A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [15]
So, 1.2 million years ago we could make tools, like our handaxe, that helped us control our environment and transform it – the handaxe gave us better food as well as the ability to skin animals for clothing and strip branches for fire or shelter. Not only this: we could now talk to each other and we could imagine something that wasn’t physically in front of us. What next? The handaxe was about to accompany us on a huge journey; because with all these skills, we were no longer tied to our immediate environment. If we needed to – even if we just wanted to – we could move. Travel became possible, and we could move beyond the warm savannahs of Africa and survive, perhaps even flourish, in a colder climate. The handaxe became our ticket to the rest of the world, and in the study collections of the British Museum you can find handaxes from all over Africa – Nigeria, South Africa, Libya – but also from Israel and India, Spain and Korea … even from a gravel pit near Heathrow Airport.
As they moved north out of Africa, some of these early handaxe-makers became the first Britons. The archaelogist and British Museum curator Nick Ashton elaborates:
At Happisburgh, in Norfolk, we have these thirty foot cliffs, composed of clays and silts and sands, and these were laid down by massive glaciation around 450,000 years ago. But it’s beneath these clays that a local was walking his dog and found a hand axe embedded in these organic sediments. These tools were first being made in Africa 1.6 million years ago, arrived in southern Europe and parts of Asia just under a million years ago. Of course the coast then would’ve been several miles further out. And if you’d walked along that ancient coastline, you would have arrived in what nowadays we call the Netherlands, in the heart of Central Europe. At this time there was a major land bridge connecting Britain to mainland Europe. We don’t really know why humans colonized Britain at this time, but perhaps it was due to the effectiveness of this new technology that we call the hand axe.
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Swimming Reindeer
Sculpture carved from mammoth tusk, found in Montastruc, France
11000 BC
Around 50,000 years ago something dramatic seems to have happened to the human brain. Across the world, humans started to create patterns that decorate and intrigue, to make jewellery to adorn the body, and to produce representations of the animals that shared their world. They were making objects that were less about physically changing the world than about exploring the order and the patterns that can be seen in it. In short, they were making art. The two reindeer represented on this piece of bone form the oldest artwork in any British gallery or museum. It was made during the end of the latest Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. It is alarmingly delicate: we keep it in a climate-controlled case and hardly ever move it, because with any sudden shock it could just crumble to dust. It’s a sculpture about 20 centimetres (8 inches) long, carved from the tusk of a mammoth – evidently from towards the end of the tusk, because it’s slim and slightly curved. It was made by one of our ancestors who wanted to show his own world to himself, and in doing so he relayed that world with astonishing immediacy to us. It is 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.
The stone tools we looked at previously raised the question of whether it is making things that makes us human. Could you conceive of being 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. Why do all modern humans share the compulsion to make works of art? Why does man the tool-maker everywhere turn into man the artist?
The two reindeer in this artwork swim