"No one invented sex or love, but they've always been one of the great spurs to human inventiveness." "Making ourselves sexually attractive is not just a modern obsession." "Our ancient ancestors were just as obsessed with inventing new ways of looking good and turning each other on as we are, today." "For example, Pharaoh's slaves once went on strike because they ran out of makeup." "Honestly." "And, fashionable Roman women used to smear themselves with gladiator sweat." "And, when it comes to finding ways to improve our sex lives, our ancestors came up with a good many inventions modern Man has only just rediscovered." "The female condom the pregnancy tester, yes, and even the oral contraceptive believe it or not, they're all ancient inventions." "They say it all begins with a kiss." "The first ever screen kiss was filmed by the Thomas Edison Company for a stage show." "It lasted a whole minute and caused a sensation when it was first shown in 1896." "But, just when was the kiss invented?" "Yup, I did say invented." "It seems that us human beings haven't always been kissing and that the kiss might be yet another thing that we owe to the ancient Romans." "In most of the ancient civilizations that have left any record of what they did, it appears that rubbing noses or cheeks was the commonest form of greeting and pressing the lips together was an action reserved for mother and child." "So, I suppose the ancient Syrians would have regarded this as nursery behavior." "The ancient Romans, however were so excited by the idea of kissing that they invented a whole new vocabulary for it." "Ah, now that's what they called a basiam, a polite kissing of the hand." "And, that's still a basiam, a little peck on the cheek." "But, that's an osculum, meant a pretty mouth, a sweet mouth and was usually reserved between close relatives." "But, it's just become saviam, a real kiss of passion." "Originally, a saviam meant a mouth puckered up to be kissed." "Hence, it came to mean a real tongue-down-the-throater." "And, I'm not quite sure what they call this." "Sexual intercourse began in 1963 according to the British poet" "Philip Larkin, sometime between the Lady Chatterly trial and the Beatles' first LP." "So, I have to confess, I was a bit shocked to discover that sexual intercourse has, in fact, been going on for several thousands of years." "And, as far as sexual enlightenment is concerned, the 1960s were the Dark Ages compared to some more ancient times." "In many Oriental cultures for example, ecstasy was considered a sacred duty." "Since sexual pleasure led you to a higher spiritual plane, religious leaders had to teach their followers how to perform this sacred duty." "These temples, built in Kadurau in Central India around a thousand years ago, are adorned with erotic sculptures." "They depict all aspects of life including the joy of sex." "In a way, I suppose you could say they were a sort of sex manual carved in stone." "But, they were hardly the sort of thing you could take to bed with you where you probably needed them most." "Which is why, sometime around 5th Century AD, the Indian sage," "Batsana Maharishi, invented a more portable version the Kamasutra." "These illustrations show just a few of the hundreds of sexual positions recommended in the Kamasutra." "But, it was not simply a manual for sexual technique, it also recommended ways to improve relationships and included tips on housewifery and even styles of walking." "But, it's no good having all this technique if you can't find somebody to practice with, which is why some of the oldest inventions we know of are ways of adorning the human body." "And, many of them were first recorded in ancient Egypt." "On the 14th of November, 1365 BC, the construction workers working on the temple for Ramses III went on strike." "And, the reason they went on strike is because they ran out of makeup." "Now, this may seem a bit odd, but, in fact, makeup was the central part of the tool kit of any construction worker in ancient Egypt." "The reason, of course, is because they were working all day long under the hot Sun." "They needed to protect their skins." "And, what the ancient Egyptians had invented, 3,000 years before anyone had heard of Factor 20, was the moisturizing sun block." "As a matter of fact, ancient Egyptian men wore just as much makeup as did women." "We don't know if the Egyptians invented makeup, but they were certainly the first to thoroughly document it." "The Egyptians had every cosmetic invention that we have, today;" "foundation, blusher, lip gloss and eyeliner." "Instead of mascara pencils and brushes, they invented delicate applicators of ivory, silver and bronze." "Not even death was an excuse to look off color." "A healthy complexion was ensured in the afterlife, by burying hand cosmetic kits alongside their sarcophagi." "Cleanliness was considered next to Godliness and so was hairlessness which is why the ancient Egyptians used to shave themselves all over." "The first purpose designed razors were made from bronze and date back over 5,000 years." "Now, the only snag was that the Egyptians also adored a fancy hairdo, so they invented a method of having it both ways." "The first ever known wigs were depicted in Egyptian tomb paintings 4,600 years ago." "They used human hair and wool for the more costly wigs." "But, they also invented artificial hair, fashioned from the fiber of date palm branches." "And, if you couldn't afford that you get a cheap one made from straw." "There was even a fashion for false beards, for women." "This is Queen Hatshepsut, seen wearing a beard for a ceremonial occasion to show off her kingly qualities." "Almost every civilization had a mirror of some kind." "The Egyptians used circular hand mirrors, of polished bronze, designed to resemble the face of the Sun God Ra." "So, to admire your own reflection was to gaze into the face of a god." "But this, however, was an ancient Greek invention." "The Egyptians would have to wait until the time of Alexander the Great for the first powder compact." "Oh, actually, the powder wasn't for putting on the face, see, it was for polishing the mirror something like that." "Sorry." "Nowadays, cosmetics have been turned into a multibillion dollar industry." "Like anything to do with sex, makeup has become big business." "But, there are plenty of other ways of cashing in on our obsession." "And, for sheer cheek, I think I'd give the prize to the man who invented the beauty parlor." "He was called Zeriab which meant blackbird, and he set up the world's first beauty parlor in Cordoba, the capitol of Moorish Spain in 823 AD." "Zeriab was a sort of a Vidal Sassoon of his day." "But, he was also a poet, a musician and a great innovator in all aspects of lifestyle." "For example, he invented the idea of the three course meal and he revolutionized the world of fashion by inventing new hairstyles, including, it is said, the fringe." "But, Zeriab's innovative mind ran all over the female body in a manner of speaking." "He invented the world's first underarm deodorant." "He invented the hot wax hair remover." "He even invented the toothbrush." "What Zeriab realized is that personal hygiene is crucial, if you're going to be really attractive to the opposite sex." "Then, of course, when I was a child a shower in the home was a rarity." "It was certainly considered the height of modernity." "And yet, excavations in the ancient Greek city of Pernumin revealed one building with a fully plumbed in shower unit." "And, this painting from a vase of the 4th Century BC shows four rather athletic looking Greek ladies enjoying a communal shower with water gushing through nozzles shaped like animal heads from an overhead tank." "Well, you're feeling good, you're looking good, but you've got to smell good, too." "And, one of the most successful inventions to do with sex was the invention of perfume." "We'll never know who first thought of extracting musk from the glands of Himalayan dear or ambergris from the secretions of the sperm whale." "But, somebody must have." "The invention of perfume occurred long before Man began to record such things." "This painting, from Pompeii of little cherubs manufacturing highly prized exotic fragrances shows that the Romans were using techniques that have not changed for thousands of years." "Plants, flowers, resins and other materials were crushed, strained and soaked in water fats or oils." "It was all very labor intensive and could take up to six months to produce one fragrance." "But then, in 870 AD, the world of perfume manufacture was revolutionized by an Arab invention, distillation." "The alembic condenser meant that perfumiers could extract the very purest essence of a fragrance on an industrial scale." "The crushed rose petals, or whatever are boiled in the bottom chamber." "The process of evaporation separates the essential oils from the water." "The steam rises up to the second chamber where it is rapidly cooled by cold water." "The steam condenses into droplets that flow down a tube and are collected at the base, leaving pure rose oil floating on the surface of distilled water." "It took 10,000 pounds of roses to produce just one pound of rose oil." "And yet, the Arab factories produced so much of it, they were able to send a annual tribute of 30,000 bottles to the Caliph of Baghdad." "Rose oil is still used, today, as an ingredient in over 75% of all perfumes." "And, this is the end result Oh, gorgeous." "Ah, you're going to say, the atomizer isn't an ancient invention." "And, you're quite right." "The atomizer was invented by an American, in 1910." "But, the ancients had just as ingenious ways of applying their perfume." "The problem with perfume is that as the evening wears on the scent wears off." "So, how do you smell good throughout the whole party?" "Well, the Egyptians used their heads literally." "Here it is, the automatic, all night slow release scent dispenser." "A cone of fat, impregnated with perfume was balanced on the head." "During the warm evening the fat melted, drenching the wearer in scent that got more intense the longer the party lasted." "But, not everybody shared the Egyptian's love of perfume." "The Spartans, for instance banned it." "And, in 361 BC, when the Egyptians threw a banquet for the King of Sparta, Igesilayus, he was so affronted by the smells of his hosts, that he stormed out." "The Egyptians were equally offended by his uncouth behavior." "It is possibly the only diplomatic incident in history to be caused by perfume." "But, a bit of slap, a dab of scent and a new hairdo can only do so much for a chap." "What about this here, Flavio?" "You don't have a bit..." "Mascara is not going to cover that up, is it?" "Thank God that nowadays we have a solution for expanding waistlines." "Take me to the gym." "The word gymnasium comes from the Greek meaning to exercise naked gumnos meaning naked." "Yup, even the gym is an ancient invention." "The Greeks and Romans took the workout more seriously than, perhaps, any other culture in recorded history." "Young men were expected to go to the gym every day." "Pumping iron is another invention we owe to the classical world." "[Skipped item nr. 238]" "Throwing the javelin and discus were all part of the routine." "Perhaps, surprisingly, the gym was not an all men preserve, in ancient Rome, although the Satyrus juvenile was pretty snooty about women that exercised." "Their sort of woman is a regular visitor to the baths." "She loves the bustle of sweat and when she has tired her arms of dumbbells, it is the turn of the masseur to oil her body, finishing up with a resounding slap." "Incidentally, this Sicilian wall painting from the 4th Century AD shows that other great, classical invention, the bikini." "The 20th Century seems to have elevated physical beauty into a competitive sport in its own right, but the beauty contest is as old as history." "It was invented, according to Greek mythology, when the gods asked the shepherd, Paris, to decide who was the fairest goddess," "Athena, goddess of wisdom," "Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, or Hera, the wife of Zeus." "Paris chose Aphrodite who had promised him the most beautiful, walking woman as a bride," "Helen of Troy." "Helen's husband took a dim view of this offer and, thus, the world's first beauty contest ended up in a bloody war." "According to the historical record the forerunner of the modern beauty contest first took place over 3,000 years ago on the Greek Island of Lesbos." "But, in ancient Greece, beauty was even more of a boy's thing than a girl's." "The Greeks may be best known for inventing the Olympic Games, but they also invented the Mr. Universe contest." "One of them, held in the city of Elias, was known as the Battle of the Beautiful." "In the Panathenaic Games, held once every four years in the Parthenon in Athens, there was another contest known as the Urandrias or fine manliness." "In this, athletes competed for good looks and the victors had a ribbon tied around whichever portion of their anatomy was considered to be award-winning." "I think we're going to need a bigger ribbon." "The Greeks took physical beauty so seriously, that they even invented mathematical guidelines for bodily perfection according to rules of proportion and synergy." "For them, physical beauty was equated with moral beauty." "Being out of shape and unattractive was consequently considered a vice." "Sex has been the motivation for a lot of inventions, although in some cases you'd never have guessed it." "For example, the world's first mechanical clock was not invented to tell the time." "It was invented to regulate the sex life of the Emperor of China." "In the ancient China of the T'ang dynasty, in the 8th Century AD, the emperor's heir was not necessarily his firstborn son." "The heir was chosen by the court astrologist according to his astrological suitability." "And, for the Chinese, the most important thing, astrologically was not when the child was born, but when he was conceived." "So, the timing of the Emperor's lovemaking was vital matter of state importance." "The exact moment of the conception of each child had to be witnessed and recorded." "But, this was complicated by the fact that he shared his marital bed with no less than 121 women, not all at the same time, of course." "And, that was another problem because there was a strict order in which the women of the court should attend the Emperor's bed." "It all had to be monitored in the most minute detail." "The 81 assistant concubines would visit in tour groups of nine for nine nights running." "Then, the principle concubines all 27 of them, attend for the next three nights in groups of nine and, then, the nine lessor royal spouses followed by the three royal wives." "Finally, when the Emperor's yang has been built up and strongest, don't ask me what that means, the Empress goes in to him." "She brings with her the power of the full Moon." "This is the moment the astrologers have been waiting for." "In 723, the horrendous logistics of the Emperor's bed drove a Buddhist monk, by the name of Izing to invent this, a water driven, spherical, bird's eye view map of the heavens, clock." "The whole mechanism was powered by a carefully controlled flow of water which turned a wheel." "As each bucket fills, it triggers a counterweight lever to release the wheel so that the next bucket can fill." "This tiny mechanism is known as escapement and is the principle behind the regulation of every mechanical clock." "With each click of this escapement, power is transmitted through a series of connecting lugs and gears to tell the rings in the celestial globe." "And, just like the hands of a clock these rings record the hours of the day, but they also record the days of the week, phases of the Moon and the movements of the stars." "I suppose it must have been the first time Mankind had ever heard this familiar sound." "Mechanical clocks didn't appear in the West until the 14th Century when they were built in monasteries so that monks could keep track of their prayers." "I suppose it's typical of Christianity that it adopted the clock not to time sex, but to time celibacy." "However, there's one trade where time and sex have always meant money." "In Athens, in the 3rd Century BC there was a prostitute who went by the name of Clepsydra." "Now, Clepsydra used to time her clients with this ingenious little invention." "She had a series of bowls, each with a different sized hole drilled in the bottom." "A session lasted just as long the bowl stayed afloat, quarter of an hour, half an hour depending on the size of the hole." "Once you heard this noise, your time was up, no matter where you'd got to." "In fact, that's why her clients called her Clepsydra, because Clepsydra is the Greek for the water clock." "Here, in the ancient Greek city of Ephesis, on the west coast of Turkey," "St. Paul wrote his letters to the Ephesians because he was concerned about their spiritual well-being." "And, well he might be." "In classical times, Ephesis was a thriving port and had its full quota of exactly the sort of things St. Paul would have disapproved of." "There's probably always been a sex industry and its come up with its fair share of inventions." "Take this, for example." "It's a dual purpose brothel indicator." "On the one hand, it's a perfectly ordinary street sign saying this way to the brothel." "For example, here's the left foot showing it's on the left hand side of the street and a picture of a young maiden and underneath an inscription follow me." "But, it's also an ingenious child protection device." "If your foot was too small, you were considered too young to be allowed in." "I just about qualify." "Of course, I'd probably be a bit embarrassed to be seen trying this out if I wasn't making a film." "But, in some ancient civilizations it would have been my sacred duty to visit the local brothel." "The selling of sex has not always been unrespectful." "In fact, in ancient Greece if you wanted to see a live sex show, you'd have probably gone down to the local temple." "In certain religious rituals, members of the public would pay to watch couples celebrating their devotion by frolicking naked in sacred pools." "Even further back in ancient Babylon, the priestesses of the cult of Ishtar sold their sexual favors to the faithful." "Not surprisingly, the cult became hugely popular and made so much money that the priestesses went on to invent the world's first bank." "So, even Wall Street ultimately owes its existence to sex." "As with every other aspect of life the Roman approach to the sex industry was highly organized and regulated." "Rome, itself, had 45 public brothels which were so popular, the city authorities had to restrict opening times until mid-afternoon so as not to interfere with the working day." "They even kept an official prostitute register with over 32,000 recorded in the 1st Century AD." "That's as many prostitutes as in New York in 1900 which was last time anyone counted." "Business was on an international scale." "Prostitutes and clients came from all over the Roman world." "So, communication could be tricky which is why the brothel keepers adorned their walls with these paintings." "In effect, they had invented the world's first picture catalog." "These ones are from a brothel in Pompeii." "Just point at your preference lie back and think of England or Fraser or Delmatia or wherever you came from." "Roman bureaucracy was always trying to come up with new ways of regulating the sex industry and here's one of them." "You see, the Roman troops might find themselves in some godforsaken spot like the Sahara Desert or London unable to speak the lingo of the local madam." "So, the back room boys, back at the military research center in Rome came up with this ingenious device." "It's the universal non-lingual brothel token." "On one side, you can see there's a depiction of whatever activity the soldier wanted to engage in with a young lady." "And, on the other side is a number." "And, that number is also an invention." "It's a price code." "Once more, recent research has established that the relative values of these services depicted on the token are the same, today, as they were 2,000 years ago." "The Romans had invented a price scale for sex that still holds true." "The ancient brothel keepers may have invented lots of ways of making sex public, but most people are usually more concerned with the problems of keeping it private." "There's something we take for granted, nowadays, but which was an extremely rare commodity in the ancient world, privacy." "In fact, for most people it quite simply didn't exist." "The majority of activities all took place in one large room, eating, entertaining, talking, sleeping, even making love." "And, the best you could manage for privacy would be a curtain or a folding screen." "Even if you were rich enough to be able to afford a separate room of your own, the concept of privacy was still pretty notional." "Right up to the 1800s, even the grandest families lived in homes in which one room led directly into another." "Of course, that's one reason for the popularity of the four poster bed." "With all those servants and visitors tramping through your bedroom all hours of the night, at least you could curtain them off." "The modern age of privacy was ushered in by one extraordinary invention, in particular." "In fact, you might be rather surprised to think of it as an invention." "And yet, here I am, in it." "It's the invention of the corridor." "And, the really odd thing about the corridor is that it's not an ancient invention." "The first corridors, like this don't appear until the late 17th Century." "It may be that our obsession with privacy is relatively recent and that the corridor is a prime example of an invention that doesn't happen until there's a real, social demand for it to happen." "While we're on the subject of privacy an archeological mystery in the last century, centered around these things." "They kept turning up in ancient tombs particularly in the graves of women." "And, nobody had the first clue what they were for." "The mystery was only resolved earlier this century when a traveler in Ethiopia, saw them still in use 4,000 years after they'd been first invented." "As far as we know, these were world's first keys." "The lock actually relies on two pegs one acting as a bolt on the inside of the door with a string dangling back through the keyhole." "To unlock the door, the bolt string colored purple, is threaded through the key peg which is then slotted through the keyhole." "Pulling on the two strings jams the key peg up against the bolt and slides the bolt back into the door frame." "Let go of the strings and, hey presto, just push open your door." "There is one sexual organ human beings have never bothered to hide," "the nose, our pheromone detection system." "Now, pheromones are something our ancestors seemed to know all about and we have only just rediscovered." "In ancient Rome, women didn't just admire their sporting heroes, they actually wanted a piece of them." "To be specific, they wanted their sweat, especially the sweat of athletes and, even better gladiators." "Well, the Romans didn't use soap." "So, they covered themselves with olive oil and then scraped the sweat and dirt off with one of these things." "It's called a strigil." "There you are." "You see, it actually works, going off into that little bowl, down there." "The glop that was scraped off was collected by the cosmetic manufacturers and turned into a face pack to be worn by wealthy ladies." "The idea was that the strength and vitality of the gladiator would be transferred to the aging" "Roman lady, an elixir of youth and sexual potency." "Now, of course, the more famous the gladiator, the higher the price paid for their glop." "Actually, the Roman matrons may be on to something." "We now know that human sweat contains chemicals, pheromones that effect how sexy we feel." "So, gladiator sweat could well have been an aphrodisiac." "And, the very term aphrodisiac is another thing we owe to the Greek goddess of love and beauty Aphrodite." "Known to Romans as Venus, she was the half sister of Kronus who castrated his father, Uranus with a reaping hook and hurled his testicles into the sea Out of the tremendous foam this whipped up," "Aphrodite was born emerging from a giant shell." "And aphrodisiac is the name we still use for any preparation designed to stimulate the sex drive." "Tea, however, was by no means the only aphrodisiac on the market." "In fact, when it came to aphrodisiacs our ancestors were peculiarly inventive." "The Greeks, for instance, made a potion from the sex glands of horses and the Syrians recommended half a dried lizard, ground up and taken with honey for breakfast." "The Chinese preferred rhino horn and the private parts of tigers." "The Chinese, in particular, may have a lot to teach modern medicine." "In 1927, Western scientists announced to the world that they had found a way to mass produce these molecules, human sexual hormones, a discovery that would revolutionize human fertility treatments." "What they didn't realize was that the Chinese already knew all about this, 2,200 years ago." "In fact, they both used exactly the same source material, human urine." "By evaporating vast quantities of urine, sometimes up to 200 gallons at a time, the Chinese were able to produce just a few ounces of these valuable, salt crystals." "The crystals contained a concentration of human steroids and the sex hormones, estrogen progesterone and testosterone." "The resulting preparations were widely used to boost fertility, increase sexual potency, treat various sexual disorders and, in some cases, even to encourage the growth of beards." "So, the Chinese were actually manufacturing and using highly sophisticated hormone treatments over 2000 years before Western science even knew they existed." "Even the way it was taken is another ancient invention." "The pill." "And, there is yet another kind of pill that modern science wrongly credits itself with inventing." "The swinging '60s were only possible because of the huge advances in contraception that set women and men free to make love for the first time in history, without the fear of unwanted pregnancies." "Well, yes, except that even with contraception nothing is as new as we think." "According to legend, King of Minos of Crete produced sperm that was laced with scorpions and poisonous snakes." "For some accountable reason, however he still managed to get women to go to bed with him." "But, before entering his bedchambers they were give a prophylactic to protect them from his deadly sperm." "The female condom, it seems, was in existence in pre-classical times." "As for the male condom, well we know for certain it existed in Rome." "Probably, it was in use long before that." "But, since vulcanized rubber is a 20th Century invention, what on Earth did they use?" "Yes, sheep's bladders." "Sorry, sheep." "Two hundred years ago," "Casanova, the famous Venetian librarian the once seducer of over 10,000 women, was so proud of his sheep's bladder condom that he described it in loving detail in his autobiography." "It is a little coat of very fine transparent skin, eight inches long with a pink ribbon slotted through the open end." "He was even said to have blown them up, like balloons, for the amusement of the ladies." "And, one final, valuable feature was its durability." "It could be used again and again and in Casanova's case, again." "Four thousand years ago, the muddy banks of the Nile provided a breakthrough in the science of contraception, a substance the ancient Egyptians were prepared to risk their necks to gather." "Crocodile dung." "The Egyptians mixed crocodile dung with sour milk." "It was then rolled into a pessary and apparently proved an effective means of avoiding pregnancy." "Well, I suppose it would have been a bit of a disincentive to amorous activity, but it also worked on a physiological level." "Modern science has discovered that the acids from crocodile dung are actually powerful spermicides." "Although, how Egyptian women first discovered crocodile dung had these properties I simply can't imagine." "Anyway, reptilian excrement was not the only contraceptive available to the ancients." "The spread of Christianity, at the end of the Roman era around 500 AD, ensured that any areas of knowledge that were regarded as pagan or unchristian was suppressed." "And, of course, this particularly applied to contraception." "Which makes it especially ironic that one of the places that this knowledge was preserved is in the writings of a 12th Century" "German nun." "Abbess Hildegard of Bingen." "Hildegard was an extraordinary creative genius, accomplished in the arts and sciences." "Mystic, playwright, composer, artist and medical herbalist." "She was an enthusiastic collector of ancient inventions for herbal remedies including traditional recipes for contraceptives." "Here, Abbess Hildegard is preparing a herbal infusion of tansy and feverfew." "These particular herbs and others like juniper and rue have been used throughout recorded history to bring on menstruation, in effect, a sort of morning after pill." "But, there were a vast array of other plants used by our ancestors to avoid pregnancy, such as this one, Queen Anne's Lace also known as cow parsnip." "The seeds have been found to contain estrogenic substances known as teratogens that will stop an embryo from developing." "And, wild yam which has been used as a contraceptive for centuries by the Chiapas Indians, of" "Mexico, contains the female hormone progesterone, which is known to prevent ovulation." "In fact, progesterone extracted from wild yam, is actually used, today, in the industrial manufacture of some brands of the modern pill." "Not only were all contraceptives widely available to the ancients, they actually had a thriving international trade in them." "This Greek painting shows the gathering of a plant called sylphiam." "It was shipped all over the Mediterranean for use in medicine and as an oral contraceptive." "Indeed, it was so popular, it was harvested to extinction and its chemical properties remain a mystery to modern science." "Plants also provide another good example of how knowledge can get lost." "The Babylonians knew that the sap of certain plants changed color according to its PH value, that is, according to our acidic or alkaline, it was." "Now, a clay tablet dated about 700 BC describes how the doctors of Babylon soaked strips of cloth in the sap of an unidentified white flower dissolved in alum." "They would then take these strips of cloth and use them as a sort of a litmus paper to test the acidity of a woman's urine." "If it went pink, it was acidic." "Now, of course, the reason the doctors were so interested in a woman's urine is that its PH value changes when she's with child." "The ancient Babylonians had pregnancy tests almost identical to these modern devices nearly 3,000 years ago." "Anthropologists tell us that Mankind's oldest invention was probably devised to meet the needs of mother and child." "When human beings first walked upright, but had lost their body fur that a baby could cling onto, they needed some way of carrying the child." "So, someone came up with the sling." "And so, the very first inventor of all was probably a woman." "It's so easy to think we're discovering something for the first time, like sex itself, in the 1960s." "And yet, all to often, what we think is a modern invention is really something that our ancestors knew and that we had forgotten."