Frere, John (1740–1807)

English antiquary. A pioneering discoverer of the Palaeolithic era (Old Stone Age), he found flint weapons in association with large extinct animals 3.5 m/12 ft below ground in a brick pit at Hoxne, Suffolk, in 1797. He suggested (long before the English scientist Charles Darwin) that they predated the conventional biblical timescale.

Frere was high sheriff of Suffolk, member of Parliament for Norwich, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His views were not taken seriously by his contemporaries, who believed in the creation as described in the Bible, and perhaps accepted the timescale formulated by the archbishop of Armagh, James Usher, in which humans were created on 23 October 4004 BC.