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

What does the past sound like?

Of course, when we're as far back in deep time as we are this week, we can have no real idea.

We can imagine the unchanging sounds of nature, wind, rain, sea, river.

But for us, history is silent.

But if we can't hear the past, we can certainly see it.

I'd like to introduce you to an object that's 13,000 years old, made by one of our ancestors who wanted to show his own world to himself,

and in doing so, relayed that world with astonishing immediacy to us.

You can feel that here is somebody making this who must projected themselves with huge

imaginative generosity into the world around and saw and felt in their bones that rhythm.

It is, I think, a masterpiece of Ice Age art,

and it's also evidence of a huge change in the way in which the human brain was working.

Something between say a hundred thousand and fifty thousand years ago

happens in the human brain that allows this fantastic creativity, imagination, artistic

abilities to emerge. A history of the world in a hundred objects. The swimming reindeer made from

a month The swimming reindeer made from Mammoth Tusk, carved around 10,000 BC and found in France.

In the last two programs,

in the last two programs we looked at stone tools which raised the question whether it's

making things that makes us human. Could you conceive of me human without using

objects to negotiate the world? I don't think I can. But there's another

question that follows quite quickly once you start looking at these very

ancient things. Our modern species, Homo sapiens, thinking man in the Latin, evolved in Africa

...