Introducing the world's very first valentine By Anne W. Semmes

A few weeks ago I happened upon a BBC broadcast of an ambitious 100-part series produced by the BBC and Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum that is telling the "history of humanity" in 100 human made objects from around the world.

The object featured for that particular broadcast was a small stone sculpture of a pair of lovers, the size of a fist, dating from the end of the Ice Age, some 11, 000 years ago. It was found by a Bedouin in the early 1930's in a cave called Ain Sakhri in the Judean desert near Bethlehem. Thus, the sculpture became known as the Ain Sakhri lovers.

The sculpture is famous for being the first known representation of a couple making love. But according to MacGregor, the lovers' placement in a case in the Manuscript Saloon of the British Museum draws hardly a stare, barely a notice. Pictures online show a four-inches-high couple, seated, with their arms and legs wrapped around each other in the closest of embraces. They appear to be looking into each other's eyes. MacGregor was clearly moved by it as he said. "I think it's one of the tenderest expressions of love that I know, comparable to the great kissing couples of Brancusi and Rodin."

Perhaps if they put a sign over the case of "The World's First Valentine" people would stop and take notice.

One imagines the maker - in my mind a male - as the story goes, finding the overlarge pebble on the banks of a small river that had "tumbled downstream...banged and smoothed against other stones as it went." The finder carries the nicely rounded stone back to his cave and ponders it in his hand, perhaps in the presence of his lover, and then begins to shape it. The archaeologists have confirmed the sculpture was found with other objects indicating that the cave was a dwelling place.

This view differs sharply from my earliest view of cave dwellers from an old movie my uncle used to show the younger generation with great mirth called "One Million BC" starring Victor Mature and Lon Chaney that depicted cave life at "the dawn of time" as "nasty, brutish and short." But the Ain Sakhri lovers were found at the dawn of civilization, at the dawn of agriculture when the hunter-gatherers were beginning to settle down in communities.

The sculptor was one of the so-called Natufien people living in the Judean desert then covered with rich grasslands and forests. Seeds were gathered and ground, and soon these people would be seed planting and bread making.

"Our little sculpture of the entwined lovers," MacGregor said, "may be a response to this new way of living - a different way of thinking about ourselves." The sculptor and his companions are starting "to form stable families, to have more food, and therefore more children, and perhaps this is the first moment in human history when a mate could become a husband or a wife."

Hence, perhaps the Ain Sakhri lovers was a love-bonding gift - a valentine!

Agreeing with MacGregor is Stanford University archaeologist, Ian Hodder who sees the sculpture and its focus on human sexuality as showing "that general shift towards a greater concern with...human relationships rather than on the relationships between humans and wild animals, and on the relationships between wild animals themselves."

Indeed, the commonly found sculpture at that ime was the gazelle, the favourite and most frequently hunted animal of the Natufien people, thus making the Ain Sakhit lovers find remarkable.

s these Natufiens were the precursors of the world's first farmers some experts likely read the Ain Sakhri sculpture as a fertility object created to bring on a fertile crop, as MacGregor explained: "Our ancestors turned to new gods, and they made images which show and celebrate the key elements in their changing universe; food, power, worship, sex and love. And the maker of the `lovers' sculpture was one of these people."

But in the end, the sculpture speaks to MacGregor and to this reporter in the same way as he says, "The tenderness of the embracing figures suggests not reproductive vigour, but love. From the Ain Sakhri lovers to Rodin's statue of `The Kiss' there are 11,000 years of human history but not, I think, much change in human desire."

When the "History of the World in 100 Objects" kicked off in mid-January and was reported in The Economist, MacGregor had not selected the object to represent our time. Suggestions were requested from the general public, to be sent to the British Museum. What jumped into my mind was the space probe Voyager I, that is currently the furtherest travelled human made object from earth - as of last August it was 10,312 billion miles out in space.

On board the Voyager is the Golden Record of sounds and images to portray the diversity of life and culture on earth for whatever aliens will one day come upon it. But alas, nothing is depicted to show what really makes our world go round - love.

There was a lot of hoopla when record organizer Carl Sagan wanted to include a nude photo of a man and pregnant women - and NASA only allowed a silhouette of a couple with a baby drawn in the woman's belly. But there were no images of lovers, no songs of love, no hearts and flowers.

There was only the recorded sound of a kiss on the cheek by the Voyager Record producer, Timothy Ferris to Ann Druyan, the record's creative director who later married Carl Sagan. What should have been aboard was an image of the Ain Sakhri lovers.

For information on the ongoing BBC broadcasts on "A History of the World" go to their website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/programme