Vol 1 Ep 18 - The origin of metallurgy

Reflections on Volume 4 and looking forward to Volume 5, including the big announcement about the name of the volume and our usual review of listener messages. 

1200 - 1449 - Step into the fourteenth century, a world caught between collapse and rebirth. As the Mongol Empire fractures, new powers rise across Europe, Asia and Africa. From the birth of the Ming dynasty to the brilliance of Mali and the devastation of the Black Death, this e ... Show More

1000 - 1299 - From shattered empires to rising ideas, this episode traces a world in motion. Across continents, scholars, warriors and kings reshape faith, power and knowledge, while distant societies unknowingly edge toward collision. This is an age of transformation — where pri ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the dawn of the European Iron Age.In around 3000 BC European metalworkers started to make tools and weapons out of bronze. A complex trading network evolved to convey this valuable metal and other goods around the continent. But two millennia l ... Show More

<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In this episode, we leave the realm of myth and trace the development of early primate/human activity in Greece in the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age), culminating in the domestication of plants and animals, the rise of the earliest villages, ... Show More

<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In this episode, we discuss the archaeological evidence for the early Bronze Age on mainland Greece and the Cycladic Islands; the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in Greece (known as the proto-Greeks); and the rediscovery and excavation of three leg ... Show More

En el tema de al Prehistoria en la península Ibérica repasaremos los principales conceptos relacionados con la prehistoria definiéndolos: “paleolítico”, “neolítico”, “nómada”, “sedentarios….  Trataremos todas las etapas de la prehistoria en la península ibérica destacando la impo ... Show More

<p>Roughly 40,000 years ago, Ice Age Britain was undergoing a transformation.&nbsp;</p><br><p>The first modern humans, <em>Homo sapiens, </em>were arriving and beginning to settle in the British Isles. Their evolutionary predecessors, the Neanderthals, were on their way to extinc ... Show More

<p>Invention and innovation are two concepts that have propelled humankind forward for as long as people can remember - but who were the first,&nbsp;<em>original</em>&nbsp;tool makers, and what can we learn from them? Travelling back nearly 3 million years ago to the African cont ... Show More

<p>Discovered in a German cave, days before the Second World War broke out, the Lion Man statue remained an enigma for decades. A figurine that represents a hybrid creature with the body of a human and the head of a lion, the statue is made from mammoth ivory and is estimated to ... Show More

<p>Where do humans come from? Or, perhaps more interestingly, <em>who</em> did humans evolve from? A question once posed by the likes of Charles Darwin and other early naturalists, the answer has changed throughout history. But now, thanks to advancements in archaeology and devel ... Show More