Subsequently Louis-Laurent-Marie Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-1898), professor of prehistoric anthropology at the School of Anthropology in Paris, published (1882) "Le Prehistorique antiquite de l'homme", in which he was the first to characterize periods by the name of a site. Many of his names are still in use. His first two were Chellean and Acheulean.
Chellean included artifacts discovered at the town of Chelles, a suburb of Paris. They are similar to those found at Abbeville. Later anthropologists substituted Abbevillian for Chellean, which is now not in use at all.
Abbevillian prevailed until the Leakey family discovered older similar artifacts at Olduvai Gorge and promoted the African origin of man. Olduwan then replaced Abbevillian for every other region except Europe. Perhaps the public found it hard to accept an African name for a European tradition or vice versa; in any case, Abbevillian is still used, but only for Europe. It is, however, on the way out.
Mortillet had portrayed his traditions as chronologically sequential. In the Abbevillian, early Palaeolithic man used cores; in the Acheulian, flakes. Olduwan tools, however, indicate that in the earliest Palaeolithic, the distinction between flake and core is smeared. Consequently there is a tendency to view Abbevillian as a phase of Acheulian.
The Abbevillian Type site is on the 150-foot terrace of the River Somme. Tools found there are rough chipped bifacial handaxes made during the Mindel Glaciation of the Pleistocene Ice Age, which covered central Europe between 500,000 and 400,000 years ago.