John Frere was the first to suggest in writing a very ancient date for Acheulean hand-axes. In 1797 he sent two examples to the Royal Academy in London from Hoxne in Suffolk. He had found them in prehistoric lake deposits along with the bones of extinct animals and concluded that they were made by people ""who had not the use of metals"" and that they belonged to a ""very ancient period indeed, even beyond the present world"". His ideas were ignored by his contemporaries however, who held a pre-Darwinian view of human evolution.