Bird-shaped Pestle

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Neil MacGregor continues his retelling of human history using 100 selected objects from the British Museum. This week he explores the profound changes that humans experienced at the end of the Ice Age. By this period, humanity is reconsidering its place in the world and turning its attention to food, power, worship, and human relationships. But then, as now, one of the most important parts of human existence was finding enough food to survive. Taking a pestle from Papua New Guinea as an example, Neil asks why our ancestors decided to grow and cook new foods. The answer provides us with a telling insight into the way early humans settled on the land. Becoming farmers and eating food that was harder for other animals to digest made us a formidable force in the food chain. The impact on our environment of this shift to cookery and cultivation is still being felt. Neil is joined by Indian food writer Madhur Jaffrey, campaigner Sir Bob Geldof and archaeologist Professor Martin Jones

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. Lunch here at the British Museum's staff canteen has always been a pretty international affair. It's not just
0:24.8	the scholars and the curators who come from all around the world, it's also of
0:28.8	course the food. As today is one of my healthy days I I'm at the salad bar looking in among the greens at a fairly standard run of potato salad, rice, sweet corn and kidney beans.
0:42.0	What I find interesting about these vegetables is not just that they come originally from all over the world,
0:48.0	but that none of them would exist in the form they do today if the plants they come from hadn't been carefully
0:54.6	chosen, cherished and modified in a long process that began about 10,000 years ago with
1:01.0	some intrepid and ingenious Ice Age cooks.
1:06.0	Everyone did these things and the families existed as families because you did it not for yourself but for the family.
1:15.2	We needed some new evolutionary tricks in order to spread out into increasingly hostile environments.
1:55.0	A history of the world, in a hundred objects. Bird-shaped pestle made of stone four to eight thousand years old discovered in Papua New Guinea. beginning. In previous programs, we've looked at how our ancestors moved around the world.
2:02.0	In this week's programs programs I'm going to be
2:04.3	focusing on what happened when they settled down. This is a week full of ancient
2:09.4	animals, powerful gods, dangerous weather, good sex and even better food. Around 11,000 years ago, the world underwent a violent and rapid period of climate change,
2:31.0	leading to the end of the last ice age.
2:34.7	Temperatures increased by as much as 7 degrees centigrade in 100 years, and sea levels
2:39.2	rose by over 100 meters.
2:42.0	Ice turned to water, snow gave way to grass, and the result
2:45.7	were slow but profound changes in the way that humans lived. Over the course of this
2:51.6	week I'd be covering about 7,000 years of human history
2:55.8	when as the Ice Age ended people in many different parts of the world began to breed
3:00.7	animals, grow plants and eat differently.
3:04.6	Ten thousand years ago the sound of daily life began to change across the world, as the rhythms of grinding and pounding prepare the new foods that were going to change our diets and our landscapes. For a long time our ancestors
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