This is Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast.

I'm Griselda. I'm one of the arts editors here, and on this episode, I'll be talking

to two people who are commenting in very different ways on the past and present and thinking

about how art can help us make sense of the world.

I'll be talking to the historian Simon Sharma

about his epic new TV series Civilisations,

which spans six continents in thousands of years.

I'll also be chatting to the artist Eddie Peake,

who's focusing his attention right in on a single concrete sports pitch in North London.

Then you come across this and in an instant vast millennia of time just collapsed.

And you're in the midst of fellow humans, their hands doing what hands do.

Signalling from a very long way off.

37,000 years distant, in fact.

But this long distance greeting somehow makes us bond with the makers of this

because they establish a presence that is palpably alive.

Astonishingly, hand stencils like these have been found in caves as far apart as Indonesia and Patagonia.

Wherever we went, it seems, the urge to signal the presence went with us.

And undeniably, these hand stencils do what nearly all art that would follow

would aspire to. First, they want to be seen by others, and then they want to endure beyond

the life of the maker. So that was, of course, the inimitable Simon Sharma in the first episode of his new series Civilisations.

And I watched the first episode last night.

And it's epic in its sweep.

...