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Bird-shaped Pestle

Stone pestle, found by the Aikora River, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea

6000–2000 BC

Next time you are at the salad bar in a restaurant, look closely at the choice of vegetables on offer. It probably includes potato salad, rice, sweetcorn and kidney beans, all of which come originally from widely different parts of the world; nothing unusual about that nowadays, but none of them would exist in the nutritious form they do today if the plants they come from hadn’t over generations been chosen, cherished and profoundly modified by our ancestors. The history of our most modern cereals and vegetables begins about 10,000 years ago.

Previously, I have looked at how our ancestors moved around the world; now I’m going to be focusing on what happened when they settled down. It was a time of newly domesticated animals, powerful gods, dangerous weather, good sex and even better food.

Around 11,000 years ago the world underwent a period of swift climate change, leading to the end of the most recent Ice Age. Temperatures increased and sea levels rose rapidly by about a hundred metres (more than 300 feet), as ice turned to water and snow gave way to grass. The consequences were slow but profound changes in the way that humans lived.

Ten thousand years ago, the sound of daily life began to change across the world, as new rhythms of grinding and pounding heralded the preparation of new foods that were going to alter our diets and our landscapes. For a long time, our ancestors had used fire to roast meat; but now they were cooking, in a way that is more familiar to us today.

There’s an enormous range of objects in the British Museum that I could have chosen to illustrate this particular moment in human history, when people started putting down roots and cultivating plants that would feed them all year round. The beginning of this sort of farming seems to have happened in many different places at more or less the same time. Archaeologists recently discovered that one of those places was Papua New Guinea, the huge island just to the north of Australia, where this bird-shaped stone pestle comes from. We think it’s about 8,000 years old, and a pestle then would have been used exactly as it is now – to grind food in a mortar and break it down, so that it can be made edible. It’s a big pestle, about 35 centimetres tall (just over a foot). The grinding part, at the bottom, is a stone bulb, about the size of a cricket ball; it’s visibly worn and you can see that it’s been much used. Above the bulb, the shaft is very easy to grasp, but the upper part of this handle has been carved in a way that’s got nothing at all to do with making food – it looks like a slender, elongated bird with wings outstretched and a long neck dipping forward; indeed it looks a bit like Concorde.

It is a commonplace in every culture that preparing and sharing food unites us, either as a family or as a community. All societies mark key events with feasting, and a great deal of family memory and emotion is bound up in the pots and pans, the dishes and the wooden spoons of childhood. These sorts of associations must have been formed at the very beginning of cooking and its accompanying implements – so around 10,000 years ago, roughly the period of our pestle.

Our stone pestle is just one of many to have been found in Papua New Guinea, along with numerous mortars, showing that there were large numbers of farmers growing crops in the tropical forests and grasslands around this time. This relatively recent discovery has upset the conventional view that farming began in the Middle East, in the area from Syria to Iraq, often called the Fertile Crescent, and that from there it spread across the world. We now know that this was not the way it happened. Rather this particular chapter of the history of humanity occurred simultaneously in many different places. Wherever people were farming they began to concentrate on a small number of plants, selectively harvesting them from the wild,