TOOLS. Other animals use tools; but what distinguishes man from everybody else is the crazy-big role tools play in our lives and history. Most other tool-using animals do so to solve an immediate problem, usually how to get food. For example, the otter takes a rock and cracks a mussel he’s already got; he doesn’t find a rock first and then go looking for mussels. We look for tools when we need help eating, like that, but we also make tools in the hopes that they might be useful someday, or knowing full-well they won’t be but we make them because we like them. The oldest item in the British Museum is a tool, basically a hand-held rock with a sharp edge created by whacking it with another rock. It’s extremely practical, but also a little fancier than necessary, suggesting its creator took him/herself seriously both as craftsman and artist. Louis Leakey found this item in the African rift valley in the 50s, and proved that the species as we are now originated in Africa—dismaying many in the racist white establishment of the day. MacGregor’s #1 ambition, in creating this series, is to write a world history telling the story of all of humanity together, instead of ‘us’ and ‘them’. A laudable goal; alas, the layout of the museum, created many years ago, organizes objects into geographical districts (ie, “Go upstairs to the Asian hall for Buddhist/Hindu stuff,” or “Go to the Muslim annex for Islamic stuff”). Today,we know—and NEED to know—that we’re all in this together. His special guest in this podcast was the great David Attenborough, narrator of just about every British nature film for five decades.
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