A History Of The World In A 100 Objects: No. 6

A History Of The World In A 100 Objects
Number 6
Bird Shaped Pestle
Stone pestle, found by the Aikora River, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea
6000-2000 BC

Around about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the planet warmed, the sea levels rose & a dramatic shift in conditions for Humans at that time occurred. It was at a time when Humans were spreading out across the globe, settling in new places, becoming more civilised, creating trade routes & the beginnings of agriculture instead of hunting as a means to feed a rapidly expanding population were all happening.
This item, a stone pestle in the shape of a bird, comes from around just after that time. Growing crops for food was becoming widespread amongst the various worldwide communities & this pestle, from papua New Guinea, comes from the middle of that era. The pestle it's self has a usual bulbous shape at the bottom, about the size of a cricket ball, as is usual for a pestle and the stem or handle of the pestle is in the shape of a long, thin bird with a curved neck, two sticky out wings & a head (which actually looks more like a snake than a bird). It's just over a foot tall and in fact looks a bit like concorde if you squint & allow for poetic license.
It would have been used for grinding cereal crops, in Papua New Guinea this would have been Taro which was extensively farmed by the large community. Papua New Guinea actually developed in isolation after the Ice Age but there are other examples of early Humans developing crops as a means to feed their growing populations, in Africa it was sorghum & China, rice. But the significance of this item, and others like it from similar times is that it shows a link between food & spirituality. Our ancestors who began this agricultural revolution were at the mercy of weather cycles & they had a lot more of hands on, communal nature to their societies so this item, as it is carved like a bird, shows that they were spirtually connected to their crops & the natural world as a source of sustainence.
As per usual, this item would have almost certainly been used by women to grind the Taro & studies on the bones of women from this era show significant arthritic like conditions in the hips, knees & ankles of these women, showing just how tough life still was in this era.
But the item does show significant advances in food producing & preparation technology, better & more balanced diets & fitter, stronger & generally healthier people.
It also tells us that these Papua New Guineaian farming communities, and their fellow settlers who had spread to other parts of the globe, had a better understanding of the natural world, how they could influence it, how they could use it too better benefit their lives from their distant ancestral hunter gathering, African forefathers & the brave one's who journeyed away from Africa too colonise the planet, tame it & settle down into large communities, which they were only able to do after they began their agricultural revolution.