Gobekli tepe

One of the most compelling artefacts described in this history of human birth is a stone carving discovered at an ancient temple site in what is now Turkey. The Gobekli Tepe totem pole, 11,500 years old, 6ft 3in tall and weighing 1,100lb, shows successive generations giving birth: a faceless figure at the top delivers a woman, who delivers another woman, who delivers a man, who is ‘proffering his phallus’. The exact meaning and function of this object is long lost, but it is clear that it has something to do with fertility. For as long as humans have had a culture, that culture has been – understandably – concerned with

In the 1930s curators at the British Museum, under orders from Lord Duveen, a generous donor, scoured and hacked at the friezes and statues of their Parthenon collection. They were trying to remove the smudges and stains thought to be discolouration, to restore the marbles to their original colour — white. But it wasn’t discolouration; it was paint. Though the idea was rejected for years, an arsenal of new technologies — infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray and chemical analysis — has since established that classical sculpture was slathered with the stuff. Though polychromy — the art of painting statues and architecture — was finally accepted in the 1970s, it was proposed over