BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Back in 2010, Radio 4 and the British Museum

embarks on what was to become a remarkable project, a history of the world. A history of the world based not

on written texts, but on what objects communicate to us across time.

In these programs, I'm traveling back in time and across the globe.

To see how we humans over 2 million years have shaped our world and been shaped by it.

And I'm going to tell this story exclusively through the things that humans have made. All sorts of things,

carefully designed and then either admired and preserved or used broken and thrown away.

I've chosen just a hundred objects from different points on our journey

from a cooking pot to a golden galleon

from a stone age tool to a credit card and in each program I'm going to be talking about one object from the

British Museum's collection.

When I see it, I immediately think all a mastery of technology and out the welding of the two.

I just thought it was beautiful to look at that made me feel that it was used and used again and again.

Holding this, I can feel what it was like to be out on the African

Svanas. You knew that this was a statement of your own subordination.

A history of the world, in a hundred objects.

The idea caught on. There were tens of millions of downloads and in the decade since then countless other histories in a hundred

objects appeared. Even on Radio 4, a history of Ambridge and

the Archers in a hundred objects. But those ten years have also been turbulent and tragic ones.

A journey through a frozen ocean transformed into slush.

This is the high Arctic, where temperatures are rising and the ice is stirring.

...