Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, retells the history of human development from the first stone axe to the credit card, using 100 selected objects from the Museum. In this programme, Neil goes back two million years to the Rift Valley in Tanzania, where a simple chipped stone marks the emergence of modern humans. One of the characteristics that mark humans out from other animals is their desire for, and dependency on, the things they fashion with their own hands. This obsession has long roots and, in today's programme, Neil introduces one of the earliest examples of human ingenuity. Faced with the needs to cut meat from carcasses, early humans in Africa discovered how to shape stones into cutting tools. From that one innovation, a whole history human development springs. Neil MacGregor tells the story of the Olduvai stone chopping tool, with contributions from Sir David Attenborough and African Nobel Prize winner Dr Wangari Maathai

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this podcast of a history of the world and a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	Perhaps the best thing of all about being directed to the British Museum and one that still gives me the most enormous thrill is that now and then I'm allowed to
0:14.4	take some of the objects out of the cases and hold them. And today I'm being allowed to hold something absolutely astonishing.
0:30.0	I've got to admit that if any of us saw this just lying on the ground, we'd probably walk past it.
0:36.0	But in fact, it's the oldest object in the British Museum.
0:40.0	And it was made nearly 2 million years ago in Africa.
0:45.0	It looks like a large chipped grey cobble.
0:49.0	Holding this, I can feel what it was like to be out on the African savannah's
0:54.9	needing to cut flesh for example, needing to cut into a carcass in order to get a meal.
1:03.0	This is one of the first things that humans ever consciously made,
1:07.0	and holding it puts me directly in touch with them.
1:11.0	In this history of the world that I'm trying to tell through things, this chipped stone from Africa,
1:18.3	from modern Tanzania, is where it all begins.
1:22.3	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Stone chopping tool, made 1.8 million years ago found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa. I've come out onto the front steps by the main door of the British Museum.
2:01.1	One of the points of any museum is to allow you to travel through time.
2:07.0	But our understanding of just how much time there is for us to travel through has expanded dramatically since the museum opened its doors in 1759.
2:17.0	At that point, most of the visitors would probably have agreed that the world had begun in 4,04 BC. To be precise, at the very beginning
2:28.0	of Sunday the 23rd of October. This astonishingly exact date had been calculated by the mathematically
2:35.4	minded clergyman Archbishop Usher who preached just down the road in Lincoln's Inn.
2:40.0	Usher had carefully trawled the Bible, totting up the lifespan of everyone descended from
2:45.4	Adam and Eve to reach his date. But as you and I know, we don't now celebrate the 23rd
2:52.4	of October as Start the world day.
	...

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