Modern life would quite literally fall apart without glues – they hold our buildings, our phones, even our bodies together. But the story of stickiness runs much deeper than that. In fact, our greatest leaps forward as a species couldn’t have happened without adhesives.

In this series we chart the journey of human progress through the sticky substances that have shaped us. In episode one we explore the very earliest adhesives, dating back at least 190,000 years, that allowed our ancestors to invent, innovate, and make the first tools. And we hears how lumps of these prehistoric glues contain fragments of the stone age people who used them, trapped in time for thousands of years. Listen here or where ever you get your podcasts.

Producer: Anand Jagatia
Presenter: Mark Miodownik
Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem
BBC Studios Audio Production