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As the last Ice Age came to an end, somebody picked a pebble out of a small river not far from Bethlehem.

It's a pebble that must have been tumbled downstream, banged and smoothed against other stones as it went, in a process that geologists poetically

describe as chattering. But about 11,000 years ago, a human hand then shaped and chipped this beautifully

shattered rounded pebble into one of the most moving objects in the British

Museum. It shows two naked people literally wrapped up in each other. It's the oldest

known representation of a couple having sex. Well, it's the classic thing that we always imagine that we discovered sex and that all other ages before us were kind of rather

prudish and simple. Whereas in fact obviously human beings have been emotionally sophisticated since at least 8,000 BC when the sculpture was made,

and just as sophisticated as us, I'm sure.

And I think it's clear that sexuality was a very, very important part of the symbolic and social world.

A history of the world, in a hundred objects. The Einsekri-Lovers, a stone sculpture discovered near Bethlehem, approximately 11,000 years old.

At the end of the last ice age as the climate warmed up across the world, humans

gradually shifted from hunting and gathering to a settled way of life based on

farming. And in the process our relationship to the natural world was transformed.

From living as a minor part of a balanced ecosystem we start trying to overcome nature, to take control. In the Middle East, the warmer weather

brought a spread of rich grasslands. People had been moving around, hunting gazelle, and gathering the seeds of lentils, chickpeas and wild grasses.

But in the new lusher Savannah, Gazelle were plentiful and they tended to stay in one place

throughout the year.

So the humans settled down with them.

And once they were settled, they deliberately collected grass grains still on the stalk.

And by collecting and sewing the seeds they almost inadvertently carried out a very early

kind of genetic engineering. They slowly created the world's great staple crops, wheat and barley. With this more stable life our

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