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Neil MacGregor - director of the British Museum
'History of the world in 100 objects' (publ. 2011) BBC Radio 4 series / book

Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool - Tanzania, Africa (1.8 - 2 million years old)
MacGregor describes the story of two million years of our development through a hundred objects in the British Museum:
"Can we be human without objects?
The invention of the first tools is one of the most important moments in human history. Making, using and sharing things played a key role in developing human behaviour. The ability to make tools allowed humans to adapt to new environments and out-compete other animals."

Swimming Reindeer Mammoth Tusk Sculpture - Montastruc, France (11,000 BC)
Descibing the amazing creation of a sculptural piece which has no practical use:
"The two reindeer in this sculpture swim closely, one behind the other and in positioning them the sculptor has brilliantly exploited the tapering shape of the mammoth tusk… It’s a superbly observed piece - and can only have been made by somebody who has spent a long time watching reindeer swimming across rivers….
We know that this detailed naturalism was only one of the styles that Ice Age artists had at their disposal. In the British Museum there is another sculpture found in that same cave at Montastruc. By a happy symmetry, that may not be a coincidence: where our reindeer are carved on mammoth tusk, the other sculpture is of a mammoth carved on a reindeer antler. But the mammoth, although instantly recognisable is drawn in quite a different way - simplified and schematised, somewhere between a caricature and an abstraction. This pairing is no one-off accident: Ice Age artists display a whole range of styles and techniques - abstract, naturalistic, even surreal - as well as using perspective and sophisticated composition. These are modern humans with modern human minds, just like our own. They still live by hunting and gathering, but they are interpreting their world through art…

It is an appreciation not just of the animal world - these people know how to make the most of the rocks and minerals. This little sculpture is the result of four separate stone technologies. First the tip of the tusk was severed with a chopping tool; then the contours of the animals were whittled with a stone knife and scraper. Then the whole thing was polished with iron oxide mixed with water, probably buffed up with chamois leather, and finally the markings on the bodies and the details of the eyes were carefully incised with a stone engraving tool. In execution as well as in conception this is a very complex work of art. It shows all the qualities of observation and skilled execution that you would look for in any great artist."

Why would you go to such trouble to make an object with no practical purpose? Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sees deep meaning in all this:

"You can feel that somebody’s making this who was projecting themselves with huge imaginative generosity into the world around, and saw and felt in their bones that rhythm. In the art of this period you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on around them, in a way which isn’t just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing the success in hunting. I think it’s more than that. It’s really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and that’s actually a very religious impulse…

We sometimes tend to identify religion with not being at home in the world, as if the real stuff were elsewhere in Heaven; and yet if you look at religious origins, at a lot of mainstream themes in the great world religions, it’s the other way round - it’s how to live here and now and how to be part of that flow of life."

resource link > Niel MacGregor: History of the world in 100 objects

what do we mean - thinking by making?

• there is special knowledge and understanding to be gained by making things

• childhood plays a vital part in this innovative process

a historical perspective

• evidence from the past

• art and decoration

• observation, trial and error

• origins of maths
• patterns and geometry

facing the future

• living in a digital age

• how can this be creative?