balthazar retrieves the Grimhold. Dave changes his mind, deciding that he likes magic after all, and agrees to become Balthazar's apprentice. He also becomes romantically involved with Becky against Balthazar's wishes and advice, impressing her by playing the OneRepublic song "Secrets" with the Tesla coils he has been experimenting with.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: Horvath enlists a youthful Morganian, celebrity magician Drake Stone to get back the Grimhold. They attempt to kill Dave, but Balthazar saves him. Cued by Horvath, Dave demands to know the truth about Balthazar's quest. Balthazar reveals that Morgana is trapped in the Grimhold with Veronica. Morgana, if freed, would cast a spell called "The Rising", which would revive sorcerers from the dead and enslave mankind. As Prime Merlinian, Dave will become powerful enough to cast spells without his ring (a focus, which for any other magician is the only way to channel their magic), and is the only one who can stop her. Despite Balthazar's disdain of his relationship with Becky, Dave convinces to allow him to meet her for a date. Dave tries to use magic to clean his lab, but loses control of his animated cleaning mops, which forces him to cancel his date with Becky. He is saved because of Balthazar's intervention and, disillusioned, decides to give up on magic, until Becky unknowingly changes his mind. He returns to his underground subway lab, just as Drake and Horvath try to kill Balthazar and steal the Grimhold. Horvath, having no more use for Drake, casts a parasite spell and steals Drake's magic and his ring.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: Horvath releases the witch Abigail Williams, uses her to kidnap Becky at the radio station, then steals her magic and pendant focus. He threatens to kill Becky, therefore forcing Dave to surrender the Grimhold and his ring. Balthazar goes after Horvath in Battery Park, sure that Dave, without his ring, will be killed. Horvath releases Morgana, who begins the Rising Spell while Horvath animates the Charging Bull sculpture and commands it to attack Balthazar. Dave arrives and stuns Horvath with a Tesla coil tied to Balthazar's car while Balthazar's eagle flies away with the bull. Becky disrupts the Rising Spell, stunning Morgana. Balthazar takes Morgana, body and soul, from Veronica into himself, but Morgana escapes and tries to incinerate them. Dave attempts to stop her without his ring and succeeds, proving that he is the Prime Merlinean. Morgana shoots plasma bolts at the three and overwhelming Balthazar and Veronica's shield spells, kills Balthazar when he bodily intercepts a bolt meant for Veronica. Dave makes another, larger Tesla coil out of the square's lamp posts and power lines to overwhelm her and then fires a plasma barrage, which finally destroys her. He revives Balthazar by restarting his heart with plasma shocks, and Balthazar reunites with Veronica. Dave and Becky kiss, and fly to France for breakfast on Balthazar's eagle.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: The basic idea for the film was mostly Nicolas Cage's, who wanted to explore a mystic world and play a character with magical powers, and following a suggestion by his producer friend Todd Garner, decided to make a feature-length movie based upon the "Fantasia" segment of the same name. On February 12, 2007, this film was announced by Disney. References to the original animation include the scene where Dave animates mops to clean his laboratory, and having Mickey Mouse's hat in the post-credits scene.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is set in New York City, and most scenes were shot on location, in places such as Washington Square Park and Chinatown's Eldrige Street. Dave's laboratory was filmed in either an abandoned subway station located under the New York City Hall or a studio recreation of it. The Bedford Armory in Crown Heights held several of the movie's sets, including Dave's laboratory, complete with inactive Tesla coil generators, Drake Stone's penthouse apartment and even part of Chinatown.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: In the early morning hours of May 4, 2009, a Ferrari F430 being driven during filming of a chase sequence, lost control and careened into the window of a Sbarro restaurant in Times Square, injuring two pedestrians, one of whom was struck by a falling lamppost. Filming resumed the following night, when yet another accident occurred. The two accidents were blamed on rain making the roads slick.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: To make the magic more believable, it was decided to have an emphasis on practical, on-set effects, such as making real fire, with fluids or flash powder being used for colored flames. To provide a lighting reference for the plasma bolts, the actors wore gloves with LED displays to make them glow before adding the computer-generated shot. For floating objects, they were either thrown with wires or held by stuntmen wearing green chroma key suits.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 40% based on 174 reviews with an average rating of 5.30/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It has a likable cast and loads of CGI spectacle, but for all but the least demanding viewers, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" will be less than spellbinding." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 46 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: Kirk Honeycutt of "The Hollywood Reporter" has said that ""The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is a tired relic of summer-movie cliches, clearly beaten to death by far too many credited writers." "Chicago Sun-Times" film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of four and wrote "This is a much better film than "The Last Airbender", which is faint praise, but it's becoming clear that every weekend brings another heavily marketed action 'comedy' that pounds tens of millions out of consumers before evaporating".


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" made an opening gross of $3,873,997 on its first day (Wednesday July 14, 2010). It finished at #3 on its first weekend with $17,619,622 behind "Inception" and "Despicable Me" in the U.S. and Canada and gained another $8,928,216 on its first weekend internationally (in 13 countries) for a worldwide opening of $26,547,841. On October 28, 2010, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" closed at the box-office in the United States and Canada with $63,150,991. As of December 12, 2010, it has earned $152,132,612 in other countries totaling $215,283,603 worldwide. Besides the U.S. and Canada, other countries where it grossed more than $10 million were Russia and the CIS ($13,630,194), France and the Maghreb region ($12,930,320) and Japan ($10,632,660). Its largest international weekend was August 13–15, during which it grossed $14,091,169 in 42 countries. It occupies the fourth place on the all-time chart of "Sword and Sorcery" films in the U.S. and Canada, and the third place on the same chart worldwide. In July 2010, "Parade" magazine listed the film #1 on its list of "Worst Box Office Disasters of 2010 (So Far)".


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was released on Blu-ray and DVD on November 30, 2010. It has sold 1,288,735 DVD units (equivalent to $21,609,680) since its release in DVD. Adding in its box-office revenue, the film's earnings sum up to $236,893,283.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was nominated for Choice Summer Movie at the 2010 Teen Choice Awards. It placed one of the Top Box Office Films at the 2011 ASCAP Awards.


title: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010 film)

text: The songs "Secrets" by OneRepublic and "The Middle" by Jimmy Eat World are used in the film but do not appear on the album.


title: Three-age system

text: The three-age system is the periodization of human pre-history (with some overlap into the historical periods in a few regions) into three time-periods: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age; although the concept may also refer to other tripartite divisions of historic time-periods. In history, archaeology and physical anthropology, the three-age system is a methodological concept adopted during the 19th century according to which artefacts and events of late prehistory and early history could be broadly ordered into a recognizable chronology. C. J. Thomsen initially developed this categorization in the period 1816 to 1825, as a result of classifying the collection of an archaeological exhibition chronologically – there resulted broad sequences with artefacts made successively of stone, bronze, and iron.


title: Three-age system

text: The system appealed to British researchers working in the science of ethnology – they adopted it to establish race sequences for Britain's past based on cranial types. Although the craniological ethnology that formed its first scholarly context holds no modern scientific value, the "relative chronology" of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age remains in use in a general public context, and the three-ages concept underpins prehistoric chronology for Europe, the Mediterranean world and the Near East.


title: Three-age system

text: The structure reflects the cultural and historical background of Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East. It soon underwent further subdivisions, including the 1865 partitioning of the Stone Age into Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods by John Lubbock. The schema, however, has little or no utility for establishing chronological frameworks in sub-Saharan Africa, much of Asia, the Americas and some other areas; and has little importance in contemporary archaeological or anthropological discussion for these regions.


title: Three-age system

text: The concept of dividing pre-historical ages into systems based on metals extends far back in European history, probably originated by Lucretius in the first century BC. But the present archaeological system of the three main ages – stone, bronze and iron – originates with the Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, who placed the system on a more scientific basis by typological and chronological studies, at first, of tools and other artifacts present in the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen (later the National Museum of Denmark). He later used artefacts and the excavation reports published or sent to him by Danish archaeologists who were doing controlled excavations. His position as curator of the museum gave him enough visibility to become highly influential on Danish archaeology. A well-known and well-liked figure, he explained his system in person to visitors at the museum, many of them professional archaeologists.


title: Three-age system

text: In his poem, "Works and Days", the ancient Greek poet Hesiod possibly between 750 and 650 BC, defined five successive Ages of Man: Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron. Only the Bronze Age and the Iron Age are based on the use of metal:


title: Three-age system

text: ... then Zeus the father created the third generation of mortals, the age of bronze ... They were terrible and strong, and the ghastly action of Ares was theirs, and violence. ... The weapons of these men were bronze, of bronze their houses, and they worked as bronzesmiths. There was not yet any black iron.


title: Three-age system

text: Hesiod knew from the traditional poetry, such as the "Iliad", and the heirloom bronze artifacts that abounded in Greek society, that before the use of iron to make tools and weapons, bronze had been the preferred material and iron was not smelted at all. He did not continue the manufacturing metaphor, but mixed his metaphors, switching over to the market value of each metal. Iron was cheaper than bronze, so there must have been a golden and a silver age. He portrays a sequence of metallic ages, but it is a degradation rather than a progression. Each age has less of a moral value than the preceding. Of his own age he says: "And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of men, but had died before it came, or had been born afterward."


title: Three-age system

text: The moral metaphor of the ages of metals continued. Lucretius, however, replaced moral degradation with the concept of progress, which he conceived to be like the growth of an individual human being. The concept is evolutionary:


title: Three-age system

text: For the nature of the world as a whole is altered by age. Everything must pass through successive phases. Nothing remains forever what it was. Everything is on the move. Everything is transformed by nature and forced into new paths ... The Earth passes through successive phases, so that it can no longer bear what it could, and it can now what it could not before.


title: Three-age system

text: The Romans believed that the species of animals and humans, were spontaneously generated from the materials of the Earth, because of which the Latin word "mater", "mother", descends to English-speakers as matter and material. In Lucretius the Earth is a mother, Venus, to whom the poem is dedicated in the first few lines. She brought forth humankind by spontaneous generation. Having been given birth as a species, humans must grow to maturity by analogy with the individual. The different phases of their collective life are marked by the accumulation of customs to form material civilization:


title: Three-age system

text: The earliest weapons were hands, nails and teeth. Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire and flame as soon as these were discovered. Then men learnt to use tough iron and copper. With copper they tilled the soil. With copper they whipped up the clashing waves of war, ... Then by slow degrees the iron sword came to the fore; the bronze sickle fell into disrepute; the ploughman began to cleave the earth with iron, ...


title: Three-age system

text: Lucretius envisioned a pre-technological human that was "far tougher than the men of today ... They lived out their lives in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large." The next stage was the use of huts, fire, clothing, language and the family. City-states, kings and citadels followed them. Lucretius supposes that the initial smelting of metal occurred accidentally in forest fires. The use of copper followed the use of stones and branches and preceded the use of iron.


title: Three-age system

text: By the 16th century, a tradition had developed based on observational incidents, true or false, that the black objects found widely scattered in large quantities over Europe had fallen from the sky during thunderstorms and were therefore to be considered generated by lightning. They were so published by Konrad Gessner in "De rerum fossilium, lapidum et gemmarum maxime figuris & similitudinibus" at Zurich in 1565 and by many others less famous. The name ceraunia, "thunderstones", had been assigned.


title: Three-age system

text: Ceraunia were collected by many persons over the centuries including Michele Mercati, Superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden in the late 16th century. He brought his collection of fossils and stones to the Vatican, where he studied them at leisure, compiling the results in a manuscript, which was published posthumously by the Vatican at Rome in 1717 as "Metallotheca". Mercati was interested in Ceraunia cuneata, "wedge-shaped thunderstones", which seemed to him to be most like axes and arrowheads, which he now called ceraunia vulgaris, "folk thunderstones", distinguishing his view from the popular one. His view was based on what may be the first in-depth lithic analysis of the objects in his collection, which led him to believe that they are artifacts and to suggest that the historical evolution of these artefacts followed a scheme.


title: Three-age system

text: Mercati examining the surfaces of the ceraunia noted that the stones were of flint and that they had been chipped all over by another stone to achieve by percussion their current forms. The protrusion at the bottom he identified as the attachment point of a haft. Concluding that these objects were not ceraunia he compared collections to determine exactly what they were. Vatican collections included artifacts from the New World of exactly the shapes of the supposed ceraunia. The reports of the explorers had identified them to be implements and weapons or parts of them.


title: Three-age system

text: Mercati posed the question to himself, why would anyone prefer to manufacture artefacts of stone rather than of metal, a superior material? His answer was that metallurgy was unknown at that time. He cited Biblical passages to prove that in Biblical times stone was the first material used. He also revived the 3-age system of Lucretius, which described a succession of periods based on the use of stone (and wood), bronze and iron respectively. Due to lateness of publication, Mercati's ideas were already being developed independently; however, his writing served as a further stimulus.


title: Three-age system

text: On 12 November 1734, Nicholas Mahudel, physician, antiquarian and numismatist, read a paper at a public sitting of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in which he defined three "usages" of stone, bronze and iron in a chronological sequence. He had presented the paper several times that year but it was rejected until the November revision was finally accepted and published by the academy in 1740. It was entitled "Les Monumens les plus anciens de l'industrie des hommes, et des Arts reconnus dans les Pierres de Foudres." It expanded the concepts of Antoine de Jussieu, who had gotten a paper accepted in 1723 entitled "De l'Origine et des usages de la Pierre de Foudre". In Mahudel, there is not just one usage for stone, but two more, one each for bronze and iron.


title: Three-age system

text: He begins his treatise with descriptions and classifications of the "Pierres de Tonnerre et de Foudre", the ceraunia of contemporaneous European interest. After cautioning the audience that natural and man-made objects are often easily confused, he asserts that the specific ""figures"" or "formes that can be distinguished ("formes qui les font distingues")" of the stones were man-made, not natural:


title: Three-age system

text: It was Man's hand that made them serve as instruments ("C'est la main des hommes qui les leur a données pour servir d'instrumens"...)


title: Three-age system

text: Their cause, he asserts, is "the industry of our forefathers ("l'industrie de nos premiers pères")." He adds later that bronze and iron implements imitate the uses of the stone ones, suggesting a replacement of stone with metals. Mahudel is careful not to take credit for the idea of a succession of usages in time but states: "it is Michel Mercatus, physician of Clement VIII who first had this idea". He does not coin a term for ages, but speaks only of the times of usages. His use of "l'industrie" foreshadows the 20th century "industries", but where the moderns mean specific tool traditions, Mahudel meant only the art of working stone and metal in general.


title: Three-age system

text: An important step in the development of the Three-age System came in the period 1816–1825 when the Danish antiquarian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen was able to use the Danish national collection of antiquities and the records of their finds as well as reports from contemporaneous excavations to provide a solid empirical basis for the system. He showed that artefacts could be classified into types and that these types varied over time in ways that correlated with the predominance of stone, bronze or iron implements and weapons. In this way he turned the Three-age System from being an evolutionary scheme based on intuition and general knowledge into a system of relative chronology supported by archaeological evidence. Initially, the three-age system as it was developed by Thomsen and his contemporaries in Scandinavia, such as Sven Nilsson and J.J.A. Worsaae, was grafted onto the traditional biblical chronology. But, during the 1830s they achieved independence from textual chronologies and relied mainly on typology and stratigraphy.


title: Three-age system

text: In 1816 Thomsen at age 27 was appointed to succeed the retiring Rasmus Nyerup as Secretary of the "Kongelige Commission for Oldsagers Opbevaring" ("Royal Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities"), which had been founded in 1807. The post was unsalaried; Thomsen had independent means. At his appointment Bishop Münter said that he was an "amateur with a great range of accomplishments." Between 1816 and 1819 he reorganized the commission's collection of antiquities. In 1819 he opened the first Museum of Northern Antiquities, in Copenhagen, in a former monastery, to house the collections. It later became the National Museum.


title: Three-age system

text: Like the other antiquarians Thomsen undoubtedly knew of the three-age model of prehistory through the works of Lucretius, the Dane Vedel Simonsen, Montfaucon and Mahudel. Sorting the material in the collection chronologically he mapped out which kinds of artefacts co-occurred in deposits and which did not, as this arrangement would allow him to discern any trends that were exclusive to certain periods. In this way he discovered that stone tools did not co-occur with bronze or iron in the earliest deposits while subsequently bronze did not co-occur with iron – so that three periods could be defined by their available materials, stone, bronze and iron.


title: Three-age system

text: To Thomsen the find circumstances were the key to dating. In 1821 he wrote in a letter to fellow prehistorian Schröder:


title: Three-age system

text: nothing is more important than to point out that hitherto we have not paid enough attention to what was found together.


title: Three-age system

text: we still do not know enough about most of the antiquities either; ... only future archaeologists may be able to decide, but they will never be able to do so if they do not observe what things are found together and our collections are not brought to a greater degree of perfection.


title: Three-age system

text: This analysis emphasizing co-occurrence and systematic attention to archaeological context allowed Thomsen to build a chronological framework of the materials in the collection and to classify new finds in relation to the established chronology, even without much knowledge of their provenience. In this way, Thomsen's system was a true chronological system rather than an evolutionary or technological system. Exactly when his chronology was reasonably well established is not clear, but by 1825 visitors to the museum were being instructed in his methods. In that year also he wrote to J.G.G. Büsching:


title: Three-age system

text: To put artifacts in their proper context I consider it most important to pay attention to the chronological sequence, and I believe that the old idea of first stone, then copper, and finally iron, appears to be ever more firmly established as far as Scandinavia is concerned.


title: Three-age system

text: By 1831 Thomsen was so certain of the utility of his methods that he circulated a pamphlet, ""Scandinavian Artefacts and Their Preservation", advising archaeologists to "observe the greatest care" to note the context of each artifact. The pamphlet had an immediate effect. Results reported to him confirmed the universality of the Three-age System. Thomsen also published in 1832 and 1833 articles in the "Nordisk Tidsskrift for Oldkyndighed", "Scandinavian Journal of Archaeology". He already had an international reputation when in 1836 the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries published his illustrated contribution to "Guide to Scandinavian Archaeology" in which he put forth his chronology together with comments about typology and stratigraphy.


title: Three-age system

text: Thomsen was the first to perceive typologies of grave goods, grave types, methods of burial, pottery and decorative motifs, and to assign these types to layers found in excavation. His published and personal advice to Danish archaeologists concerning the best methods of excavation produced immediate results that not only verified his system empirically but placed Denmark in the forefront of European archaeology for at least a generation. He became a national authority when C.C Rafn, secretary of the "Kongelige Nordiske Oldskriftselskab" ("Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries"), published his principal manuscript in "Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed" ("Guide to Scandinavian Archaeology") in 1836. The system has since been expanded by further subdivision of each era, and refined through further archaeological and anthropological finds.


title: Three-age system

text: It was to be a full generation before British archaeology caught up with the Danish. When it did, the leading figure was another multi-talented man of independent means: John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury. After reviewing the Three-age System from Lucretius to Thomsen, Lubbock improved it and took it to another level, that of cultural anthropology. Thomsen had been concerned with techniques of archaeological classification. Lubbock found correlations with the customs of savages and civilization.


title: Three-age system

text: In his 1865 book, "Prehistoric Times", Lubbock divided the Stone Age in Europe, and possibly nearer Asia and Africa, into the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic:


title: Three-age system

text: By "drift" Lubbock meant river-drift, the alluvium deposited by a river. For the interpretation of Palaeolithic artifacts, Lubbock, pointing out that the times are beyond the reach of history and tradition, suggests an analogy, which was adopted by the anthropologists. Just as the paleontologist uses modern elephants to help reconstruct fossil pachyderms, so the archaeologist is justified in using the customs of the "non-metallic savages" of today to understand "the early races which inhabited our continent." He devotes three chapters to this approach, covering the "modern savages" of the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Western Hemisphere, but something of a deficit in what would be called today his correct professionalism reveals a field yet in its infancy:


title: Three-age system

text: Perhaps it will be thought ... I have selected ... the passages most unfavorable to savages. ... In reality the very reverse in the case. ... Their real condition is even worse and more abject than that which I have endeavoured to depict.


title: Three-age system

text: Sir John Lubbock's use of the terms Palaeolithic ("Old Stone Age") and Neolithic ("New Stone Age") were immediately popular. They were applied, however, in two different senses: geologic and anthropologic. In 1867–68 Ernst Haeckel in 20 public lectures in Jena, entitled "General Morphology", to be published in 1870, referred to the Archaeolithic, the Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic and the Caenolithic as periods in geologic history. He could only have got these terms from Hodder Westropp, who took Palaeolithic from Lubbock, invented Mesolithic ("Middle Stone Age") and Caenolithic instead of Lubbock's Neolithic. None of these terms appear anywhere, including the writings of Haeckel, before 1865. Haeckel's use was innovative.


title: Three-age system

text: Westropp first used Mesolithic and Caenolithic in 1865, almost immediately after the publication of Lubbock's first edition. He read a paper on the topic before the Anthropological Society of London in 1865, published in 1866 in the "Memoirs". After asserting:


title: Three-age system

text: Westropp goes on to define "different epochs of flint, stone, bronze or iron; ..." He never did distinguish the flint from the Stone Age (having realized they were one and the same), but he divided the Stone Age as follows:


title: Three-age system

text: These three ages were named respectively the Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic and the Kainolithic. He was careful to qualify these by stating:


title: Three-age system

text: Their presence is thus not always an evidence of a high antiquity, but of an early and barbarous state; ...


title: Three-age system

text: Lubbock's savagery was now Westropp's barbarism. A fuller exposition of the Mesolithic waited for his book, "Pre-Historic Phases", dedicated to Sir John Lubbock, published in 1872. At that time he restored Lubbock's Neolithic and defined a Stone Age divided into three phases and five stages.


title: Three-age system

text: The First Stage, "Implements of the Gravel Drift", contains implements that were "roughly knocked into shape". His illustrations show Mode 1 and Mode 2 stone tools, basically Acheulean handaxes. Today they are in the Lower Palaeolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: The Second Stage, "Flint Flakes" are of the "simplest form" and were struck off cores. Westropp differs in this definition from the modern, as Mode 2 contains flakes for scrapers and similar tools. His illustrations, however, show Modes 3 and 4, of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. His extensive lithic analysis leaves no doubt. They are, however, part of Westropp's Mesolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: The Third Stage, "a more advanced stage" in which "flint flakes were carefully chipped into shape", produced small arrowheads from shattering a piece of flint into "a hundred pieces", selecting the most suitable and working it with a punch. The illustrations show that he had microliths, or Mode 5 tools in mind. His Mesolithic is therefore partly the same as the modern.


title: Three-age system

text: The Fourth Stage is a part of the Neolithic that is transitional to the Fifth Stage: axes with ground edges leading to implements totally ground and polished. Westropp's agriculture is removed to the Bronze Age, while his Neolithic is pastoral. The Mesolithic is reserved to hunters.


title: Three-age system

text: In that same year, 1872, Sir John Evans produced a massive work, "The Ancient Stone Implements", in which he in effect repudiated the Mesolithic, making a point to ignore it, denying it by name in later editions. He wrote:


title: Three-age system

text: Sir John Lubbock has proposed to call them the Archaeolithic, or Palaeolithic, and the Neolithic Periods respectively, terms which have met with almost general acceptance, and of which I shall avail myself in the course of this work.


title: Three-age system

text: Evans did not, however, follow Lubbock's general trend, which was typological classification. He chose instead to use type of find site as the main criterion, following Lubbock's descriptive terms, such as tools of the drift. Lubbock had identified drift sites as containing Palaeolithic material. Evans added to them the cave sites. Opposed to drift and cave were the surface sites, where chipped and ground tools often occurred in unlayered contexts. Evans decided he had no choice but to assign them all to the most recent. He therefore consigned them to the Neolithic and used the term "Surface Period" for it.


title: Three-age system

text: Having read Westropp, Sir John knew perfectly well that all the former's Mesolithic implements were surface finds. He used his prestige to quell the concept of Mesolithic as best he could, but the public could see that his methods were not typological. The less prestigious scientists publishing in the smaller journals continued to look for a Mesolithic. For example, Isaac Taylor in "The Origin of the Aryans", 1889, mentions the Mesolithic but briefly, asserting, however, that it formed "a transition between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods". Nevertheless, Sir John fought on, opposing the Mesolithic by name as late as the 1897 edition of his work.


title: Three-age system

text: Meanwhile, Haeckel had totally abandoned the geologic uses of the -lithic terms. The concepts of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic had originated in the early 19th century and were gradually becoming coin of the geologic realm. Realizing he was out of step, Haeckel started to transition to the -zoic system as early as 1876 in "The History of Creation", placing the -zoic form in parentheses next to the -lithic form.


title: Three-age system

text: The gauntlet was officially thrown down before Sir John by J. Allen Brown, speaking for the opposition before the Anthropological Institute on 8 March 1892. In the journal he opens the attack by striking at a "hiatus" in the record:


title: Three-age system

text: It has been generally assumed that a break occurred between the period during which ... the continent of Europe was inhabited by Palaeolithic Man and his Neolithic successor ... No physical cause, no adequate reasons have ever been assigned for such a hiatus in human existence ...


title: Three-age system

text: The main hiatus at that time was between British and French archaeology, as the latter had already discovered the gap 20 years earlier and had already considered three answers and arrived at one solution, the modern. Whether Brown did not know or was pretending not to know is unclear. In 1872, the very year of Evans' publication, Gabriel de Mortillet had presented the gap to the Congrès international d'Anthropologie at Brussels:


title: Three-age system

text: Apparently prehistoric man was hunting big game with stone tools one year and farming with domestic animals and ground stone tools the next. Mortillet postulated a "time then unknown ("époque alors inconnue")" to fill the gap. The hunt for the "unknown" was on. On 16 April 1874, Mortillet retracted. "That hiatus is not real ("Cet hiatus n'est pas réel")," he said before the "Société d'Anthropologie", asserting that it was an informational gap only. The other theory had been a gap in nature, that, because of the ice age, man had retreated from Europe. The information must now be found. In 1895 Édouard Piette stated that he had heard Édouard Lartet speak of "the remains from the intermediate period ("les vestiges de l'époque intermédiaire")", which were yet to be discovered, but Lartet had not published this view. The gap had become a transition. However, asserted Piette:


title: Three-age system

text: I was fortunate to discover the remains of that unknown time which separated the Magdalenian age from that of polished stone axes ... it was, at Mas-d'Azil in 1887 and 1888 when I made this discovery.


title: Three-age system

text: He had excavated the type site of the Azilian Culture, the basis of today's Mesolithic. He found it sandwiched between the Magdalenian and the Neolithic. The tools were like those of the Danish kitchen-middens, termed the Surface Period by Evans, which were the basis of Westropp's Mesolithic. They were Mode 5 stone tools, or microliths. He mentions neither Westropp nor the Mesolithic, however. For him this was a "solution of continuity ("solution de continuité")" To it he assigns the semi-domestication of dog, horse, cow, etc., which "greatly facilitated the work of Neolithic man ("a beaucoup facilité la tàche de l'homme néolithique")." Brown in 1892 does not mention Mas-d'Azil. He refers to the "transition or 'Mesolithic' forms" but to him these are "rough hewn axes chipped over the entire surface" mentioned by Evans as the earliest of the Neolithic. Where Piette believed he had discovered something new, Brown wanted to break out known tools considered Neolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: Sir John Evans never changed his mind, giving rise to a dichotomous view of the Mesolithic and a multiplication of confusing terms. On the continent, all seemed settled: there was a distinct Mesolithic with its own tools and both tools and customs were transitional to the Neolithic. Then in 1910, the Swedish archaeologist, Knut Stjerna, addressed another problem of the Three-Age System: although a culture was predominantly classified as one period, it might contain material that was the same as or like that of another. His example was the Gallery grave Period of Scandinavia. It was not uniformly Neolithic, but contained some objects of bronze and more importantly to him three different subcultures.


title: Three-age system

text: One of these "civilisations" (sub-cultures) located in the north and east of Scandinavia was rather different, featuring but few gallery graves, using instead stone-lined pit graves containing implements of bone, such as harpoon and javelin heads. He observed that they "persisted during the recent Paleolithic period and also during the Protoneolithic." Here he had used a new term, "Protoneolithic", which was according to him to be applied to the Danish kitchen-middens.


title: Three-age system

text: Stjerna also said that the eastern culture "is attached to the Paleolithic civilization ("se trouve rattachée à la civilisation paléolithique")." However, it was not intermediary and of its intermediates he said "we cannot discuss them here ("nous ne pouvons pas examiner ici")." This "attached" and non-transitional culture he chose to call the Epipaleolithic, defining it as follows:


title: Three-age system

text: With Epipaleolithic I mean the period during the early days that followed the age of the reindeer, the one that retained Paleolithic customs. This period has two stages in Scandinavia, that of Maglemose and that of Kunda. ("Par époque épipaléolithique j'entends la période qui, pendant les premiers temps qui ont suivi l'âge du Renne, conserve les coutumes paléolithiques. Cette période présente deux étapes en Scandinavie, celle de Maglemose et de Kunda.")


title: Three-age system

text: There is no mention of any Mesolithic, but the material he described had been previously connected with the Mesolithic. Whether or not Stjerna intended his Protoneolithic and Epipaleolithic as a replacement for the Mesolithic is not clear, but Hugo Obermaier, a German archaeologist who taught and worked for many years in Spain, to whom the concepts are often erroneously attributed, used them to mount an attack on the entire concept of Mesolithic. He presented his views in "El Hombre fósil", 1916, which was translated into English in 1924. Viewing the Epipaleolithic and the Protoneolithic as a "transition" and an "interim" he affirmed that they were not any sort of "transformation:"


title: Three-age system

text: But in my opinion this term is not justified, as it would be if these phases presented a natural evolutionary development – a progressive transformation from Paleolithic to Neolithic. In reality, the final phase of the Capsian, the Tardenoisian, the Azilian and the northern Maglemose industries are the posthumous descendants of the Palaeolithic ...


title: Three-age system

text: The ideas of Stjerna and Obermaier introduced a certain ambiguity into the terminology, which subsequent archaeologists found and find confusing. Epipaleolithic and Protoneolithic cover the same cultures, more or less, as does the Mesolithic. Publications on the Stone Age after 1916 include some sort of explanation of this ambiguity, leaving room for different views. Strictly speaking the Epipaleolithic is the earlier part of the Mesolithic. Some identify it with the Mesolithic. To others it is an Upper Paleolithic transition to the Mesolithic. The exact use in any context depends on the archaeological tradition or the judgement of individual archaeologists. The issue continues.


title: Three-age system

text: The post-Darwinian approach to the naming of periods in earth history focused at first on the lapse of time: early (Palaeo-), middle (Meso-) and late (Ceno-). This conceptualization automatically imposes a three-age subdivision to any period, which is predominant in modern archaeology: Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age; Early, Middle and Late Minoan, etc. The criterion is whether the objects in question look simple or are elaborative. If a horizon contains objects that are post-late and simpler-than-late they are sub-, as in Submycenaean.


title: Three-age system

text: Haeckel's presentations are from a different point of view. His "History of Creation" of 1870 presents the ages as "Strata of the Earth's Crust", in which he prefers "upper", "mid-" and "lower" based on the order in which one encounters the layers. His analysis features an Upper and Lower Pliocene as well as an Upper and Lower Diluvial (his term for the Pleistocene). Haeckel, however, was relying heavily on Lyell. In the 1833 edition of "Principles of Geology" (the first) Lyell devised the terms Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene to mean periods of which the "strata" contained some (Eo-, "early"), lesser (Mio-) and greater (Plio-) numbers of "living Mollusca represented among fossil assemblages of western Europe." The Eocene was given Lower, Middle, Upper; the Miocene a Lower and Upper; and the Pliocene an Older and Newer, which scheme would indicate an equivalence between Lower and Older, and Upper and Newer.


title: Three-age system

text: In a French version, "Nouveaux Éléments de Géologie", in 1839 Lyell called the Older Pliocene the Pliocene and the Newer Pliocene the Pleistocene (Pleist-, "most"). Then in "Antiquity of Man" in 1863 he reverted to his previous scheme, adding "Post-Tertiary" and "Post-Pliocene". In 1873 the Fourth Edition of "Antiquity of Man" restores Pleistocene and identifies it with Post-Pliocene. As this work was posthumous, no more was heard from Lyell. Living or deceased, his work was immensely popular among scientists and laymen alike. "Pleistocene" caught on immediately; it is entirely possible that he restored it by popular demand. In 1880 Dawkins published "The Three Pleistocene Strata" containing a new manifesto for British archaeology:


title: Three-age system

text: The continuity between geology, prehistoric archaeology and history is so direct that it is impossible to picture early man in this country without using the results of all these three sciences.


title: Three-age system

text: He intends to use archaeology and geology to "draw aside the veil" covering the situations of the peoples mentioned in proto-historic documents, such as Caesar's "Commentaries" and the "Agricola" of Tacitus. Adopting Lyell's scheme of the Tertiary, he divides Pleistocene into Early, Mid- and Late. Only the Palaeolithic falls into the Pleistocene; the Neolithic is in the "Prehistoric Period" subsequent. Dawkins defines what was to become the Upper, Middle and Lower Paleolithic, except that he calls them the "Upper Cave-Earth and Breccia", the "Middle Cave-Earth", and the "Lower Red Sand", with reference to the names of the layers. The next year, 1881, Geikie solidified the terminology into Upper and Lower Palaeolithic:


title: Three-age system

text: In Kent's Cave the implements obtained from the lower stages were of a much ruder description than the various objects detected in the upper cave-earth ... And a very long time must have elapsed between the formation of the lower and upper Palaeolithic beds in that cave.


title: Three-age system

text: The Middle Paleolithic in the modern sense made its appearance in 1911 in the 1st edition of William Johnson Sollas' "Ancient Hunters". It had been used in varying senses before then. Sollas associates the period with the Mousterian technology and the relevant modern people with the Tasmanians. In the 2nd edition of 1915 he has changed his mind for reasons that are not clear. The Mousterian has been moved to the Lower Paleolithic and the people changed to the Australian aborigines; furthermore, the association has been made with Neanderthals and the Levalloisian added. Sollas says wistfully that they are in "the very middle of the Palaeolithic epoch". Whatever his reasons, the public would have none of it. From 1911 on, Mousterian was Middle Paleolithic, except for holdouts. Alfred L. Kroeber in 1920, "Three essays on the antiquity and races of man," reverting to Lower Paleolithic, explains that he is following Gabriel de Mortillet. The English-speaking public remained with Middle Paleolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: Thomsen had formalized the Three-age System by the time of its publication in 1836. The next step forward was the formalization of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic by Sir John Lubbock in 1865. Between these two times Denmark held the lead in archaeology, especially because of the work of Thomsen's at first junior associate and then successor, Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, rising in the last year of his life to Kultus Minister of Denmark. Lubbock offers full tribute and credit to him in "Prehistoric Times".


title: Three-age system

text: Worsaae in 1862 in "Om Tvedelingen af Steenalderen", previewed in English even before its publication by "The Gentleman's Magazine", concerned about changes in typology during each period, proposed a bipartite division of each age:Both for Bronze and Stone it was now evident that a few hundred years would not suffice. In fact, good grounds existed for dividing each of these periods into two, if not more.


title: Three-age system

text: He called them earlier or later. The three ages became six periods. The British seized on the concept immediately. Worsaae's earlier and later became Lubbock's palaeo- and neo- in 1865, but alternatively English speakers used Earlier and Later Stone Age, as did Lyell's 1883 edition of "Principles of Geology", with older and younger as synonyms. As there is no room for a middle between the comparative adjectives, they were later modified to early and late. The scheme created a problem for further bipartite subdivisions, which would have resulted in such terms as early early Stone Age, but that terminology was avoided by adoption of Geikie's upper and lower Paleolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: Amongst African archaeologists, the terms Old Stone Age, Middle Stone Age and Late Stone Age are preferred.


title: Three-age system

text: When Sir John Lubbock was doing the preliminary work for his 1865 "magnum opus", Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were jointly publishing their first papers On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection. Darwins's On the Origin of Species came out in 1859, but he did not elucidate the theory of evolution as it applies to man until the Descent of Man in 1871. Meanwhile, Wallace read a paper in 1864 to the Anthropological Society of London that was a major influence on Sir John, publishing in the very next year. He quoted Wallace:From the moment when the first skin was used as a covering, when the first rude spear was formed to assist in the chase, the first seed sown or shoot planted, a grand revolution was effected in nature, a revolution which in all the previous ages of the world's history had had no parallel, for a being had arisen who was no longer necessarily subject to change with the changing universe,—a being who was in some degree superior to nature, inasmuch as he knew how to control and regulate her action, and could keep himself in harmony with her, not by a change in body, but by an advance in mind.


title: Three-age system

text: Wallace distinguishing between mind and body was asserting that natural selection shaped the form of man only until the appearance of mind; after then, it played no part. Mind formed modern man, meaning that result of mind, culture. Its appearance overthrew the laws of nature. Wallace used the term "grand revolution". Although Lubbock believed that Wallace had gone too far in that direction he did adopt a theory of evolution combined with the revolution of culture. Neither Wallace nor Lubbock offered any explanation of how the revolution came about, or felt that they had to offer one. Revolution is an acceptance that in the continuous evolution of objects and events sharp and inexplicable disconformities do occur, as in geology. And so it is not surprising that in the 1874 Stockholm meeting of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology, in response to Ernst Hamy's denial of any "break" between Paleolithic and Neolithic based on material from dolmens near Paris "showing a continuity between the paleolithic and neolithic folks," Edouard Desor, geologist and archaeologist, replied: "that the introduction of domesticated animals was a complete revolution and enables us to separate the two epochs completely."


title: Three-age system

text: A revolution as defined by Wallace and adopted by Lubbock is a change of regime, or rules. If man was the new rule-setter through culture then the initiation of each of Lubbock's four periods might be regarded as a change of rules and therefore as a distinct revolution, and so "Chambers's Journal", a reference work, in 1879 portrayed each of them as:...an advance in knowledge and civilization which amounted to a revolution in the then existing manners and customs of the world.


title: Three-age system

text: Because of the controversy over Westropp's Mesolithic and Mortillet's Gap beginning in 1872 archaeological attention focused mainly on the revolution at the Palaeolithic–Neolithic boundary as an explanation of the gap. For a few decades the Neolithic Period, as it was called, was described as a kind of revolution. In the 1890s, a standard term, the Neolithic Revolution, began to appear in encyclopedias such as Pears. In 1925 the Cambridge Ancient History reported:There are quite a large number of archaeologists who justifiably consider the period of the Late Stone Age to be a Neolithic revolution and an economic revolution at the same time. For that is the period when primitive agriculture developed and cattle breeding began.


title: Three-age system

text: In 1936 a champion came forward who would advance the Neolithic Revolution into the mainstream view: Vere Gordon Childe. After giving the Neolithic Revolution scant mention in his first notable work, the 1928 edition of "New Light on the Most Ancient East", Childe made a major presentation in the first edition of "Man Makes Himself" in 1936 developing Wallace's and Lubbock's theme of the human revolution against the supremacy of nature and supplying detail on two revolutions, the Paleolithic–Neolithic and the Neolithic–Bronze Age, which he called the Second or Urban revolution.


title: Three-age system

text: Lubbock had been as much of an ethnologist as an archaeologist. The founders of cultural anthropology, such as Tylor and Morgan, were to follow his lead on that. Lubbock created such concepts as savages and barbarians based on the customs of then modern tribesmen and made the presumption that the terms can be applied without serious inaccuracy to the men of the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Childe broke with this view:The assumption that any savage tribe today is primitive, in the sense that its culture faithfully reflects that of much more ancient men is gratuitous.


title: Three-age system

text: Childe concentrated on the inferences to be made from the artifacts:But when the tools ... are considered ... in their totality, they may reveal much more. They disclose not only the level of technical skill ... but also their economy ... The archaeologists's ages correspond roughly to economic stages. Each new "age" is ushered in by an economic revolution ...


title: Three-age system

text: The archaeological periods were indications of economic ones:Archaeologists can define a period when it was apparently the sole economy, the sole organization of production ruling anywhere on the earth's surface.


title: Three-age system

text: These periods could be used to supplement historical ones where history was not available. He reaffirmed Lubbock's view that the Paleolithic was an age of food gathering and the Neolithic an age of food production. He took a stand on the question of the Mesolithic identifying it with the Epipaleolithic. The Mesolithic was to him "a mere continuance of the Old Stone Age mode of life" between the end of the Pleistocene and the start of the Neolithic. Lubbock's terms "savagery" and "barbarism" do not much appear in "Man Makes Himself" but the sequel, "What Happened in History" (1942), reuses them (attributing them to Morgan, who got them from Lubbock) with an economic significance: savagery for food-gathering and barbarism for Neolithic food production. Civilization begins with the urban revolution of the Bronze Age.


title: Three-age system

text: Even as Childe was developing this revolution theme the ground was sinking under him. Lubbock did not find any pottery associated with the Paleolithic, asserting of its to him last period, the Reindeer, "no fragments of metal or pottery have yet been found." He did not generalize but others did not hesitate to do so. The next year, 1866, Dawkins proclaimed of Neolithic people that "these invented the use of pottery..." From then until the 1930s pottery was considered a sine qua non of the Neolithic. The term Pre-Pottery Age came into use in the late 19th century but it meant Paleolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: Meanwhile, the Palestine Exploration Fund founded in 1865 completing its survey of excavatable sites in Palestine in 1880 began excavating in 1890 at the site of ancient Lachish near Jerusalem, the first of a series planned under the licensing system of the Ottoman Empire. Under their auspices in 1908 Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger began excavation at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) previously excavated for the first time by Sir Charles Warren in 1868. They discovered a Neolithic and Bronze Age city there. Subsequent excavations in the region by them and others turned up other walled cities that appear to have preceded the Bronze Age urbanization.


title: Three-age system

text: All excavation ceased for World War I. When it was over the Ottoman Empire was no longer a factor there. In 1919 the new British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem assumed archaeological operations in Palestine. John Garstang finally resumed excavation at Jericho 1930–1936. The renewed dig uncovered another 3000 years of prehistory that was in the Neolithic but did not make use of pottery. He called it the Pre-pottery Neolithic, as opposed to the Pottery Neolithic, subsequently often called the Aceramic or Pre-ceramic and Ceramic Neolithic.


title: Three-age system

text: Kathleen Kenyon was a young photographer then with a natural talent for archaeology. Solving a number of dating problems she soon advanced to the forefront of British archaeology through skill and judgement. In World War II she served as a commander in the Red Cross. In 1952–1958 she took over operations at Jericho as the Director of the British School, verifying and expanding Garstang's work and conclusions. There were two Pre-pottery Neolithic periods, she concluded, A and B. Moreover, the PPN had been discovered at most of the major Neolithic sites in the near East and Greece. By this time her personal stature in archaeology was at least equal to that of V. Gordon Childe. While the three-age system was being attributed to Childe in popular fame, Kenyon became gratuitously the discoverer of the PPN. More significantly the question of revolution or evolution of the Neolithic was increasingly being brought before the professional archaeologists.


title: Three-age system

text: Danish archaeology took the lead in defining the Bronze Age, with little of the controversy surrounding the Stone Age. British archaeologists patterned their own excavations after those of the Danish, which they followed avidly in the media. References to the Bronze Age in British excavation reports began in the 1820s contemporaneously with the new system being promulgated by C.J. Thomsen. Mention of the Early and Late Bronze Age began in the 1860s following the bipartite definitions of Worsaae.


title: Three-age system

text: In 1874 at the Stockholm meeting of the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology, a suggestion was made by A. Bertrand that no distinct age of bronze had existed, that the bronze artifacts discovered were really part of the Iron Age. Hans Hildebrand in refutation pointed to two Bronze Ages and a transitional period in Scandinavia. John Evans denied any defect of continuity between the two and asserted there were three Bronze Ages, "the early, middle and late Bronze Age".