Olduvai Handaxe

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, retells two million years of history of human development through the objects it has produced. This programme follows early humans as they slowly begin to move beyond their African homeland taking with them one essential item - a handaxe. In the presence of the most widely used tool humans have created, Neil sees just how vital to our evolution this sharp, ingenious implement was and how it allowed the spread of humans across the globe. Today Neil MacGregor tells the story of the handaxe, with contributions from designer Sir James Dyson and archaeologist Nick Ashton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this podcast of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	What do you take with you when you travel?
0:10.0	Oh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Most of us would embark on a long list of objects that begins with a toothbrush and ends with excess baggage.
0:24.0	But for most of human history, there was only one thing that you really needed in order to travel.
0:31.0	A stone hand axe. Pretty sharp around the edges, isn't it? I think whoever made this
0:37.2	did it very beautifully and carefully. It looks pretty straightforward, but in fact it's extremely tricky to make, and for over a million
0:45.0	years it was literally the cutting edge of technology.
0:49.7	Once they've been invented, if you want to use that word, they just never changed a design, and I think that is the ultimate
0:56.4	compliment to the design of a superb tool.
0:59.4	It accompanied our ancestors through half of their history, and it was the main reason that they spread first across Africa and then across the world.
1:09.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects.
1:14.0	Stone hand axe.
1:17.0	Stone hand axe Stone Handax, made 1.2 million years ago, found in Oljevai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa. For a million years the sound of making hand axes provided the percussion of everyday life.
1:50.0	Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world has to include a hand axe.
1:59.5	All of this week I'm looking at objects from the very earliest moments of human history.
2:04.0	Every object I've chosen is a document of the world in which it was made,
2:08.0	but also marks a critical stage in the process by which we became fully human. And what I think makes this
2:15.8	stone axe so interesting is how much it tells us not just about the hand but
2:21.2	about the mind that made it. I'm holding the hand axe now. It doesn't of course look any like a modern axe. There's no
2:35.4	handle and there's no metal blade. It's in fact a piece of grey-green volcanic rock, a very
2:41.2	beautiful grey-green and it's in the shape of a tear drop, and it's a lot
2:46.1	more versatile than a modern straight act would be. The stone's been chipped to give you sharp edges
	...

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