Thank you're for downloading this podcast of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.

Imagine you're in a green landscape studded with trees and bushes.

You're working as one of a team of hunters quietly stalking a herd of mammoths.

One of the mammoths you hope is going to be your supper.

You're clutching a light spear with a sharp pointed stone at the end of it. You get closer, you hurl your spear, and it misses.

The mammoth you wanted to kill snaps the shaft under its foot. That spear is useless now.

You take another one and you move on and you leave behind you

on the ground something that's not just a killing tool that failed but a thing

that's going to become a message across time. Because thousands of years after the mammoth trod on your spear. Humans will find that pointed stone spearhead and know

that their ancestors were in this place far earlier than anyone had imagined.

It looks so tiny and thin it's only sort of two or three inches in length.

These are people on the move explorers and I can really feel quite a bit of empathy with what it must have been like to enter country

that nobody had told you about, that nobody had actually been in before you.

It's 13,000 years ago, and you're in America.

A history of the world, in a hundred objects.

A history of the world, in a hundred objects. Clovis Spear Point, made of stone, 13,000 years old and found in Arizona, United States of America.

things that are thrown away or lost can tell us as much about the past as any object carefully preserved for posterity. Broken things tell poignant stories. In fact, mundane everyday items

discarded long ago as rubbish are as much a defining characteristic of being

human as great art.

And these modest but essential things can tell us some of the most important stories of all

in human history. In the case of this

program how modern humans, the toolmakers and the artists we've been following this

...