(WALTZ MUSIC)
(STEVE LEONARD) What if an alien biologist from outer space visited Earth?
Imagine he was looking for the most intelligent of our planet's tens of millions of species,
He'd probably start with the apes,
They all seem pretty smart,
A chimpanzee can do most of the things a two-and-a-half-year-old human child can,
If he compared their DNA, our alien investigator would discover they're almost identical,
Biologically, he wouldn't hesitate to classify we humans as just another kind of chimp,
But if he'd stayed and watched the way humans live and behave,
he'd soon have seen a huge gulf between our capabilities and those of all the other apes,
He'd have seen billions and billions of us dominating the earth,
How did that happen?
How did we, Homo sapiens, become so different?
Ors is perhaps the strangest journey of all. This is the story of or evolution.
In this programme, we're going to take a five-million-year journey
from chimpanzees to modern man,
I'm going to meet our closest living relatives
and discover how we used our hands to get ahead,
By following in our ancestors' footsteps,
I'll see how we came up against some very serious design flaws..,
(MIDWIFE) Push.
..why giving birth is so hard..,
..why for so many years we could do little more than grunt...
(GRUNTING)
..and how talking is worth dying for,
A risk that means that when we open our mouths to speak, there's a chance we can choke,
(CHOKING COUGH)
I'll find out how the human race almost became extinct...
..and what it was that saved us,
And I'll be looking into the future, when we may be able to create perfect humans..,
..and even defy the ageing process,
Finally, I'll ask where evolution, whether for good or bad, may lead us next,
Homo sapiens,
Both man and animal, The hairless ape,
Yet we're so different from all other animals on the planet,
So where did we come from?
For thousands of years, we turned to the supernatural for the answer,
but there is another explanation -
that we slowly but surely evolved, just like all other living things,
Science can explain everything that makes a human being -
our behaviour, our intelligence, even our culture -
by the gradual course of evolution over millions of years,
The big clues to our past come from these chimpanzees - our closest living relatives,
Until 50 years ago, we wrote them off as dumb animals,
but since then we've had to change our tune,
(STEVE) What do you want, you four?
The more we study them, the more we realise just how much we have in common,
And the resemblance isn't just skin deep,
A bit of avocado and monkey nut? A bit of pineapple, anyone?
The evidence that we really are descended from a chimp-like ancestor
is deep within the workings of our bodies - in our genes,
I still love you!
Amazingly, we're more genetically similar to chimps
than Indian elephants are to African elephants.
99% of or key genes are exactly the same.
That's just 1% different.
So what's the story in that 1% that's taken us from ape to man?
I'd like to think that we at least behave a little differently.
My table manners are marginally better than this.
(STEVE LAUGHS)
What are you doing?
My life is so much more complicated. I flew to get here, I drive a car,
I watch TV, I se a mobile phone, a laptop...
All these guys have to do is eat, groom and play.
Something amazing happened to our ancestors to let us dominate the world,
What triggered that transformation into the super-intelligent beings we are today?
What are you doing?
Surprisingly, it was nothing to do with our brains,
Between four and five million years ago,
our ancestors started to spend more time on the ground,
and two different strategies emerged,
Chimps evolved walking on their knuckles as a way to get around,
But we took a more radical approach, and since then we've never looked back,
The first step in or journey was just that. We stood up on two legs.
We became what is known as bipedal.
Over the years, there have been many theories as to what turned us into bipedal apes,
The current thinking is that walking upright evolved in the forest
and then became a more efficient way of travelling between patches of trees,
It was a very, very gradual process,
And at this point we were no more intelligent than chimps,
Our brain wasn't as big as it is today,
Five million years ago, it was much smaller - the same size as a chimpanzee's,
So why was walking upright such a crucial step?
Well, by putting all our weight on our feet, we freed up our hands to do other things,
If you look at the adult chimps in this reserve in Cameroon,
you soon see how amazing human hands are,
All these chimps have been rescued from the bush-meat trade,
They're looked after by Dieudonne, who has a special relationship with them,
The chimps have been playing with Dieudonne's shoelaces for years,
There seems to be an element of competition here,
The chimps never give up,
They tie themselves in knots trying to get it right,
But however hard they practise, for however many years, they can't compete,
As you probably remember from being a kid,
learning to tie your shoelace is more complicated than it looks,
and chimps just don't have what it takes,
So why do we beat chimps at tying shoelaces hands down?
(PHONE BEEPS)
Thank you.
We can control our hands with more precision than any other creature can,
No. You’re spelling it wrong.
(PHONE BEEPS)
Answer...
Prob...ab...ly...not...
It's because of our thumbs,
My thumb compared to a chimp's is really long and very mobile.
If you look at Goran's, he can't move his thumb and this knuckle here more than this.
I can move mine right across here.
So whereas he can just do this and this on the side of his finger,
I can go one, two, three, for,
making my hand an expert tool for handling small and delicate objects.
It was this precise touch that was crucial in making us what we are today,
We couldn't do any of this if we were still using our hands for walking,
But or ancestors didn't evolve this new anatomy overnight.
It took hundreds of thousands of years. It also took an important change in the climate
to make this evolutionary leap away from the chimps.
It was then that we parted company.
The chimps stayed in the trees...
..we walked out onto the newly-formed African savannah.
The climate change suited our ancestors very well,
Over the next few million years, it got drier and drier,
completely transforming the landscape from thick forest into savannah,
A new world to explore, and a world in which we made our next big breakthrough,
As our ancestors used their hands less for climbing and more for holding things...
..they would have got much better at manipulating basic tools.
Some of the earliest tools thought to have been used by man have been found in caves like this.
All these tools were very simple...
..and also very similar,
This was state-of-the-art technology two and a half million years ago.
This old bit of rock is actually a kind of apeman penknife.
Hard to believe, but it would have worked - this cutting edge almost matches steel.
To be honest, it is very, very basic,
but even more surprising is that no one came up with much in the way of improvements.
This remained the state-of-the-art tool for a million years.
Think how much modern technology like the mobile phone
has moved on in just the last ten years..,
..yet this stone tool didn't change for a million years -
but that didn't mean the tool users were standing still,
In all the time that this type of tool was in use, something WAS changing -
the bodies of those apemen.
And most importantly, their brain,
It was slowly getting bigger - much bigger,
A new brainier apeman was evolving,
and he would be able to do much more than a chimp,
But why did our brains start growing bigger than those of the other apes?
Once we'd left the trees for the plains, we had a new challenge to face - we weren't alone,
You can see the problem even today
when you get out of the vehicle and you go on safari on foot.
Taking a walk on the savannah on your own is asking for trouble,
and it gets more dangerous the darker it becomes..,
..because this is the domain of the big cats,
At night, baboons try to find a hiding place,
They stick close together, and if they can, take refuge in a tree,
(BABOONS SCREECH)
But when they hear a leopard coming, they still panic because they can't see well at night,
The leopard tries to terrorise the troop and force them into breaking rank,
Once separated from the rest, a baboon's a sitting duck,
Imagine what it was like for or ancestors out here 24 hours a day,
trying to protect their families from wild animals,
with the only thing to defend themselves being stones to throw at them, and without a torch.
(GROWLING)
This is no place for a soft defenceless human to be out late on his own,
With big predators around, you feel incredibly vulnerable,
(HOWLING)
(SNORTING, GROWLING)
(MAN) Jambo. (STEVE) I'm not here on my own.
Michael's here as well, carrying considerably more than an apeman's penknife.
OK, Michael, shall we go? What was that last sound?
(MICHAEL) I think it was a jackal.
And there's solid evidence to show we humans really were under attack,
Again, the answers lie deep in ancient caves,
Apeman skulls have been found with holes in them
that exactly match the teeth of leopard, hyena and sabre-toothed tiger.
One cave contained the remains of over 300 baboons and 150 apemen.
Between one and three million years ago,
our ancestors were being torn apart and eaten by big cats.
Even by day, life here is no walk in the park,
but like us, at least baboons can see much better in the light,
They live in large troops, which means many pairs of eyes to spot a threat
and more combined force to fight off a predator,
Safety in numbers gives baboons surprising confidence,
In fact, they're downright cocky,
For our ancestors, too, sticking together was the best chance of avoiding ending up as cat food,
The communal life created new challenges and forced us to really start using our brains,
Living together brings a whole new element - a social life -
and the bigger your group, the bigger your social problems can be,
You need a bigger brain to cope,
In a group, working at friendships and alliances is crucial, You need to remember who's who..,
..and what's what,
You need to be a diplomat so you don't get on the wrong side
of those with more powerful weapons than you,
A single social gaffe can be disastrous,
Just like baboons, as we began to live in larger groups for safety,
so our brains evolved to cope,
Our social skills became increasingly important and our brains continued to get bigger -
almost four times bigger -
so our skulls had to get larger, too,
(AFRICAN LANGUAGE)
So, one and a half million years ago,
in steps giant-brained Homo sapien and world domination.
No, Not yet, because being the two-legged brainboxes of the savannah
now gave us a problem our four-legged friends didn't have,
Take wildebeest, Because the female wildebeest walks on all fours,
she can afford to have wide hips,
That makes giving birth quick and easy, which is important with so many predators around,
Although the baby wildebeest is big,
its brain and its skull are quite small in relation to its body size,
so it can slip out easily,
That's true for most land mammals,
but for humans, birth is where we pay the price for our big brain,
If we look at the physique of modern woman, we can see why,
The best design for walking upright is a slender body with narrow hips,
But narrow hips are the worst design for a big-brained human,
This was perhaps the biggest stumbling block we humans faced in our whole journey of life,
We were stuck,
(MIDWIFE) Push. Push hard.
Push down. Push harder.
Push a little harder.
But evolution came up with a surprising solution,
Unlike almost all other mammals, our skull isn't fully formed at birth,
A human baby's head is soft and squishy, allowing it to pass down the narrow birth canal,
(BABY CRIES)
(MIDWIFE) Well done!
During the first 12 months of life, the bony skull plates gradually fuse together to protect it,
In effect, we're all born premature,
So for the first few months, a human baby is extremely vulnerable, requiring constant care,
but the pay-off - a giant brain - far outweighs the risk,
It seems this is the only way that we can have a large-brained baby
and hang on to the narrow hips we need for walking upright,
Biological problem solved.
Big-brained man, Homo sapien, finally bursts out onto the scene
somewhere here in East Africa around 300,000 years ago.
And with his clever, complex brain,
he was able to develop new technology that early apeman never had.
OK, they're just little lumps of rock, but it's what they did with them that's really cunning.
This hasn't been made by accident. It's been designed.
This part has been crafted specifically to attach to a handle.
Plonk this on a stick and what have you got? A spear. The perfect weapon for hinting.
So man started developing a more sophisticated tool kit,
As well as weapons, he designed a variety of scrapers and cutters for butchering meat,
But then...there was this.
A bit of crumbly rock.
Believe it or not, this led to the great masterpieces of the future.
This led to the Mona Lisa.
Watch.
It was the first paint.
It's ochre - crumbly iron oxide,
This piece was found in Blombos Cave near Cape Town in South Africa
and is at least 70,000 years old,
What's amazing is that it's engraved,
This abstract etching is the first recorded work of art,
It marks the roots of what we now call culture or civilisation,
And this old pig jawbone might even offer a clue to when religion first began,
It was discovered in the same grave as an early human
and it's dated at more than 100,000 years old,
It's the earliest evidence of ritual burial,
The very act of carefully burying a body with other objects
suggests that those people believed that death wasn't the end - that the spirit lived on.
Now, for the first time, we can say that these weren't apemen,
They were people who thought like you and me,
It led to human civilisation,
(MUSIC)
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
Those early people had an understanding of the past and of the future,
They recognised their own mortality,
Art and religion set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
They're the most difficult things for scientists to explain.
(PLAINCHANT)
This is when some believe that only a divine spark could have made us truly human,
But is there another way to explain these sudden breakthroughs?
(WOMAN) They had a procession here.
Palms were difficult to get in medieval times so yew branches...
Many scientists believe that the trigger was something we all take for granted - language.
From the fossil skulls of our ancestors,
scientists know that their voice box, or larynx, was much higher up than it is today,
(GRUNTING)
It's still in this position in the chimps and other apes,
(HOOTING, GRUNTING)
If this was still the same for us..,
..apart from a grunt or two, we wouldn’t have the power of speech.
On Palm Sunday...
Around 200,000 years ago, our larynx dropped to where it is today,
allowing us to make more complex sounds,
This is when we started to talk.
(WOMAN) Now we'll look at the cloisters. This way.
Why is talking so important to the story of the human race?
You can get a clue by going back to West Africa,
These chimps are collecting nuts to eat,
Children also gather nuts, but not to eat - to play with,
Remember collecting conkers?
Chimps have to use a rock or stick to crack open the nuts,
They pick up these skills by copying,
The young ones watch their mothers closely, Titbits keep them concentrating on the job,
(WOMAN) Five! That's a big one. You’ve got three and I've got three as well.
Like the chimps, the younger children learn by copying the older ones -
handing down skills across the generations,
The difference is that it can take a young chimp six years to perfect its nut-cracking technique,
We humans on the other hand, can use a short cut,
We can teach even very young children simply by talking to them,
That's a nice little conker. Don't eat it. Put it in the pile.
So they can learn a new technique - for opening the conkers - instantly,
Are you opening them with your heels? It's much easier to do it like that, isn't it?
(CHILD) There's already a conker in here.
What takes chimps years to learn, modern-day children can pick up in minutes,
With language, we continue to learn new things all our lives,
By 100,000 years ago, we were solving problems by talking together,
We were using our big brains to communicate with each other as never before,
So, we were hugely brainy.
We could talk. We were perfect.
No, not so.
Talking gave us another big biological problem,
and this one still hasn't been solved.
Let's look at the adult chimps in Cameroon again,
Chimps breathe mostly through their noses and hardly ever through their mouths,
They use their mouths almost entirely for feeding, so air goes down one way, food another,
But for humans, it's a different story,
(WOMAN) Let's get you up on your balloon chair.
For us, it's more complicated,
Remember being told not to talk with your mouth full?
Well, there's a very good reason for this,
To talk, we have to breathe through our mouths as well,
so we use the same opening for talking, eating, drinking and breathing,
(ALL) # Happy birthday to you
# Happy birthday to you... #
Most of the time, this works out fine,
but sometimes things go down the wrong way, with tragic results,
Normally, when we swallow, a flap of cartilage covers the windpipe,
so the food goes straight down to the stomach,
But with our larynx now in its lower position,
just occasionally food falls in and down the windpipe
where it blocks the airway to the lungs, making us choke,
(CHOKING COUGH)
Every year in Britain alone, around 200 people choke to death,
(CHOKING COUGH)
Talking has been so critical to our evolution that it's even worth the risk of dying for,
(WOMAN) That's better. Are you all right?
Well, we could talk, but one thing's for sure - we haven't evolved into biological supermen,
At this point in or journey,
it had been for million years since we'd split from the other apes. So let's recap.
What had happened to us during that time?
Well...
..biological evolution - that is, the physical changes to our bodies...
..has worked some slow but crucial changes in us,
First, around four to five million years ago, we stood up on two legs and walked,
But then it was another three million years before we started getting clever with our hands,
It wasn't until over a million years later that our brains got as big as they are today,
(MAN) Here!
And for all this time, our only form of conversation was probably just grunting,
(GRUNTING)
It wasn't until very recently, around 200,000 years ago,
that our larynx began to drop, which led to modern language,
(MEN ALL TALK AT ONCE)
But now that we cold talk...
..our cultural evolution could go into warp speed.
Cultural evolution was a brand-new trend,
It isn't based on genes like biological evolution, it's about the sharing of ideas,
Talking allowed ideas and knowledge to be passed around so quickly
that it was one of the greatest revolutions in the journey of life.
It set us on the path to world dominance.
(MUSIC)
But the story isn't over yet,
75,000 years ago, modern, talking humans were thriving here in Africa,
They had the anatomy which allowed them to speak and they were sharing ideas.
Modern man with a modern brain - us.
But at that precise moment when they had so much to look forward to, disaster struck.
A volcano called Toba in northern Sumatra erupted,
This would have been the loudest noise ever heard by man,
(RUMBLING ROAR)
It blasted vast clouds of ash and sulphur dioxide right across the planet,
blocking out the sun,
It triggered a six-year global winter that would have blighted the entire world,
In Africa, 4,000 miles away, drought and famine would have followed,
Millions of animals would have died -
the animals we humans depended on for meat,
Those early Homo sapiens, too, must have been decimated,
Because of one freak act of nature, our ancestors nearly became extinct,
DNA evidence suggests that perhaps as few as 1,000 people were left..,
..which could mean that all six billion of us alive on Earth today
are descended from those 1,000 survivors in Africa,
This mega catastrophe must have pushed man to his limits, so how did he survive?
Scientists now believe
what really may have saved us from extinction was working together - sharing information,
To get some idea of what it must have been like after Toba blew its top,
you can go to the Kalahari desert today,
It's one of the harshest places anywhere in the world,
But even here, there is water and food if you know where to look,
The Ju/'hoansi people of northern Namibia are mainly hunter gatherers,
How do they cope with living in such heat and drought?
Most importantly, they never remain isolated as a single group for long,
They regularly walk for two to three days across the desert to visit different family groups,
It may have been months since they last saw each other,
(CHATTING AND LAUGHING)
(SINGING AND CLAPPING)
Once here, the highlight of the visit is swapping gifts,
They do it not only to cement the bonds of friendship
but also to secure co-operation and the sharing of ideas...
..and out here, what your neighbours choose to tell you could well save your life,
They may know where the best water sources are or good fruiting trees,
or the new hunting grounds,
And of course, they can tell you the gossip. Without this regular exchange of knowledge,
different villages could become isolated, and without outside help, even die out,
It's now thought that it was our ability to talk and help each other in a hostile world
that saved us from extinction after Toba erupted,
It's encouraging to think that the very existence of the human race
may owe more to co-operation than to conflict,
Gradually, the world recovered,
and small bands of pioneering humans started to leave Africa
and travel to the far corners of the earth,
By now, we humans weren't just sharing ideas, we were working together as never before,
and cultural evolution was spreading around the globe,
But the communication skills of this co-operative modern man
were still quite limited.
After all, the only way he had of sharing ideas was by talking.
Do you know where the Natural History Library is?
Although telling other people what you know through speech is still vital to man today..,
- The Natural History Library. -I don't know.
..there's only so much knowledge any individual can store in his memory,
You don't know where the Natural History Library is, do you? Have you heard of it?
And no one person can know everything,
- Hi, mate. I'm looking for the library. - The library? Round here, up Park Street...
If someone dies without passing on their ideas and culture, those ideas are lost for ever,
Unless, of course, they've been written down.
The answer was for us to start preserving our ideas and knowledge in books,
And it was only with the advent of recorded information
that our new cultural evolution could accelerate again,
Writing was an enormous breakthrough, It stopped culture being lost
and meant successive generations could begin to build on what had gone before,
No one could REMEMBER how to make a space rocket,
but once it's written down, that information is accessible to multitudes,
For two and a half thousand years, we saved our precious culture in our books,
But the amount of knowledge accessible through a computer
adds up to all the books in all the libraries in all the world.
We might have left this guy behind five million years ago,
but only in the last few decades
have our big brains made this quantum leap forward in information transfer.
(COCKEREL CROWS)
In the age of the internet, anyone anywhere on Earth can tap into this massive central fund,
At the forest reserve in Cameroon, Dieudonne can search the web
and get hold of all the same stuff as I can,
And it's fast.
If I download a picture into the computer, I can send it halfway round the world in seconds.
Never before have ideas spread so widely so quickly,
whether for business, education or purely for pleasure,
Computers are now the core of modern culture,
But without writing and without this power to store knowledge..,
The answer is here - still in the Stone Age,
If you could use a time machine
to bring a Stone Age baby from 35,000 years ago and educate it here in our modern world..,
..it could do anything - become an airline pilot, doctor, even president,
By the Stone Age, people were just as intelligent as us,
And if a 21st-century baby was sent back 35,000 years,
it would be no more advanced than the people who lived then,
Strip away our technology and underneath we're all still cavemen,
That's because or genes haven't changed since the Stone Age.
These babies would have the same genetic make-up.
But just suppose both babies were unlucky and were born with a serious genetic disease,
In the past, this baby would have died,
His defective gene would not have been passed on,
It was, after all, survival of the fittest,
Today, modern medicine is so advanced
that many of us can live on despite our problem genes..,
..whereas in the past, we wouldn't have survived,
And that is affecting our evolution,
Now, without the force of natural selection,
those problem genes will become more and more widespread within us.
Fortunately, or most important evolutionary trait, or big brain,
may have come up with a solution.
We are embarking on a revolution - genetic engineering,
In as little as ten years from now,
we may be able to alter our children's genes before they're born,
We now know which genes are involved in some 5,000 illnesses,
Scientists believe they'll soon be able to manipulate these genes in a fertilised embryo,
So for the first time in the history of man,
our children and their children could be free of genetic illness and disease,
That's just what scientists know today,
And remember, cultural evolution works faster...
..faster...and faster.
Once scientists have the power to cure these illnesses,
what else may they do in years to come?
Imagine a world where the same technology could enhance our children's looks,
As you make your choices for your daughter, I can click them into my computer.
Could we soon be ordering up designer babies?
Have you thought about what skin colour you’d like?
Could we choose the perfect features for our child?
- Does that look OK? - Yes.
Every detail, from skin tone to eye colour,
(CUSTOMER) Can we have blue?
How do you feel about the features of the face?
No more nose jobs,
and no more plastic surgery,
(CUSTOMER) That's great.
We could design and create the perfect child,
And what about their brain power?
Our offspring could become much more intelligent than us, much younger,
- (MUM) Are you winning? - Yes!
Child geniuses could soon become the norm,
Our children could be academically successful at a much earlier age..,
..and make modern technology look like child's play,
Some scientists even predict that by 2020,
we'll be able to manipulate the genes that control ageing,
While we age normally over our lifetimes,
our children could reach 200 years old and yet keep their youthful good looks,
We've come a long way from the chimps -
amazing considering there's only that crucial 1% difference in or genes.
Our journey of life has certainly been a rocky ride,
Until now, our evolution was a game of chance,
That we survived at all is something of a miracle,
Of course, no one can really know for sure how much further away from chimps we'll go,
The difference is that now the choice is ours,
(WALTZ MUSIC)
So what might that space-age biologist find if he came back to Earth in the future?
If he visited the apes again, he might get quite a surprise,
Before, he was comparing we humans with the chimps,
But if he now looked at the chimps..,
..and then at me, the unmodified man of today...
..then at the new super-Homo sapiens of the future,
he might well see a greater difference between me and the super-human
than he saw before between me and the chimps,
He might think we were three equally different kinds of ape,
No one can really predict what path we'll take in the future, but one thing is for certain -
for the first time in the history of life,
we can control or own evolution.
Whether we choose to or not,
we now have the knowledge and power to determine or biological future -
or own journey of life.