Stone sculpture, found at Wadi Khareitoun, Judea, near Bethlehem.

9000 BC.

As the latest Ice Age came to an end, somebody picked a pebble out of a small river not far from Bethlehem. It's a pebble that must have tumbled downstream and been banged and smoothed against other stones as it went, in the process that geologists poetically describe as 'chattering'. But about 11,000 years ago, a human hand then shaped and chipped this beautifully chattered, rounded pebble into one of the most moving objects in the British Museum. It shows two naked people literally wrapped up in each other. It's the oldest known representation of a couple having sex.

In the Manuscripts Saloon at the British Museum, most people walk straight past the case that contains the carving of the lovers. Perhaps it's because from a distance it doesn't look like very much; it's a small, muted, greyish stone about the size of a clenched fist. But when you get nearer to it, you can see that it's a couple, seated, their arms and legs wrapped around each other in the closest of embraces. There are no clear facial features, but you can tell that these two people are looking into each other's eyes. I think it's one of the tenderest expressions of love that I know, comparable to the great kissing couples of Brancusi and Rodin.

At the time this pebble was shaped by human hands, human society was changing. As the climate warmed up across the world and people gradually shifted from hunting and gathering to a more settled way of life based on farming, our relationship to the natural world was transformed. From living as a minor part of a balanced ecosystem, we began trying to shape our environment, to control nature. In the Middle East the warmer weather brought a spread of rich grasslands. Until then people had been moving around, hunting gazelle and gathering the seeds of lentils, chickpeas and wild grasses. But in the new, lusher savannah, gazelle were plentiful and tended to stay in one place throughout the year, so the humans settled down with them. Once they were settled, they started gathering grass grains that were still on the stalk, and, by collecting and sowing these seeds, they inadvertently carried out a very early kind of genetic engineering. Most wild grass seeds fall off the plant and are spread easily by the wind or eaten by birds, but these people selected seeds which stayed on the stalk a very important characteristic if a grass is to be worth cultivating. They stripped these seeds, removed the husks and ground the grains to flour. Later, they would go on to sow the surplus seeds. Farming had begun and for over 10,000 years we've been breaking and sharing bread.

These early farmers slowly created two of the world's great staple crops wheat and barley. With this more stable life, our ancestors had time to reflect and to create. They made images that show and celebrate key elements in their changing universe: food and power, sex and love. The maker of the 'lovers' sculpture was one of these people. I asked the British sculptor Marc Quinn what he thought of it: We always imagine that we discovered sex, and that all other ages before us were rather prudish and simple, whereas in fact obviously human beings have been emotionally sophisticated since at least 10,000 BC, when this sculpture was made, and I'm sure just as sophisticated as us.

What's incredible about this sculpture is that when you move it and look at it in different ways, it changes completely. From the side, you have the long shot of the embrace, you see the two figures. From another side it's a penis, from another a vagina, from another side breasts it seems to be formally mimicking the act of making love as well as representing it. And those different sides unfold as you handle it, as you turn this object around in your hand, so they unfold in time, which I think is another important thing about the sculpture it's not an instant thing. You walk round it and the object unfolds in real time. It's almost like in a pornographic film, you have long shots, close-ups it has a cinematic quality as you turn it, you get all these different things. And yet it's a poignant, beautiful object about the relationship between people.

What do we know of the people captured in this lovers' embrace? The maker or should we say the sculptor? of the lovers belonged to a people that we now call the Natufians, who lived in a region that straddled what is today Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Syria. Our sculpture came from south-east of Jerusalem. In 1933 the great archaeologist Abbe Henri Breuil and a French diplomat, Rene Neuville, visited a small museum in Bethlehem. Neuville wrote: Towards the end of our visit, I was shown a wooden casket containing various items from the surrounding areas, of which none, apart from this statuette, was of any value. I realized immediately the particular significance of the design involved and asked the source of these objects. I was told that they had been brought by a Bedouin who was returning from Bethlehem towards the Dead Sea.

Intrigued by the figure, Neuville wanted to know more about its discovery and sought out the Bedouin he had been told about. He managed to track down the man responsible for the find, who took him to the very cave in the Judaean desert not far from Bethlehem in which the sculpture had been discovered. It was called Ain Sakhri, and so these sculpted figures that had so captivated Neuville are still known as the Ain Sakhri lovers. Crucially, the sculpture had been found with objects which made it clear that the cave was a dwelling rather than a grave, and so our sculpture must have played some kind of role in domestic everyday life.

We don't know exactly what that role might have been, but we do know that this dwelling belonged to people who were living at the dawn of agriculture. Their new way of life involved the collecting and storing of food. The result was as profound a transformation for human beings as any revolution in history. This process of settling down did, of course, make them more vulnerable than hunters or nomads to crop failure, pests, diseases and, above all, to the weather; but while things were good, society boomed. A guaranteed abundant food source fuelled a sustained population explosion, and people began to live in large villages of between two and three hundred the densest concentration of people the world had yet seen. When larders are stocked and the pressure is off, there is time to think, and these rapidly growing, settled communities had the leisure to work out new social relationships, to contemplate the changing pattern of their lives and to make art.

Looked at from different angles, the figurine changes completely Our little sculpture of the entwined lovers may embody a key response to this new way of living a different way of thinking about ourselves. In the depiction of the sexual act in this way and at this time, the archaeologist Ian Hodder, of Stanford University, sees evidence of a process he calls the 'domestication of the mind': The Natufian culture is really before fully domesticated plants and animals, but you already have a sedentary society. This particular object, because of its focus on humans and human sexuality in such a clear way, is part of that general shift towards a greater concern with domesticating the mind, domesticating humans, domesticating human society, being more concerned with human relationships, rather than with the relationships between humans and wild animals, and the relationships between wild animals themselves.

As you hold the Ain Sakhri pebble and turn it round, it is striking not just that there are clearly two human figures rather than one, but that it's impossible, because of the way the stone has been carved, to say which is male and which is female. Could that generalized treatment, that ambiguity which forces the engagement of the viewer, have been a deliberate intention on the part of the maker? We just don't know, but we don't know either how this little statue would have been used. Some scholars think it might have been made for a fertility ritual, but Ian Hodder takes a different view: This object is one that could be read in many ways. At one time it would probably have been thought that these notions of sexual coupling, and sexuality itself, were linked to ideas of the mother goddess, because it's been assumed that the first farmers' main concern is the fertility of the crops. My own view is that the evidence doesn't really support this idea of a dominant mother goddess very early on, because there are now exciting new discoveries that really have no representations of women at all most of the symbolism is very phallocentric so my view at the moment is that sexuality is important in these early farming societies, but not in terms of reproduction/fertility, children and mothering and nurturing. It's really more clearly about the sex act itself.

To me, the tenderness of the embracing figures certainly suggests not reproductive vigour, but love. People were beginning to settle and to form more stable families, to have more food, and therefore more children, and perhaps this is the first moment in human history when a mate could become a husband or a wife.

All these ideas may be present in our sculpture of the lovers, but we're still largely in the realm of historical speculation. On another level, though, it speaks to us absolutely directly, not as a document of a changing society but as an eloquent work of art. From the Ain Sakhri lovers to Rodin's sculpture The Kiss there are 11,000 years of human history, but not, I think, much change in human desire.

8.

Egyptian Clay Model of Cattle.

Painted model, found at Abydos (near Luxor), Egypt.

3500 BC.

Mention excavation in Egypt, and most of us see ourselves entering Tutankhamun's tomb, discovering the hidden treasures of the pharaohs and at a stroke rewriting history. Aspiring archaeologists should be warned that this happens only very rarely. Most archaeology is a slow, dirty business, followed by an even slower recording of what has been found. And the tone of archaeological reports has a deliberate, academic, almost clerical dryness, far removed from the riotous swagger of Indiana Jones.

In 1900 a member of the Egypt Exploration Society excavated a grave in southern Egypt. He soberly labelled his discovery Grave A23 and noted the contents: Body, male. Baton of clay painted in red stripes, with imitation mace-head of clay. Small red pottery box, four-sided, 9 inches 6 inches. Leg bones of small animal. Pots and stand of 4 clay cows.

The four horned cows stand side by side upon fertile land. They've been grazing on their simulated patch of grass for about five and a half thousand years. That makes them really ancient Egyptian, more ancient even than the pharaohs or the pyramids. These four little clay cows, hand-moulded out of a single lump of Nile river clay, are a long way from the glamour of the pharaohs, but you could argue that cows and what they represent have been far more important to human history. Babies have been reared on their milk, temples have been built to them, whole societies have been fed by them, economies have been built on them. Our world would have been a different and a duller place without the cow.

On these models you can still see faint traces of black and white paint applied after the clay had been lightly baked, making them like toy farm animals of the sort many of us played with as children. They stand only a few centimetres high, and the clay base that they share is roughly the size of a dinner plate. Like other objects we will encounter, the presence of these artefacts in Grave A23, where they were buried with a man in a cemetery near the small village 0f El Amra in southern Egypt, speaks of the consequences of climate change and human responses to it.

All of the objects found in this grave were intended to be useful in another world, and, in a way never imagined by the people who placed them there, they are. But they're useful for us, not for the dead. They allow us profound insights into remote societies, because the way of death casts light on the way of life of those people. They give us some idea not just of what people did but of what they thought and believed.

Most of what we know about early Egypt, before the time of the pharaohs and the hieroglyphs, is based on burial objects like these little cows. They come from a time when Egypt was populated only by small farming communities living along the Nile Valley. Compared to the spectacular gold artefacts and tomb ornaments of later Egypt, these little clay cows are modest. Funerals at that point were simpler; they didn't involve embalming or mummifying, a practice that wouldn't come for another thousand years.

The owner of our four clay cows would have been laid in an oval pit, in a crouched position and lying on a mat of rushes, facing the setting sun. And around him were his grave goods items of value for his journey into the afterlife. Cow models like this one are quite common, so we can be quite confident that cows must have played a significant part in Egyptian daily life such a significant part that they couldn't be left behind when the owner passed through death and on into the afterlife. How did this humble beast become so important to human beings?

The story begins more than 9,000 years ago, in the vast expanses of the Sahara. Then, instead of today's landscape of arid desert, the Sahara was a lush, open savannah with gazelles, giraffes, zebras, elephants and wild cattle roaming through it happy hunting for humans. But around 8,000 years ago the rains that nourished this landscape dried up. Without rain, the land began to turn into the desert that we know today, leaving people and animals to seek ever-dwindling sources of water. This dramatic change of environment meant that people had to find an alternative to hunting. Of all the different animals these humans had hunted, only one could be tamed: cattle.

Somehow they found a way to tame wild cattle. They no longer had to chase them down, one by one, for food; instead they learnt how to gather and manage herds, with which they travelled and from which they could live. Cows became almost literally the lifeblood of these new communities. The needs of fresh water and pasture for the cattle now determined the very rhythm of life, as both human and animal activity became ever more intertwined.

What role did these early Egyptian cattle play in this sort of society? What did they keep cows for? Professor Fekri Hassan has excavated and studied many of these early Egyptian graves, and the villages associated with them. He and his colleagues found remains of animal enclosures, as well as evidence for the consumption of cattle. They found the bones of these animals. And he concludes that these particular items, these four models of cattle, were probably produced a millennium or more after cattle were introduced into Egypt.

Study of the cattle bones shows the ages at which the animals were killed. Surprisingly, many of them were old, too old if they were being kept only for food. So unless the early Egyptians enjoyed tough steak, these were not in our sense beef cattle. They must have been kept alive for other reasons perhaps to carry water or possessions on journeys. But it seems more likely they were tapped for blood, which, if it is drunk or added to vegetable stews, provides essential extra protein. This is something we find in many parts of the world, and it is still done today by the nomadic peoples in Kenya.

Our four cows may well therefore represent a walking blood-bank. We can rule out what seems at first sight the more obvious answer, that they were dairy cows, because for several reasons milk was unfortunately off the menu. Not only did these early domesticated cows produce very little milk but, more importantly for humans, getting nutrition by drinking cows' milk is an acquired skill. Martin Jones is an expert in the archaeology of food: There is a range of other foods that our distant ancestors would not have eaten as readily as we do. Humans evolved the capacity to tolerate drinking milk as adults after cattle were domesticated, presumably because the ability to gain nutrients from cows' milk helped individuals to survive and to pass on that ability to their children. But even today a great number of modern peoples around the world can't tolerate drinking milk as adults.

So drinking cows' milk would probably have made these early Egyptians very ill, but over centuries their descendants and many other populations eventually adapted to it. It is a pattern repeated across the world: substances that are initially very hard for us to digest become, by slow adaptation, central to our diet. We are often told that we are what we eat; it might be truer to say that we are what our ancestors, with great difficulty, learnt to eat.

In early Egypt, cows were probably also kept as a kind of insurance policy. If crops were damaged by fire, communities could always fall back on the cow for nourishment as a last resort; perhaps not the best thing to eat, but always there. They were also socially and ceremonially significant, but, as Fekri Hassan explains, their importance went even deeper: Cattle have always had religious significance, both the bulls and the cows. In the desert a cow was the source of life, and we have many representations in rock art where we see cows with their calves in a more-or-less religious scene. We also see human female figurines, also modelled from clay, with raised arms as if they were horns. It seems that cattle were quite important in religious ideology.

The cattle from Grave A23 don't show any outward signs of being particularly special. On closer inspection, however, they don't look like the cows you find on the farm today, anywhere across Europe, North America or even modern Egypt. Their horns are strikingly different they curve forwards and are much lower than those of any cows that we know.

All the cows alive in the world today descend from Asian stock. Our Egyptian model cows look different from the ones we know today because early Egyptian cows were descended from native African cattle, which have now become extinct.

Along the Nile Valley, the cow, a source of blood, meat, security and energy, eventually transformed human existence and became such a central part of Egyptian life that it was widely venerated. Whether actual cow worship started as early as the time of our little model is still a matter of debate, but in later Egyptian mythology the cow takes on a prominent role in religion, as the powerful cow-goddess Bat. She is typically shown with the face of a woman and the ears and horns of a cow. And the clearest sign of just how far cattle rose in status over the centuries is that Egyptian kings were subsequently honoured with the title 'Bull of his Mother'. The cow had come to be seen as the creator of the pharaohs.

9.

Maya Maize God Statue.

Stone statue, found in Copan, Honduras.

AD 715.

In the heart of the British Museum we have a god of maize. He's a bust, carved from limestone using a stone chisel and a basalt hammer, and the features are large and symmetrical, the eyes closed, the lips parted as though this god is in communion with a different world, quietly meditating. The arms are bent, the palms of the hands face outwards one raised, one lower giving an impression of serene power. The head of the god is covered with an enormous headdress in the shape of a stylized corn cob, and his hair is like the silky strands that line a cob, inside the wrapping leaves.

Some archaeologists argue that food must always have had a divine role even for our earliest ancestors just think of the cow-goddess of Egypt from the previous chapter, or Bacchus and Ceres in Classical mythology, or Annapurna, the Hindu goddess of food. But there's a particular time, after the end of the latest Ice Age, roughly between five and ten thousand years ago, when a range of new foods seems to have been accompanied by a range of new gods. As we saw in chapter 6, across the world, people began to identify particular plants that would provide them with food: in the Middle East it was wheat and barley, in China millet and rice, in Papua New Guinea taro, and in Africa sorghum. And as they did so, everywhere stories about gods emerged: gods of death and of rebirth, gods who would guarantee the cycle of the seasons and ensure the return of the crops, and gods who represent food itself, which were, or became, the food their devotees would eat. This bust is part of that worldwide process. He is a myth made material a food god from Central America.

Originally the statue would have sat with many other similar gods high up on a stepped pyramid temple in western Honduras. It was found in Copan, a major Mayan city and religious centre, whose monumental ruins can still be visited today. The temple's statues were commissioned by the Mayan ruler of the day to adorn a magnificent temple that he built at Copan around AD 700. Between the head and the body of this one you can very clearly see a join, and if you look carefully the head actually seems rather too big. When the temple in Copan was destroyed, all the statues fell. Heads and bodies were separated and had to be pieced together later, so this head may not have originally belonged with this body. But that does not affect the statue's meaning, for all these gods are about the central power and the pivotal role of maize in the lives of the local people.

Our statue of the maize god is comparatively new he was made as late as AD 715 but he comes as part of a very long tradition. Central Americans had been worshipping him and his predecessors for thousands of years, and his mythic story mirrors the annual planting and harvesting of the corn on which all Central American civilization depended. In the myth the maize god, like the maize plant, is decapitated at harvest time and is then reborn fresh, young, and beautiful at the beginning of each new growing season. John Staller, an anthropologist and the author of Histories of Maize, explains why the maize god was so appealing for rich and powerful patrons, like the rulers who commissioned our sculpture: The elite in ancient societies focused on corn as having sacred kinds of properties which they then associated with themselves. This is pretty obvious in the young maize god the sculpture was apparently a manifestation of mythological beings resulting from the third cycle of creation by the gods. There were eight mythological beings, four women and four men, who were believed to be the ancestors of all the Maya people. The Maya believed that their ancestors essentially came from corn, and they were formed of yellow and white maize dough. Maize was certainly a primary focus of ritual and religious veneration by ancient Meso-American people, going back all the way before the Maya and even into the Olmec civilization.

So our maize god is not just a hauntingly beautiful statue: he gives us a real insight into the way ancient American society thought about itself and its environment. He represents both the fact of the agricultural cycle of planting, harvesting and replanting, and the faith in a parallel human cycle of birth, death and rebirth. But even more than this, he is the stuff of which the Central Americans are made. Where the Hebrew god made Adam out of dust, the Mayan gods used maize to make their humans. The mythical story is told in the most famous epic in the whole of the Americas, the Popol Vuh. For generations, this was passed on through oral traditions before finally being written down in the seventeenth century.

And here is the beginning of the conception of humans and of the search for the ingredients of the human body ... So they spoke: the bearer, begetter, the makers, modellers and a sovereign plumed serpent they sought and discovered what was needed for human flesh. It was only a short while before the sun, moon and stars were to appear above the makers and modellers. Split place, bitter water place, is the name, the yellow corn, white corn, came from there. And this was when they found the staple foods, and then the yellow corn and white corn were ground. After that they put into words the making, the modelling of our first mother-father, with yellow corn, white corn alone for the flesh, food alone for the human legs and arms for our first fathers, the four human works.

Why did maize become the favoured food and the revered grain of the Americas rather than wheat or some kind of meat? The answer lies not in maize's divine connections, but in the environment that Central America offered. In that part of the world around 9,000 years ago, other food resources were very limited. There were no easily domesticated animals, such as the pigs, sheep or cattle you would find elsewhere in the world, and the staples were a trinity of plants that were slowly cultivated and tamed squashes, beans and maize. But beans and squashes didn't become gods. Why did maize?

The plant from which maize derives, the teosinte, is wonderfully adaptable. It's able to grow in both the lush wet lowlands and the dry mountainous regions, which means that farmers can plant crops in any of their seasonal dwellings. Constant harvesting of the grain encourages the plants to grow larger and more abundantly, so maize can quickly become plentiful farmers generally got a healthy return on their invested labour. Crucially, maize is a rich carbohydrate that gives you a rapid energy hit. Unfortunately, it is also pretty stodgy, and so from very early on farmers cultivated an ingenious accompaniment the indigenous chilli. It has very limited nutritional value, but it is uniquely able to liven up dull carbohydrates and its development and widespread use across Central America is a resounding demonstration that we've been foodies for as long as we've been farmers.

By AD 1000, maize had spread north and south, virtually through the whole length of the Americas, which is perhaps surprising given that, in its earliest form, not only did maize have little taste, it was practically inedible. It couldn't just be boiled and eaten straight away as it is today. The easy digestibility of modern maize is thanks to the selective breeding of the crop by generations of farmers, each choosing seeds from the 'best' plant to cultivate for the next crop. But 9,000 years ago the maize cob was very hard, and eating it raw would have made you seriously ill. The raw kernel needed to be cooked in a mixture of water and white lime. Without this elaborate process, the two key nutrients in the cereal, the amino acids and vitamin B, would not be released. After that, it had to be ground into a paste and then made into an unleavened dough. The god of maize expected his disciples to work hard for their supper.

Even today, maize still dominates much of Mexican cuisine and carries a surprisingly powerful religious and metaphorical charge, as the restaurateur Santiago Calva knows only too well: The continuous spin-offs of maize into daily life are vast and complex. There will always at some stage be maize around, and it jumps any class barrier or identity. Everybody eats it and drinks it, from the richest to the poorest, from the most indigenous to the least indigenous, and that's one thing that unites us more than anything else.

Maize culture faces two new problems, one being the use of maize as a bio-fuel, which has caused an increase in prices. That directly affects the Mexican population. The other problem concerns genetically modified maize. It's almost personally, and religiously, offensive that you are playing God. When you take corn to be used for purposes other than to be eaten or be worshipped, even to be put into a car, it becomes a highly controversial issue.

For some Mexicans it's unthinkable that maize, the divine food, should end up in a fuel tank. And far beyond Mexico the idea of genetic modification of crops also causes deep unease, often as much religious as scientific. The habit of seeing something divine in the crops that sustain us, formed all over the world around 10,000 years ago, is still stubbornly alive. Whatever may be the benefits of modifying plants to improve yield or to resist disease, many still have an uneasy sense that the natural order is being disturbed, that humans are trespassing on territory that's properly reserved for the gods.

10.

Jomon Pot.

Clay vessel, found in Japan.

5000 BC.

I know that it's scientifically unrespectable, but it is sometimes nonetheless irresistible, to speculate how the great leaps forward in human object-making may have first occurred. So here is a very unscientific, very unrespectable guess about one of the biggest leaps of them all. Thousands of years ago, we can imagine that a lump of wet clay somehow ends up in a fire, dries out, hardens and forms a hollow shape; a shape that could hold things, in a tough, enduring material. By the time that the wet clay has hardened, a whole world of culinary possibilities, alcoholic delights and ceramic design has opened up. Mankind has made its first pot.

In the last few chapters, we have been looking at the way we now think humans began to domesticate animals and to cultivate plants. As a consequence, they started to eat new things and to live differently in short, they settled down. It had long been assumed that pottery must have coincided with this shift to a more sedentary life. But we know now that, in fact, the earliest pottery was made around 16,500 years ago, in what most experts recognize as the Old Stone Age, when people were still moving about, hunting big-game animals. Nobody really expected to find pottery quite as early as that.

You'll find pots all around the world, and in museums all around the world. In the Enlightenment gallery of the British Museum there are lots of them Greek vases with heroes squabbling on them, Ming bowls from China, full-bellied African storage jars and Wedgwood tureens. They are an essential part of any museum collection, for human history is told and written perhaps more in pots than in anything else. As Robert Browning put it: 'Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.'

The world's first pots were made in Japan. This particular one, made there about 7,000 years ago in a tradition that even then was almost 10,000 years old, is initially quite dull to look at. It's a simple round pot about the shape and size of a bucket that children might play with on the beach. It is made of brown-grey clay and is about 15 centimetres (6 inches) high. When you look more closely, you can see that it was built up with coils of clay and then fibres were pressed into the outside, so that when you hold it you feel as though you are actually holding a basket. This small Jomon pot looks and feels like a basket in clay.

The basket-like markings on this and other Japanese ceramics of the same period are in a cord pattern. That's what the name 'Jomon' means in Japanese, but the word has come to be used not just for the pots but also for the people who made them, and even the whole historic period in which they lived. It was these Jomon people living in what is now northern Japan who created the world's first pots. Simon Kaner, of the University of East Anglia, a specialist in ancient Japanese culture, puts them in context: In Europe we've always assumed that people who've made pottery were farmers, and that it was only through farming that people were able to stay in one place, because they would be able to build up a surplus on which they could then subsist through the winter months, and it was only if you were going to stay in one place all the year round that you'd be making pottery, because it's an awkward thing to carry around with you. But the Japanese example is really interesting, because here we have pottery being made by people who were not farmers. It's some of the best evidence we have from prehistory anywhere in the world that people who subsisted on fishing, gathering nuts and other wild resources, and hunting wild animals also had a need for cooking pots.

The Jomon way of life seems to have been pretty comfortable. They lived near the sea and they relied on fish as a main source of food food that came to them, so they did not have to move around as land-roaming hunter-gatherers did. They also had easy access to abundant plants with nuts and seeds, so there was no imperative to domesticate animals or to cultivate particular crops. Perhaps because of this plentiful supply of fish and food, farming took a long time to establish itself in Japan compared to the rest of the world. Simple agriculture, in the form of rice cultivation, arrived in Japan only 2,500 years ago very late, on the international scale; but in pots the Japanese were in the lead.

Before the invention of the pot, people stored their food in holes in the ground or in baskets. Both methods were vulnerable to insects and to all kinds of thieving creatures, and the baskets were also subject to wear and weather. Putting your food in sturdy clay containers kept freshness in and mice out. It was a great innovation. But in the shape and texture of the new pots the Jomon did not innovate: they looked at what they already had baskets. And they decorated them magnificently. Professor Takashi Doi, Senior Archaeologist at the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, describes the patterns they produced: The decorations were derived from what they saw around them in the natural world trees, plants, shells, animal bones. The basic patterns were applied using twisted plant fibres or twisted cords, and there was an amazing variety in the ways you could twist your cords there is an elaborate regional and chronological sequence that we have identified. Over the years of the Jomon period we can see over 400 local types or regional styles. You can pin down some of these styles to 25-year time slots, because they were so specific with their cord markings.

The Jomon clearly relished this elaborate aesthetic game, but they must also have been thrilled at the practical properties of their new leak-proof, heat-resistant kitchenware. Their menu would have included vegetables and nuts, but in their new pots they also cooked shellfish oysters, cockles and clams. Meat too was pot-roasted or boiled Japan appears to be the birthplace of the soup and the home of the stew. Simon Kaner explains how this style of cooking now helps us to date the material: We're quite lucky they weren't very good at washing up, these guys and so they've left some carbonized remains of foodstuffs inside these pots, there are black deposits on the interior surfaces. In fact, some of the very early ones that are now dated to about 14,000 years ago there are black incrustations, and it's that carbonized material that has been dated we think they were probably used for cooking up some vegetable materials. Perhaps they were cooking up fish broths? And it's possible they were cooking up nuts, using a wide range of nuts including acorns that you need to cook and boil for a long time before you can actually eat them.

This is an important point pots change your diet. New foods become edible only once they can be boiled. Heating shellfish in liquid forces the shells to open, making it easier to get at the contents, but also, no less importantly, it sorts out which are good and which are bad the bad ones stay closed. It's alarming to think of the trial and error involved in discovering which foods are edible, but it's a process that is greatly speeded up by cooking.

The Jomon hunter-gatherer way of life, enriched and transformed by the making of Jomon pottery, did not change significantly for more than 14,000 years. Although the oldest pots in the world were made in Japan, the technique did not spread from there. Like writing, pottery seems to have been invented in different places at different times right across the world. The first known pots from the Middle East and North Africa were made a few thousand years after the earliest Jomon pots, and in the Americas it was a few thousand years after that. But almost everywhere the invention of the pot was connected with new cuisines and a more varied menu.

Nowadays Jomon pots are used as cultural ambassadors for Japan in major exhibitions around the world. Most nations, when presenting themselves abroad, look back to imperial glories or invading armies. Remarkably, technological, economically powerful Japan proudly proclaims its identity in the creations of the early hunter-gatherers. As an outsider I find this very powerful, for the Jomon's meticulous attention to detail and patterning, the search for ever-greater aesthetic refinement and the long continuity of Jomon traditions seem already very Japanese.

But the story of our small Jomon pot doesn't end here, because I haven't yet described what is perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all about it that the inside is carefully lined with lacquered gold leaf. One of the fascinating aspects of telling a history through objects is that they go on to have lives and destinies never dreamt of by those who made them and that's certainly true of this pot. The gold leaf was applied somewhere between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when ancient pots were being discovered, collected and displayed by Japanese scholars. It was probably a wealthy collector who had the inside of the pot lacquered with a thin layer of gold. After 7,000 years of existence our Jomon pot then began a new life as a mizusashi, or water jar, for that quintessentially Japanese ritual, the Tea Ceremony.

I don't think its maker would have minded.

PART THREE.

The First Cities and States.

40002000 BC.

The world's first cities and states emerged in the river valleys of North Africa and Asia about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. In what are today Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India, people came together to live for the first time in settlements larger than villages, and there is evidence of kings, rulers and great inequalities of wealth and power; at this time, too, writing first developed as a means of controlling growing populations. There are important differences between these early cities and states in the three regions: in Egypt and Iraq they were very warlike, in the Indus Valley apparently peaceable. In most of the world, people continued to live in small farming communities which were, however, often part of much larger networks of trade stretching across wide regions.

11.

King Den's Sandal Label.

Hippopotamus ivory label, found at Abydos (near Luxor), Egypt.

AROUND 2985 BC.

There's a compelling, beguiling showbiz mythology of the modern big city the energy and the abundance, the proximity to culture and power, the streets that just might be paved with gold. We've seen it and we've loved it, on stage and on screen. But we all know that in reality big cities are hard. They're noisy, potentially violent and alarmingly anonymous. We sometimes just can't cope with the sheer mass of people. And this, it seems, is not entirely surprising. Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we're likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we're likely to list on a social networking site, it's rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we're all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.