Objects make us human

Upon the recommendation of my annoyingly knowledgeable friend Rene I looked up A History of the World in 100 Objects, a BBC Radio 4 series, on the Beeb’s website. You can listen to all the episodes, 18 so far, on the site, or download them for free on iTunes. Each episode is about 15 minutes long, and narrated by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. I started listening to the first episode, the Mummy of Hornedjitef, at 10 p.m. Seven non-consecutive episodes later, it is midnight and I still have a column to write. Fortunately this wonderful series covers nearly everything, including my assignment, gadgets and technology.

Museums are the great repositories of civilization, and they are chock-full of objects. Every object is a record of a specific time in human history, and two million years equals a lot of objects. What the show’s creators have done is to choose a hundred objects out of the gazillions of artifacts at one of the world’s greatest museums, the British Museum. These objects may not seem very impressive —you might walk past the display case on your way to something big and shiny —but they are records of significant periods in the development of our species: the beginning of art, the invention of writing, the origins of science and literature.

If the ability to make objects is what makes humans different from other species, then we can say that Objects Make Us Human. Consider the Swimming Reindeer of Episode 4, a small sculpture of two reindeer carved out of a piece of mammoth tusk. It was made during the Ice Age, 13,000 years ago, by someone who was clearly very familiar with reindeer — someone who had observed, hunted, eaten, and worn the skin of the animals.

At the time, humans were already making and using tools to change their surroundings. Episode 2 features the oldest object in the British Museum, an Olduvai stone chopping tool 1.8 million years old, found by the archaeologist Louis Leakey in Tanzania. It’s a stone that’s been chipped several times to turn it into an efficient knife.

According to the host, the people who made tools like this were probably not hunters but “brilliant opportunists.” They lay in wait while lions and other predators killed their prey, and after the predators had moved away they collected the meat from the dead animal.

Without such sneakiness our species would not have survived.

Stone chopping tools were used for stripping meat and breaking into the bones to collect marrow fat, the most nutritious part of the carcass. (The host notes that marrow fat doesn’t sound too appetizing; obviously he’s never had bulalo.) Having this protein to eat meant that they would survive to produce offspring who could make even more complex tools. We’re here today because our ancestors were clever enough to get bulalo.

It’s easy to understand why humans made chopping tools, but what about the swimming reindeer? The sculpture serves no practical purpose, it’s just pleasing to the eye. As the narrator points out, four separate technologies went into the making of the swimming reindeer: chopping, contouring, polishing, and engraving. All that work, and for what?

One hundred thousand years ago, the human brain underwent some sort of rewiring. Humans began to combine their knowledge of nature — in this case, what the sculptor knew of reindeer — with their knowledge of making things. That sculptor lived in the Ice Age, a challenging time for the species — relationships with other people and with the environment were vital to survival. Carving the figures was a way of asserting the relationship between man and beast. The human was using art to interpret the world.

One of my favorites, Episode 15, tackles the invention of writing. The object discussed is an Early Writing Tablet, a 5,000-year-old piece of baked clay found in Iraq. A reed stylus has been used to press marks onto it: pictographs of jars and of human heads drinking from bowls. This tablet, one of the earliest forms of writing in existence, is a record of a Mesopotamian worker’s beer rations. 5,000-year-old proof of the link between drinking and writing.

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A History of the World in 100 Objects, with photographs of the objects and transcripts of the podcasts, is at www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld.