In conjunction with BBC's A History of the World, museums have chosen objects that tell the story of the county and the people who have lived here.

The oldest is a stone handaxe dating back 500,000 years, making it the earliest evidence of human habitation in the region.

So old it falls between archaeology and geology, the axe was found with remains of straight-tusked elephants, prehistoric horses and water voles in Waverley Wood near Bubbenhall.

Warwickshire Museum keeper of archaeology Sara Wear said: "They are the oldest human-made tools we have for this area. It shows that people were existing on the edge of Europe and the edge of habitable land."

The axe was the work of Homo heidelbergensis, a nomadic hunter gatherer and the common ancestor of both Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal man. The blue andesite rock from the Lake District may have been left by an ice sheet, or may have been carried here as more attractive and easily worked than the local quartzite.

Mrs Wear added: "It's very beautiful considering it's a simple tool, It's very well made. It is an almost perfect leaf shape and is symmetrical on all sides."

Shedding light on Warwickshire from Shakes-peare's time is a tapestry map of the county dating from the 16th century. One of a set also showing Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, it is now the only one surviving intact.

British made tapestries from the period are rare, and those showing maps are even rarer, so Warwickshire Musuem keeper of social history Maggie Wood described it as "extremely unusual and possibly unique", but its importance also comes from in what it shows.

Fields, mansions, cities and landmarks are all depicted. Warwick is shown with its castle dominating the town, Coventry as a walled city of spires and Birmingham was not yet important enough to warrant picturing.

She said: "It is a pictorial representation of Shakespeare's world. It is the landscape that inspired some of his plays and a lot of his language.

"It has real significance as a map because it's a pictorial representation of Warwickshire made when modern map making was in its infancy."

In the 20th century, the jet engine's inventor Sir Frank Whittle was born in Coventry and educated in Leamington.

He patented his ideas in 1930 and the first successful jet engine ground run was in 1937 in Rugby.

The first British jet aircraft, the Gloster E28/39 Experimental, flew with a W1 Whittle engine in May 1941 and led to the Gloster Meteor, the first Allied jet aircraft

The Midlands Air Museum has an example of an early Whittle design. Barry James, chairman of trustees, said: "His connection with the area is tremendous.

"It's important that people are aware of this. It is not only the engineering history, it's the effect it had on the world."

Museums in Coventry and Warwickshire will be holding a special event on March 31 at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry to celebrate A History of the World.

St John's House Museum will be staging a one-day event on Saturday, January 30 with activities including a workshop with a flint knapper, cave painting for children and talks from archaeologists.

www.bbc.co.uk/coventry



The Waverley Wood Handaxe, St John's Museum, Warwick. One of five examples found at Waverley Wood near Bubbenhall and along with other objects found there, some of the oldest stone tools in the UK. The presence of the axes alongside remains shows that groups of an early form of human, Homo heidelbergensis, were moving around this area of the Midlands half a million years ago, in an inter-glacial period. The variety of animals gives us some idea about the climate of the time.
Sheldon Tapestry map of Warwickshire, Warwick Museum (not on display). One of a set of four tapestry maps made in the 1580s, a year after the first maps of the English counties were published. They were commissioned by a wealthy man named Ralph Sheldon to hang in his new house at Weston and made at a tapestry works set up by Ralph's father at Barcheston. Local men would have trained alongside Dutch and Flemish weavers exiled from the Low Countries under Catholic Spain.
Whittle W2/700 Jet Engine, Midland Air Museum. Produced by Sir Frank Whittle's Power Jets factory at Whetstone, England. This engine was designed for the Miles 52 Supersonic Experimental Aircraft Project of 1944, a British aeroplane intended to break the sound barrier.