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Africa, 3 million years ago, and our distant ancestors have just discovered an ingenious solution

to their limitations. They may not be as fast as the cheetah, as powerful as the hippopotamus,

as agile as the antelope. But from now on, bit by bit by bit, this imbalance

of power in the ancient African landscape will slowly start to shift.

At some point, one of these hominins picks up a stone, weathered and unremarkable.

Then they smash it against another rock, they modify it, giving them a sharper object,

a tool to forage wild plants, to craft wood, to slice flesh from bone, to reach the marrow

hidden within. No longer is this the world as it is.

This is changing it. And in that long lost moment, something novel is born. The first technology.

So what do we know about the people who made these earliest tools and how big a leap in our

evolutionary story really was this moment?

Welcome to the ancients.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are travelling back millions of years to the

very infancy of technology itself, unearthing the origins of this prehistoric industrial

revolution that would alter the course of human history forever.

...