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Lecture 1

Week 1/ 30th September
Professor Clive Gamble

The human body

Before any of the wonderful things where made or even thought about there was the human body. This had to evolve. Brains got larger, limbs changed so we became upright walkers and endurance runners, fingers shortened once they were no longer needed for climbing trees and opposable thumbs made precise grasping possible. The fine breathing needed for speech had to evolve as well as the cognitive changes that could frame sentences. Continue reading →

Introduction to module

Human history needs to be told through things. Texts help but they only reach back into the shallows of our past. In this module we go further to investigate deep human history through the wonderful things left behind. Our aim is to unite the entire span of our evolutionary history by investigating forty wonderful things described for you by experts. The story starts two and a half million years ago with the first stone tools. Continue reading →