Object 4: Swimming reindeer (made around 13,000 years ago). Sculpture carved from mammoth tusk, found at Montastruc, central France

The reindeer are back!

Like a blessing from the earth -

A living cloud of hope,

Thundering across the frozen, treeless plains.

Who has sent them?

Why do they return every season to battle the roaring current of a swollen river?

Why do they annually make that epic journey,

Returning like a mystery in the breath of the keen west wind

With their precious sacrificial gift?

Their skin, their fur, their meat, their bones

Grant us life in a bleak icy continent where every day is a struggle to survive

And the future is a place too uncertain to contemplate.

And yet, they are here again,

Eyes bulging with purpose

As they furiously kick away the tug of the river's undertow

To scramble, bedraggled and shivering on the shore of our homeland hopes.

And that is why I am scraping and chiselling their likeness

Into the tusk of a mammoth;

Their image buried deep in my eyes,

Slowly revealing itself in lines of moving force:

A stag with his doe are swimming through the ivory,

Gasping for air, antlers bent back, legs at full stretch.

That is why I am whittling with my stone knife,

Rubbing paste into the cuts;

Pulsing blood into a solid thing,

So that when they have finished their rutting

And new life bleats its fragile entrance,

Slimy and staggering, beached on a world of ice,

Ready to follow nature's flow back to the source;

We can look at the tusk and see them there, still -

Swimming toward us from the past,

Remembering how they always return.

Because the great lumbering mammoth,

A gigantic bolder of flesh and bone, as big and grand as it is,

Seems to be dwindling away,

And is rare as green grass in a patch of molten snow.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/DyfP6g6dRN6WdwdnbIVbPw

Object 3: Olduvai handaxe (made 1.2 - 1.4 million years ago) found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa

Savannah man stands upright,

Bright inquisitive eyes contemplating the horizon -

The line of possibility where the sun dips daily,

Whetting a knife edge of earth,

A sharp keen blade of Savannah plain slicing into the sky

To let in the night

With its mystery of stars and planets;

Its sparkling messengers that march across the black sleep of wonder,

And make you dream of walking across the sky.

And the stars have marched across the memory of men and women long gone:

Each life a step forward, each death a legacy of learning,

Bequeathed to a growing family of people like us...

Our ancestors in Africa have outgrown their home.

The hot Savannah air stirs with the melody of life:

The cicada's relentless chirp,

The morning chorus with its territorial army of birds;

Proclaiming their existence with a song,

The bellowing roar of the killer cats, stalking their prey,

The delicate timpani of dry grass moving a murmur in the warm wind...

And the percussive 'tap, tap, tap' of people making tools.

There in the hand of Savannah man is a teardrop of stone:

An evolution of an idea melded from the family memory of generations long gone:

A practical handaxe, reassuringly perfect:

Two sharp edges that will cut trees, cut meat,

Scrape bark from branches, skin from flesh

To make a second skin to wear when the cold winds blow,

And a sharp point that can drill a hole

So that deft hands can loop sinews through dried skins, stitch and tie,

Explore the industry of imagination

That sparks a fusion of neurons, lights a fuse in the brain,

Plants ideas in the restless mind of a restless man.

And the ideas have a sound: a grunt in the throat, a noise in the mouth

That becomes a word -

Savannah people are speaking... there is language in the land.

Families sit together, chipping at stone, sharing thoughts and ideas,

Talking about food and shelter, talking about how to make the perfect axe,

Wondering what the coming day will bring, what food can be found,

What woman is heavy with child, what man is wild and unruly,

What time of the season will the fruit ripen and be ready to eat,

And what would happen to a man if he were to walk away from here,

Follow that unknown path the great blinding sun takes daily, 

Where vision ends and dreams endure?

And then one day someone picks up an axehead,

Weighs it in his hand; its usefulness is reassuring,

Its secure purpose, a fact -

Here is a tool to travel with; here is a tool that a man will need

On a journey to a place where no other man has ever trod.

And so he walks and they watch, awe struck

As he crosses the horizon's blade and disappears from sight,

Taking the daylight with him.

And as the stars once again sprinkle the night sky with a blessing of dreams,

Someone is thinking, 'When will I go?'

Because once someone has begun a journey, someone else is bound to follow.

And stone is moving, stone is cutting,

Stone is seeding the landscape with the language of stone:

Savannah man has grown up and left home to walk a wilderness of wonders

For a million years...

With a teardrop in his hand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/I3I8quLCR8exvdZeQPONrw