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We wondered if it should be an object from Antarctica – the last place on the planet where humans have settled and now live permanently, the ultimate end of the exodus from Africa. We can live there only because of equipment we are able to make, so a suit of clothing designed for living and working in Antarctica would epitomise the paradox of man the toolmaker: it is things we make that allow us to dominate our environment, and then we come to be totally dependent on them for survival. But it seems unduly perverse to present as a climax of human endeavour clothes designed for the most inhospitable place on earth, to be worn by at most a few thousand people.

One of the most striking developments of the last decades of the twentieth century has been the migration of millions of people to cities, sometimes over huge distances. These migrants have changed the demographics of the world. They have created the totally new phenomenon of the global city, with inhabitants from every continent living closely together, mostly in relative harmony. London’s residents, for example, now speak over 300 mother tongues. It is a universal fact that whatever people leave behind when they migrate, they always take with them their cooking; humanity in that respect is constant. So we thought our 100th object could be a range of cooking utensils that would give a glimpse of the astonishing variety of cultures and cuisines that now cohabit in the world’s great cities. But this history has already traced cooking, eating and drinking and the growth of cities over thousands of years, and the international array of broken pots found in Kilwa (Chapter 60) reflected what even a thousand years ago was an interconnected culinary world. So no utensils.

There is one taste, however, that has become entirely global: football. The dominant flavour of 2010 was without doubt the World Cup in South Africa. Sport has long united communities, as we saw in Chapter 38 on the ceremonial ballgame belt, but now football seems to have united the world: West African stars play for English clubs owned by Russian businessmen; copies of their team shirts are manufactured in Asia and sold and worn in South America. So we have bought a football shirt for the Museum’s collection. It speaks lightheartedly of the present – but perhaps it tells us little of the great issues of the future.

In the end, though, we decided that the 100th object must in some sense be technological, as new devices are almost year by year changing how human beings relate to each other and how we manage our affairs. The mobile phone, or more precisely the smartphone, is a good example. It is roughly the same size as the Mesopotamian clay tablets that were humanity’s first attempt to communicate at a distance, and it has transformed the skill of writing, making textspeak the new cuneiform. It links millions instantaneously across the globe, can summon huge crowds more effectively than any war-drum and, where internet access is available, opens up realms of knowledge far beyond the Enlightenment’s dreams. In advanced societies life without mobile phones is now scarcely thinkable. But they depend on electricity being always available. Without electricity mobile phones are useless.

So, for our 100th object we have chosen a generator of electricity that could give the 1.6 billion people without access to an electrical grid the power they need to join this global conversation. But it does much more. It gives them a quite new level of control over their environment and could transform the way in which they can live. It is a solar-powered lamp.

The lamp that the British Museum has acquired for its collection is in fact a little kit, consisting of a plastic light containing a rechargeable six-volt battery and a separate, small photovoltaic panel. The lamp has a handle and is about the size of a large coffee mug, and the solar panel looks like a smallish silver photo frame – the sort you see on a desk or a bedside table. When the solar panel is exposed