Ape To Man (History Channel)

Please Subscribe To The Evolution Documentary YouTube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/EvolutionDocumentary

Broadcast 2005. It has long been considered the most compelling question in our history: Where do human beings come from? Although life has existed for millions of years, only in the past century and a half have we begun to use science to explore the ancestral roots of our own species. The search for the ultimate answer has taken a number of twists and turns, with careers made and broken along the way. Ape to Man is the story of the quest to find the origins of the human race a quest that spanned more than 150 years of obsessive searching The search for the origins of humanity is a story of bones and the tales they tell.

It was in 1856 that the first bones of an extinct human ancestor were encountered, unearthed by a crew of unskilled laborers digging for limestone in Western Europe. The find, which would be known as Neanderthal Man, was seeing the light of day for the first time in more than 40,000 years. At the time, the concept of a previous human species was virtually unthinkable. Yet just a few years later, Charles Darwin's work The Origin of Species first broached the subject of evolution, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it had become the hottest topic of the age.

Where do we come from?

For centuries, the greatest
question in the history of man

had no scientific answer

Then, the first evidence
of a human ancestor

started a scientific revolution

This is the story of the quest to
find the origins of the human race

It spanned a century and a half
of obsessive searching

and would make or break
the careers of some of the greatest
scientists in the field

For the lucky few,

chance discoveries opened
a window on the hidden world
of our ancestors

from the tiniest fragments of the past,

the full story
was slowly pieced together

Spanning 300,000 generations,

over 3 million years…

it is the story
of our progress from ape

to man

The search for
the origins of humanity

is a story of bones
and the tales they tell

The first chapter began here,

40,000 years in the future

at the entrance to this cave

With the discovery of this man

The year was 1856,

and the cave lies in what is now
the Neander Valley, in Germany

Workmen were digging for limestone

a vital ingredient in
the local chemical industry,

it lay under a layer of rock and soil

The men were paid a few pence a day
to remove the surface layer,

and everything was thrown away

But then, a spade hit something
that didn't sound like a rock

The shape looked like
the top of a skull,

and thinking it might
be a murder victim,

they stopped work
to show the foreman

It was interesting but he'd seen
this kind of thing before,

and was happy to send it
the way of all the other bits
of bone they found

to be smashed up with the rocks

Then something made him
change his mind

He knew a local school teacher
who might be interested to see it

and the skull got a reprieve

What he could never have imagined

was that the skull
was seeing the light of day

for the first time in
more than 40,000 years

In western Europe,
400 centuries before Christ,

the original owner of the skull
was a living, breathing being

a hunter, a tribal leader,
a father of children,

and a member of
the most successful species

on the European continent
at the time

Neanderthal man

40,000 years later,

a school teacher Johan Fuhlrott

got the chance to see
the skull for the first time

A keen amateur geologist
and former anatomy student,

Fuhlrott had no idea
if he'd come on a wild goose chase

The moment he saw the skull,

he knew instinctively that
this was something extraordinary

It looked fossilised,
which would make it
thousands of years old,

and it was clearly not an animal

But neither was it
from a normal, modern human being

This particular skull
is the skull of Neanderthal,

and it, it's big

There, there, the, this individual
lived around 50,000 years ago,

and by that time, Neanderthals
had developed a brain

that was as large and in some cases
larger than the modern human brain

You notice that
it's rather long and low

and it's almost as if you grab
the front of a human face

and pull it out

You also have this big protruding nose,

and in fact look how large
that nose is

So they would have looked different
for, from modern humans,

if you actually saw one
with the flesh on it

Over 300 Neanderthal remains
have been found

from Europe to the Middle East

they all tell the same story
of a short, powerful physique,

perfectly evolved for
the world they lived in

a tough place

Europe was in the early stages
of the last great Ice Age

Within a few centuries,

this land was under a glacier
half a mile thick

At this time, the climate
was fluctuating quite extremely,

and we do know that they survived
some of the major cold snaps,

the major glacial advances

The only way to support
advanced life here

was with a high-protein meat diet,

and that meant learning to
be a good hunter - or starve

What we do know from the skeletons,

that Neanderthals were very robust,

they were very strong,
but they also had this huge brain

The tools found with Neanderthal

suggest they developed
sophisticated stone technology

Their weapons were the tools
of their survival,

and needed to be maintained

If a spear failed at the critical
moment, the hunt would fail

Neanderthal males seemed
to have supported loose family
groups of up to a dozen

this hunting trip
had already taken 3 days,

and covered ten miles,
with no sign of any prey

Then, they found animal droppings

Neanderthal nasal cavities
are unique among hominids,

suggesting a highly evolved
sense of smell,

and they recognise
the scent of red deer

Rubbing the droppings
on their skin helped to
disguise their approach

if they could catch up
with the deer

They'd had to range further
in recent months to find a kill

Red deer numbers had fallen rapidly,
and they had no idea why

what they didn't know
was that they had competition,

competition that would one day
drive them to extinction

Victorian scientist Johan Fuhlrott

held the evidence of
an unknown ancient species

It's hard even to guess what
the creature was without more evidence

And they hadn't got much

Fulhrott gave the bones to
more qualified scientists

But even when more pieces
emerged from the same cave,

they completely failed
to identify them

Opinions varied widely,

from a barbarian who'd fought
the Roman legions,

to a lost Russian Cossack

Even the victim of some unknown
congenital deformity

But a new idea began
to take centre stage

Fulrod himself suggested

Neanderthal might be
an early ancestor of modern man

To many Victorians, this seemed
the most absurd notion of all

Then, in 1859, just three years
after the bones were found,

the notion suddenly caught on

Charles Darwin published
his groundbreaking work,

The Origin of Species

He suggested that all
living things had descended
from earlier, simpler forms,

by the process of evolution

And if it was true
for every living thing on earth,

then that had to include us

1859, Darwin publishes
the Origin of Species,

and a lot of people think that
this book was paid attention to,

but it wasn't.

Most people couldn't care
a job about whether a fish
evolved into an amphibian

no-one cared

The big question, the question
that everybody wanted to know was,

where did we come from?

And it's in the 1850s and 60s

that science steps to
the plate and says,

I'm going to give you the answer

And boy did they give us an answer

If humans had evolved
from a simpler form,

the implication
to the scientific mind was obvious

and disturbing

Humans could only
have descended from apes

The impact on the Victorian psyche
was profound

Many believed the theory of evolution

made them little more than animals

Darwin stayed away from that question

He knew he was going
to get into trouble

He writes to friends and says

uh-uh, I'm not going
to talk about that

far too controversial,

and it's up to other people,

new scientists, a younger
generation of scientists

coming on in the 1850s
and 60s, seeing an opening,

seeing that they could make a career

if they were to answer this question,

where do humans come from

Inspired by the Neanderthal bones,

evolution became
the hottest topic of the age

But it would stay little more than
a theory without more evidence

scientific attention
turned to an ancestor

that would link us to the apes

an ape man, a missing link

and they would go to the ends
of the earth to find it

In the late 1800s,

the world of science had become
obsessed with the idea

of a missing link between apes and man,

and German scientist Johann Fuhlrott

believed Neanderthal man was that link

Neanderthal seems so promising

when it's first presented, it seems
like it's going to be the answer,

but on closer inspection,
it starts to fall apart

Most importantly,

the key fossils just seem
to be too much like humans

Neanderthal at best is a man
with some ape qualities

Travelling back in time,

our Neanderthal stood just
3,000 generations behind us,

at around 40,000 years ago

To find a true missing link,

meant going further back in time,

to something more apelike

The question was, how much ape,

and how much man, would it be?

I think the idea of a missing link
came from a,

a very simple view of evolution,

and it's not surprising
it was simple,

because of course these ideas
were in their infancy,

but people had this idea of fixed types

There were humans, and there were apes,

and an evolutionary transition
between those two types

would somehow combine
the features of both types

There was no real conception

that evolution could operate
over vast periods of time,

and there could be complex
mixtures of characteristics,

so people were looking for
something essentially

that would be halfway between
a living human and a living ape

But where would the evidence be found?

By the 1880s,

it was believed this had to be

where apes and primitive people
lived side by side

And so the search moved from
Europe to South East Asia,

and the Dutch island colony of Sumatra,
home to both man and ape

In October 1889,

the monsoon season was beginning,

and no-one tried to negotiate the dense
rain forest unless they had to

Two years ago,

Eugene Dubois had a promising career
as a doctor in Amsterdam,

but his obsession with human origins

had led him to take up the challenge
to find the missing link

after abandoning his career and
his civilised European home,

the great dream had turned
into a nightmare

He's invested everything that he had
into finding this missing link

Dubois was the worst kind of
person to go out to the field,

because he had no experience

He doesn't know
how to teach his crew

He doesn't know
how to take care of them

They're out in the field
It's raining

It's a complete shambles

He'd found caves,

which he hoped would produce
the fossils he was looking for

They hadn't

His engineer had given up digging,

and all but a few
of his convict labourers

had run away, or were sick

To make matters worse,
Dubois had malaria

The same deadly disease

had already claimed the life
of his first engineer,

and he was about to lose
all patience with the second

His engineer had just lost his workmate

and he hadn't been paid for a month

But this meant nothing to Dubois

Poor Eugene, he desperately
wants to find something,

desperately wants to
make a name for himself,

comes up with absolutely nothing

After months in the jungle,

Dubois had just a few
animal fossils to show

for the time and money he'd spent

Dubois had many trials
and tribulations,

and someone who was not as driven,

not as determined, not as obsessed,

I'm sure would have given up
and gone home

Dubois realised his attempt to find
the missing link here had failed,

and he fired his engineer

They leave Sumatra
and he goes elsewhere,

and he frankly doesn't know
where to look,

other than somewhere
in the East Indies

Two years later, and Dubois
had started his search again,

this time on the island of Java

Finally his luck had started to turn

He'd fully recovered from malaria,

and at last had something to look at

Some fossil teeth, which he
believed were extremely old,

and looked vaguely apelike

Dubois had a new dig site,

with a bigger team,
overseen by the Dutch army

Every so often
they brought him material

they thought might be of interest,

and one day, in October 1891,

he got another batch

It contained a fossilised skull

Just like Neanderthal
40 years earlier,

it was only a skullcap,

but like Neanderthal,

it sent its discoverer into
a frenzy of speculation

The surrounding forests were
home to a variety of apes

but he knows that
this was not from any known ape

It was too fine

The brain cavity was clearly large;

yet obviously not a human skull

So, could it be
an early human ancestor,

closer to our apelike origins?

The only thing he could compare it
with in his mind was Neanderthal

The first Neanderthal found
was 40,000 years old

Unknown to Dubois, his find
was roughly 20 times older,

between half a million
and a million years old

much more primitive
than Neanderthal

But was it any closer to
being the missing link?

The key, Dubois believed,
was the size of the brain

He had a precise mathematical model
to determine the missing link

Its brain cavity should be
precisely half the size of a human,

and twice the size of a chimpanzee

But when he calculated
the brain cavity of this skull,

it was the wrong size

too big for the halfway point,

therefore too big to be the apelike
creature he had imagined

And more evidence emerged from the site

which simply added to
the confusion for Dubois

A complete fossilised leg bone

Its shape suggests that
its owner stood upright

and walked on two legs, like a man

Dubois couldn't change his evidence,

so he changed his model

He decided that the missing link

had to have a brain almost
as large as our own;

and he was so convinced
by his meagre evidence

that he wrote to
the Dutch colonial government,

announcing that
he'd found the missing link

He called it pithecanthropus erectus

upright-walking ape man

One of the most successful hominid
species ever to walk the earth

In Africa, 800,000 years ago,

and 10,000 miles from where Dubois
found his upright-walking ape

This is the same species,
today called homo erectus

upright-walking man

They've been able to colonise
Africa, Asia and beyond,

thanks to a unique combination
of physical and mental qualities

Standing at around six feet,

their bodies were similar
in shape to our own,

and their brains were about
two thirds the size of ours

Homo erectus was on the verge
of becoming human

One of the main reasons
for this was diet

Because for the first time
in our evolution,

we had access to
the concentrated protein of meat

Yet there is no evidence that
homo erectus was a true hunter

This antelope was most likely
scavenged from a leopard kill

the spears used
to drive away the predator

It's believed that our bodies

had also been going through
some radical changes

For the first time in our evolution,

body hair was disappearing,

partly because homo erectus' skin

had developed complex sweat glands

This also removed the need
to pant in the heat,

allowing voices to develop,

and paving the way for human speech

But it's their stone tools

that showed how advanced
homo erectus had become

We find the appearance of
a thing called the hand axe,

which has been called the Swiss
army knife of the Palaeolithic

This is a multi-purpose tool

It's shaped very consistently,

worked on both sides,
worked very skilfully,

and erectus developed that

certainly close to
1.5 million years ago,

so this was a big advance
in technology

These people were part
of a larger group,

the beginnings of a tribe

But they stayed together
as a tight-knit family,

and there is evidence that they
had learned to care for each other

through sickness and injury

The leg bone which Dubois found
in Java had an unusual scar,

showing clear traces
of damage and repair

It's incredible

It seems to have broken
at one point, and healed,

so whoever it was that owned this leg,

not only was severely injured,

but repaired it in their own lifetime,

and that's important,

because if you broke your leg
out in the wild,

you'd be dead

You'd have no chance of survival,

except if you were with a family,

if you were with a village,
if you were in a society

There is a family system
around that individual

There was safety within the family,

but the family itself
was never far from danger

Leopards used the same rock shelters

As darkness approached,

they would become vulnerable,
spears or no spears

And a storm was brewing
in the hot afternoon

that could bring an unwelcome
predator in search of shelter

But this storm might
also bring something else

a new weapon that
shifted the balance of power

between our ancestors
and their competitors

One of the most important pieces
in the human evolutionary puzzle

a gift from nature

Every animal on earth that
ever encountered fire

had run away from it

Homo erectus was at a crossroads
of human evolution

If they could do the unimaginable,

and conquer their instinctive fear,

they would harness a new power

They just needed the nerve
to reach into the blaze

When humans tamed fire,

this was obviously
a huge step forward,

and it must have been
a remarkable event

for people to face up to fire

and learn how to control it,

rather than running away from it,

which is the natural instinct,

and once they could do that,

once they could capture fire

and eventually even
make it at will,

this was a huge advance

The impact of fire was
enormous on human evolution

The technology of fire gave
homo erectus heat, light

and protection on their travels,

helping them to migrate
across the world

from Africa to Asia and beyond

This is how Eugene Dubois came across
their fossil remains in Java

But this nearly human species

was very different from Dubois' idea
of an upright-walking ape man

In his mind,

he'd found the perfect mix of
ape and human characteristics

for a missing link

All he had to do was convince
the rest of the world

And it wasn't going to be easy

I think he must have thought that
the world was ready for this,

and when he announced it,

the world of science
would be at his feet,

for making this great discovery

that the world had been waiting for,

and of course
it didn't work out like that

because when Dubois actually
tried to publish the material

and show people the material,

their view was that it was
too apelike to be a missing link

Dubois was convinced to the end

that his fossils
represented a missing link,

but the scientific world
did not agree,

and rejected his claim

Because he never attended
his own dig,

he couldn't even prove his pieces
belonged to the same creature

The verdict of most experts
was that the leg was human,

but the skull looked like
an unknown species of ape

He leaves the Dutch East Indies,
he goes back home,

and no-one's paying
any attention to his work,

no-one's paying attention
to his fossils,

and it must have just broken his heart

He ended up basically assembling
his fossils, and said right,

if you're not going to pay
any attention to me,

you're not going to
get access to my material

Must have been one of the greatest
sulks in scientific history

If you don't believe me,
you can't look at my stuff

The scientific world ultimately
recognise the true value
of Dubois' discovery,

but not for several decades

In the meantime, the search
for the missing link continued

And at the start of the 20th century,

the focus turned
from Asia back to Europe.

because in Britain,

a discovery was made
that amazed the world

And created one of the biggest
scandals in scientific history

Arthur

Look, look!

Teeth. What?

Suddenly, a new contender
that fitted the idea

of a missing link perfectly

In fact, it was almost too perfect

Well, Dr Watson? What do you think?

But then, forgeries often are

In December of 1912, in London

A new fossil contender for
the title of missing link

was about to be unveiled

at the very centre of
the scientific establishment

This time, the experts were
ready to be convinced,

because this was the perfect ape man

And it was British

There was this tremendous rivalry
between Britain and Germany

building up to the First World War,

both nationalistic, artistic and,

and certainly scientific,

and the fact that Britain had nothing
to match the Neanderthal find

I think was a factor in
the success that Piltdown had

once it was delivered,

here was evidence that we could match
anything the Germans had

There was a sense of expectation
among the eminent guests

of the Royal Geographical Society,

and Charles Dawson was about

to become the most celebrated
fossil-finder

in the British Empire

Gentlemen

May I introduce you to...

Piltdown Man

The reconstructed skull showed
the exact combination of features

everyone had expected to find
in the missing link

What they felt at that time,
that the essence of humanity,

the essence of being human,
was the large brain size,

and their concept of the missing link
was a large brain

mixed up with some
apelike characteristics,

and this is of course
what Piltdown Man was

So, is Piltdown Man
just another early man,

on the lines of Neanderthal?

I think not

Why?

The jaw

What Piltdown delivered was what
many British experts were hoping for

something that seemed to have a large
brain in a modern-shaped brain case,

although rather thick and primitive,

and in the jaw bone

we have evidence of a much more
apelike jaw and teeth,

and this weird combination

was what actually some
British experts had predicted

that the brain had grown large
early on in human evolution,

but the teeth and jaws lagged behind,

and Piltdown seemed to show that,

and what was more, it was British

Three years earlier,

the first piece of Piltdown Man
had emerged seemingly by chance

Workmen digging a road had found
what they thought was a coconut,

and casually smashed it

It was Piltdown Man's skull

Charles Dawson was
an amateur fossil-hunter

with a burning ambition to find
something truly earth-shattering

He'd walked past this site regularly,

in the hope that something
significant might emerge

Anything today?

His perseverance was finally rewarded

We've got this

When he examined the first piece,

he instantly recognised it
at a skull fragment

Where's the rest of it?

And there could be more

In there somewhere

Do you think
you could find it for me?

I'll try

Agreed?

Alright?

Good

Dawson knew he was
onto something at last

But to get maximum exposure
for his find,

he knew he'd need
to involve an expert

A year later,

he'd persuaded Sir Arthur Smith
Woodward of the British Museum

to join in the search
for more evidence

The skull fragments looked
vaguely human,

but they hoped to find evidence

that its own could be older
and more primitive

Evidence of something more apelike

And in a surprisingly short time,

they'd found it

This is definitely not a stone

Arthur

Look, look!

Teeth

What? We've got teeth

Goodness me

The evidence seemed conclusive,

and with Smith Woodward's support,

Dawson felt able to
make his boldest claim

It is my conjecture

that what I have termed
the anthropus awsonii,
Dawson's Dawn Man,

is nothing less than the missing link
we have searched for so long

Thank you

For the British scientific establishment,

here at least was
what they had long wished for

the perfect missing link

A big-brained British ape man

The fossils are perfect
for a missing link

Some of it seems to be human,

some of it seems to be ape;

it just fits perfectly
right in between

In your search for an ancestor,
that's what you want

You know what,
it was almost too good to be true,

but because everyone was,
was looking for something,

because everyone wanted to
find that first Briton,

nobody dug deeper

Gentlemen, please.
Gather round

It seemed
the missing link had been found

Yet while Dawson savoured
his moment of glory,

his audience was unaware that
they'd all been taken in

by the greatest hoax
in scientific history

And it would take decades
for the truth to be revealed

While the experts in England
contented themselves with fakes,

a real scientific treasure
waited to be discovered

But it was in a part of the world

that no-one at this time
even cared to look

Southern Africa

Charles Darwin believed Africa
might be the cradle of humanity,

because it was the home
of the great apes

If our closest ape relatives
were still there,

then the ancestral link
between us might lie there too

If so, evidence was bound
to turn up sooner or later

It just needed someone to
recognise it when it did

31-year-old Australian
Doctor Raymond Dart

had recently arrived in South Africa
to begin his teaching career

Soon after,
his friend was getting married,

and Dart was the best man

Keep still

He and wife Dora had half an hour
to finish getting ready

Now wait there.
I'll have to put it back on

But Dart's mind was elsewhere

He'd been collecting fossils
for the last few months,

sent to him by students
and colleagues

A week ago, he got news
of a spectacular fossil,

found in a nearby lime quarry,

and it had just arrived by train

Thank you, gentlemen,

just leave it inside
the door there. Thanks

Dart's wedding duties
were just minutes away

but he couldn't wait

The promise of a spectacular find
was too much to ignore

Where are you going?
I'll be one moment

I'll be quick, I just want to
make sure it is what I think it is

You can't go burrowing in boxes
of rubble now, Raymond,

you really, really can't

I won't take long

Raymond. Please, just leave
them alone until tomorrow

I'll be quick

The first thing he saw

was material he'd seen
a dozen times before

But then, something
he could never have dreamed of

A brain

To be precise,
the space once occupied by a brain,

now filled with fossilised sand

I knew at a glance

that what lay in my hands
was no ordinary ape brain

Here was the replica of a brain
3 times the size of any baboon,

and considerably bigger
than an adult chimpanzee

Yet it was not big enough
for a primitive man

But whose brain was it?

Dart looked to see if there
was more of the same creature

He found a piece of rock
with the outline of an upper jaw

Behind it, a hollow space

when he matched the brain
to the hollow…

it was a perfect fit

He realised he had both the brain
and skull of an unknown ape man

But the face was buried
in solid rock

Raymond, Christo is here

Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Please, this is getting silly

Powerless to reveal
its identity immediately,

but Dart knew just
a few inches of rock

separated him
from a momentous revelation

Raymond Dart had been sent
the head of a fossilised ape-man,

which he hoped
might be the missing link

But it was buried
in a lump of solid rock

It took him 7 weeks of painstaking
work to reveal its identity

It was the first human ancestor
found in Africa,

and the earliest ancestor
yet discovered

The moment of truth came
on Christmas Eve, 1924

What emerged first were its teeth,

small and fine
like the teeth of a child

But then,
the outlines of its skull,

more apelike than human

When it was finally revealed,

Dart realised he'd uncovered
something extraordinary

A combination of human and ape features
that'd never been seen before

in the face of a child

It's a baby.
It's a baby

The fossil had been found
in a limestone quarry
at a site called Taung

So, Dart called it Taung Child

Its scientific name
is Australopithecus Africanus

the southern ape of Africa

She stood further back in time
than Neanderthal, at 40,000 years

Or homo erectus,
at over half a million

Piltdown was assumed to be
around a million years

But Taung went even further back,

to more than two million years

if she was the missing link,

then that link was more apelike
than anyone'd ever imagined

It also placed our ancestral home
firmly in Africa for the first time

In South Africa,
two million years ago,

the world of Taung Child
just like the Savannah today,

was a place of food scarcity

There were no easy pickings

Taung's mother,
at a little over 3 feet tall

and just over 5 stone
was no hunter,

but supplemented her diet by scavenging
from the scraps left by predators

Like a modern chimp, she used
rocks as a basic implement

to break open bones for
their rich marrow protein

But the predators she owed her
free lunch to were never far away

You've got sabre-tooth cats,
you've got giant hyenas,

you've got hunting hyenas,
a whole plethora of carnivores,

very dangerous carnivores
that we don't have any more,

and they would have all been eating

or going after things like
the Taung Child or even Taung's mother

Absorbed by the remains
of a carcass,

the mother had placed her child
a short distance away

in the shade of a tree

Her 3-year-old was the size
of an 18-month human infant,

and had no protection apart
from its mother

She knew there were threats,

but she'd keep one eye out
for the child, like any parent

They definitely would have cared
for their children,

I mean you see chimpanzees
as the most caring of parents

There's no reason to say
that Taung wasn't careful

The problem with the Taung child was

it was probably just old enough
and rambunctious enough

that it was leaving its mother
for stretches at a time

The mother was unaware that
the baby had wandered away

Until it was too late

There was no sight or smell of
a predator in the undergrowth,

but predators don't just exist
on the ground

You've also got a threat
from eagles

They've been documented to take
human children up in Kenya,

to the age of six years of age

I mean an eagle has a,
these incredibly strong talons,

greater, and it's a lovely quote,

greater lift to weight ratio
than an F15 fighter jet

The child was unaware of
the danger from above

The mother saw the eagle and
the child in the same moment

but couldn't get to her baby
quick enough

Taung's skull was found with
eggshells and other broken skulls

typical of deposits found
in eagles' nests

A lot of the skulls, interestingly,
had these v-shaped impressions

from this eagle's beak
going through,

because preferentially
they eat out the brain,

a very rich,
nutritious source of protein

This small, defenceless creature
was Raymond Dart's missing link

Valentine's Day, 1925,

just two months after Taung Child
had first emerged from the rock

A week earlier, Dart had published
a scientific paper

claiming Taung as the missing link,

and unleashing a storm
of controversy

Dart thinks he's got
the missing link

But there's also
this Piltdown specimen

that matches what the scientific
establishment thinks

Brain growth was thought to
have driven human evolution,

and Piltdown had a large brain,
and apelike teeth

But Taung had the opposite

a small brain, and human-looking teeth

The whole mix of different features
that you find with the Taung Child

really is quite interesting,
it's a whole reversal,

it's more like an,
a man ape than an ape man,

and it's a complete different
mixture of features

that the world hadn't seen and
the world actually wasn't ready for

Have you seen Professor Dart?

The biggest experts in this field
all backed Piltdown

Any sort of voices of doubt
were generally

just overridden by the authority
of these people

Dart's publication directly contradicted
the scientific establishment

Could anybody tell me where
I can find Professor Dart?

He sent it to London to be reviewed
by the world experts

the same experts whose views
he contradicts

And these so-called experts
dismiss it,

because they've got their money
on the other horse

He had one ally in his struggle
for recognition

Dr Robert Broom, like Dart,
an anatomist and fossil collector

Broom had the reviews from London

Raymond

Raymond, I, I thought
you'd be interested in these

Some responses to
your short paper in Nature

There's one there
by Sir Arthur Keith

What does he have to say?

Not very encouraging, I'm afraid

He places Taung in the same
sub family as gorillas

What?

How?

Well he says here,

the brain is clearly too small
to be a human ancestor

The experts lined up to condemn
Dart's description of a fossil

they'd never even seen

How can he know
what's too small? Or too big?

How can he possibly claim
that a human ancestor's brain

had to be a particular size?

What's his yardstick,
a standard-size bowler hat?

It's - what's the matter
with them, Robert?

Do they think I'm making it up?

So what went wrong
for Raymond Dart?

Wrong man, wrong place,
wrong thing

He's the wrong man
- he's an Australian,

he's not part of the establishment

It's the wrong place - Southern Africa?

Everyone's expecting another place,
either Europe or Asia

It's the wrong thing -

he calls it an ape,
everyone thinks it's an ape

Well if it's an ape, where is,
where does it fit in the story?

Taung is showing so many points
of affinity with

the gorilla and the chimpanzee

that there cannot be
a moment's hesitation

in placing the fossil
in this living group

How can he say that?

I don't know

Smith Woodward dismisses
the whole thing out of hand

He says that Taung certainly has…

Sorry, old man

Dart has made probably
one of the most remarkable
discoveries of the 20th century,

and the scientific establishment
completely discounts it,

discredits his find,

and literally puts it in a box or
a suspense account for 25 years

In the 1920s and 30s,

the most widely-read textbook
on human origins

did not even mention Dart's find

His work was not
taught in universities

Dart had suffered
an incredible amount,

I mean Dart was really put in
kind of scientific obscurity

And it really is not
until the late 40s

that he starts again, once that
tide of opinion starts to turn

and shows that
he was actually correct

It took a quarter of a century of
digging in South Africa's
limestone caves

to produce the evidence Dart needed

By the late 1940s,

a dozen fossils similar to Taung Child
finally proved he was right

So, what had become of Charles Dawson
and his Piltdown Man?

40 years after it emerged

as the prime contender
for the missing link,

the Piltdown fossils were examined
scientifically for the first time,

and finally revealed for
what they always were

an elaborate hoax

There was embarrassment and
puzzlement, astonishment,

disbelief in some cases,
that this thing was not genuine,

but I think for the greater
world of science,

there was relief,
particularly outside of Britain,

because so many people
by then had decided

there was something peculiar
about Piltdown,

even if they couldn't put
their finger on it

At the Natural History
Museum in London,

scientists decided to apply some
newly-available chemical tests

But as soon as a sample
was drilled from the jawbone,

they noticed something strange

The distinct smell of burnt flesh

This could only come from
organic bone, not fossil

So the jaw couldn't be more than
a few thousand years old,

and clear marks could be seen
on the surface of the teeth

Scratch marks

Originally from a modern ape,

they've been filed down
to look human

The entire assemblage,
stained to look old,

was a forgery

It has never been proved
who the fraudster was

But with the demise of Piltdown,

an old idea died with it

that a big brain was the defining
factor in the missing link

Something else had to come
before the evolution of a big brain,

a new theory replaced the old

What defined the beginning of
humanity was not brain growth

It was using tools

In 1915, a young boy
named Louis Leakey

was looking for stone tools
near his missionary home

the beginning of a lifelong obsession

that led Leakey to revolutionise
the story of human origins

44 years later, Leakey was looking
for the missing link,

and the search had taken him
to what is now Tanzania

Leakey had persuaded
the scientific world

that what defined
the first human ancestor was tools

Now, all he had to do was find one

He was supported by
his second wife, Mary,

and her son Jonathan,
just out of school

Ah, you got something, boy

They'd found plenty
of stone tools,

but no sign of Leakey's toolmaker

he'd been looking here
for 22 years

His luck had to change soon

July 17th, 1959, Louis Leakey
was laid low with the flu

Major work at the dig site
had slowed while he recovered,

but it was a day that
would make his career

In the cool of the early morning,

Mary took the opportunity
to walk her dogs,

and headed away from the camp

She wasn't expecting to find
much in the way of fossils,

but this year's rains had done
them an unexpected favour

As she casually scaned
the broken surface,

her mind suddenly registered
an unmistakable shape
exposed in the dirt

the top of a skull

Mary was convinced
it must be the toolmaker

they had been searching for

Louis. Louis, darling,
please wake up

I've found something
very important

Darling, please, I know
you're not feeling well,

but try and wake up

What have you, what have you found?

I don't know, that's why I want
you to come and have a look

So you're going to,
you're going to have to help me

Louis Leakey had waited 20 years

to find this tool-making human ancestor

Well done, my dear

You've got better eyes than me

But this was not what
he expected to find

The skull was more apelike
than he ever imagined

Well. Certainly not a homo,
my dear, I'm afraid

Have a look at this

But darling, just look at
where he was found

It can't just be a coincidence

Yet it was in the same
geological layer as the tools

The logic was inescapable

This must be the toolmaker,

and therefore the beginning of humanity

Leakey named it zinganthropus boyesii,

after his financial sponsor,
Charles Boysey

It had a small brain
but massive teeth and jaws,

whose muscles were so large

they had to be anchored to
a ridge at the top of the skull

But if zinge was using tools,

why did it need such powerful jaws?

Leakey overlooked the question,

and announced zinge
as the toolmaker

For a year, the scientific world
accepted zinge

as the tool-making missing link

Then, in 1960,
Leakey completely changed his mind

Mary was on her way
from the camp into town one day

when a can was dislodged
in the back of her Land Rover

When she stopped to fix it,

she noticed a familiar shape
in the earth

another piece of skull,

of an entirely new,
more humanlike species

Leakey decided that this, finally,
was his long lost toolmaker

He named it homo habilis
- literally, handy man

Habilis had a larger brain,
and much more human teeth

which made sense if he was getting
meat using stone tools

Though the tools habilis made
were little more than broken rocks,

they marked the very start
of human stone technology

But if habilis is the toolmaker,

why was zinge also found
with the tools?

Leakey has stumbled across
an incredible discovery,

and that discovery is humans
and humanlike organisms

coexisting in Africa at the same time

By the early 1960s,

the whole model of human evolution
was called into question,

and with it, the very idea
of a single missing link

For over a century,

the model of human evolution
had been a simple straight line

It began with
a lower evolutionary form

an ancestral ape

and ended with the most
advanced creature on earth

the modern human being

And somewhere in the middle,

there had to be a missing link
between the two

So, when Leakey found zinge,
it took pride of place

until a new candidate arrived

All of a sudden you have habilis,
this more human-looking animal

Both these fossils date
to the exact same age,

about 1.8 million years of age,

so what do you do?

You have to remove zinge
from the human line,

and you have to place them
in different lines

And what is most amazing thing,
in the same valley,

within metres of each other,

you have two species
living side by side

And that changes, or makes
a whole paradigm shift

in how we view human evolution,

and so this line is
all of a sudden broken apart

Suddenly what had been
a single line of descent

had been replaced
by a series of lines

that connected to
form a giant family tree

In the years between 1925 and 1965,

over 100 hominid fossils were found
and categorised in South Africa alone

And they can all be placed
in relation to each other
by accurate dating

Some species
are evolutionary dead ends,

while others appear to be part
of a line that leads to humans

But a number of humanlike competitors
occupy the earth at the same time,

with several routes to humanity

The only way to cut through
the confusion is to go
further back in time,

to the root of the human family tree

Before we had a big brain

Long before we used
fire and language

Before we even made tools

The creature everyone
was looking for marked
the very beginning of humanity

November 30th, 1974

An American-led team
was searching for the oldest
human ancestor on earth

And the search had a new focus

The Northern end of
the Rift Valley in Ethiopia

It was then possible to date
rocks very accurately,

so it was possible to be more
precise than ever before
about where to dig

Using new radiometric technology,

they'd dated the volcanic layers here
to around 3.5 million years old

Team leader Donald Johanson
was a rising star in
the world of anthropology

He knew Dart's
Australopithecus Africanus
lived over 2 million years ago

And Leakey's homo habilis
at about 1.45 million

But they were on
separate ancestral lines

He believed there
was a common ancestor,

over 3 million years old

The same age as the surrounding rocks

Johanson had been kept away from
any digging by essential paperwork,

a chore he was determined to finish

But his colleague, Tom Gray, returned
from the site with other ideas

How's it going?

Well, actually very boring

There were areas
they hadn't surveyed for a while,

away from the main dig

Do you need a break?

I was thinking of
taking a hike out to bed three

You want to come?

I don't know, I've got to finish this,
I mean these are pretty urgent

I've got to do something

The urge to do what he came here to do
finally got the better of Johanson

Let's go

He made a decision
that changed his life

They headed away from the site,

to explore a couple of
isolated gullies

They had no idea they were
just a few hundred feet

from the greatest fossil
find in history

But as the afternoon wore on,

they had little to show
for their efforts

They surveyed for a couple of hours

By mid afternoon, the temperature
was approaching 40 degrees,

and all they had found were
a few teeth from an extinct horse,

and part of the skull of a pig

They decided to head back to camp

But Johanson had a hunch to
look again in an old gully
on their way back

Hey, Tom

This way

It had been thoroughly checked
before, and produced nothing

Hey man, what's up?

But today, something caught
Johanson's eye

Come here, Tom

A shape in the dirt that just
seemed too regular to be a stone

You see that?

It was a fossilised arm bone

It's an arm

It's a hominid arm

And there was more

And a leg, oh my God

Parts of a small skull

Jaw

Pelvis

Arm

My God, this is...

In all, nearly 50 pieces
of fossilised skeleton

watch your, watch your feet

What do we have here, huh?

What's going on,
I don't know where to stand, man!

I know, Tom!!

This is it!

This is what we've been looking for,
I can't believe it!

One unbelievable thought
went through his mind

What if all the pieces
fitted together?

Could they be parts of a single,
extremely primitive skeleton?

Hey guys

Come on!

If Don Johanson was right,

he was looking at
the most complete skeletal remains

of the earliest human ancestor
yet discovered

What makes this individual
an absolutely spectacular find

is that she's so complete

For the first time we had more than
the odd broken bone for one specimen

We had virtually an entire skeleton

What's missing on one side
is present on the other side

I mean, it's so rare because
these hominids didn't bury their dead,

and in normal circumstances
if an individual died,

the scavengers would come in,
the bones would be dispersed

the mere probability that something
is fossilised is extremely small

But to actually go in and
find such a beautiful fossil

of a complete human ancestor,

is really a
once in a lifetime occurrence

In the first few hours
following the discovery,

the scale of the find was
hard for the team to grasp

But that night,

in the wind-blown desert,
outside of Hadar in Ethiopia,

the realisation of what
they had found began to sink in

Inspired by a tape
of the Beatles song,

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,

the new fossil picked up
a name - Lucy

To Lucy! Alright

To Lucy. To Lucy

In Ethiopia. 3.2 million years ago

lived Australopithecus Afarensis
- Lucy

She put together the pieces of
what one of our ancestors

at this point in time
really looked like,

and it was a huge shock,

because what she looked like
was basically a chimpanzee

Lucy would have been a tree-dweller
in a changing land

For 50 million years,

her ancestors had inhabited
the trees of Africa

But the land once covered
with unbroken forest

gave way to grass
and scattered woodland

Her diet was mostly
the fruit of trees like this fig

But one tree would not
support her for long,

and unlike her ancestors,
she could no longer
swing to the next tree

She had to find another route

Lucy did something
no ape had ever done

She stood up and
walked on two legs

In her body and behaviour,
Lucy is in most respects an ape,

from her diet
to her small brain and habitat

The big difference
is the way she walked

Walking upright is the first piece
in our evolutionary puzzle

The first step on the road
to humanity

The initial ancestral change
that we see in human evolution

is not brain expansion

Interestingly,
it's not even stone tools

The first major innovative change
that you see in evolution

is none of what you would expect
to find with humans or humanity,

but it's the ability
to walk on two legs bipedally

And it made the difference
between Lucy surviving or not

She was on the constant search
for food,

and that meant finding
new trees to feed in

She spent as little time
on the ground as she could,

because she knew she was vulnerable

Lucy had no defence against
leopards and sabre-toothed cats,

except the refuge of the trees

But standing upright,

she could see further
than any of her ancestors

Sensing movement in the grass,
she runs

Whatever it was,
predator or not, it had gone

But the balance of power

between the predator and its prey
had started to shift

The simple act of walking upright

has started
an evolutionary chain reaction

It freed the hand to become
the makers and users of tools

And it was tool use that would
one day power the brain's growth,

with protein from
scavenging and hunting

But it all began here, with Lucy

So, is Lucy finally the missing link?

In a sense, Lucy is a missing link

But they all are missing links,

because without each step in the record,
without each missing link,

we wouldn't have ourselves today

They're all links of how we've gone
from a Lucy to a Taung Child,

to a habilis, to a homo erectus

all of these are links
leading towards homo sapiens

Having travelled back in time
over 3 million years,

we'd found a creature that
seemed to begin the human line

Yet Lucy was a long way
from being human

We've found the common ancestor
of all the things that are human

but at the end of the day it's,
it's a bit empty

What we don't, look what
we don't find with Lucy

We, we, we don't find culture

We don't find the things
that make us human

We don't find our humanity

Science began to look again
at our most recent ancestors

40,000 years ago
a successful, intelligent
hominid species occupied Europe

Neanderthal man

Could he hold the key to
how we finally became human?

40,000 years ago,

Neanderthal hunters,
on the scent of red deer

in the forests of Western Europe

They've been tracking
the same herd for three days

But they were opportunist hunters,

and a wild pig was
too tempting to resist

But they missed their first attempt,

and the pig disappeared
into the undergrowth

The Neanderthals worked out
a plan to corner their prey

The ability to organise and
communicate, to exercise a plan,

were all advanced human skills

The question was, did they
originate here with Neanderthal?

Exactly how human were they?

June of 1996, The vaults of
the Rhineland Museum in Germany

Genetic scientist Matthias Krings
from Munich University

was about to attempt
to answer that question

Museum curator Heike Kainitske

allowed Krings to examine
the original Neanderthal bones
found in 1856

the evidence that began
the quest for our origins

They wore full body protection
to avoid genetic contamination,

Krings isn't interested in
looking at the bones

He was going to look inside
- at their DNA

It has been thought
impossible to extract DNA

from any sample older
than 10,000 years

they were attempting to go
4 times further back in time

to the age of Neanderthal

Scientists had long thought
that Neanderthal was
our most recent ancestor,

that he became human in one last,
crucial evolutionary leap

If so, he should have
almost identical DNA to us

In Munich, Matthias Krings finally
had the two sets of DNA results

Neanderthal and modern man

Between any two people,

there should be
an average of 8 differences
in the same piece of DNA

But between the human
and Neanderthal samples,

Krings counted nearly
four times as many differences

Neanderthal, it seemed,
were not our ancestors after all

Evolution had produced 2 separate
humanlike species at the same time

Sooner or later, they were bound
to come face to face

While the Neanderthal
tried to flush out their pig,

into the same area
came a new hunting party

Another human species
were after the same pig

At the time Neanderthals
went to extinction,

we know anatomically modern humans

people like us -
had also moved into Europe,

and were competing with them
perhaps for those areas

where it was slightly easier
to catch the game

Modern humans that
have larger group sizes,

more efficient tools, maybe

They might be just that
better at hunting

The Neanderthals' plan
to corner the pig had failed

They'd lost sight of it
in the undergrowth

then it seemed to break cover,
further down the hill

In fact, the modern humans
had got there first

The first encounter between
2 almost identical humanlike species

must have been a profound shock

in this tough Ice Age world,
there was only room for one of them

500,000 years ago,

they shared a remote common ancestor,
a descendant of homo erectus

From their African homeland,

their ancestors migrated
across half the world,

spreading as far as South East Asia
and into Northern Europe

Here, they would emerge
as Neanderthal man

But the ones who stayed behind
in Africa evolved too,

and just under 200,000 years ago,

a new species first appeared

homo sapiens, modern man

They too were hunters,

but some scientists have suggested
they supplemented their diet with fish

spurring their brain development

The evidence suggests
their culture developed faster;

that their social groups became
bigger and more complex;

and driven by population pressure
and climate change,

they too migrated

It took 150,000 years to
spread from Africa to Europe,

and as they moved further
and further north,

their appearance changed

eventually they caught up with their
long-lost cousins, the Neanderthals

The European continent
was losing one of its oldest,
most successful species

Within a few dozen generations,
the last Neanderthal was gone

and the world overrun by
a species with better weapons,

better organisation,
and greater numbers

Modern man

For the first time
in our evolutionary history,

we were totally alone

The last surviving
hominid species on earth

Within 40,000 years,

homo sapiens had colonised
the whole world,

free of any competition

This is finally us

Physically, are the result of
3 million years of change, since Lucy

But we are also fully human in our mind,

and it's that which
has given us the critical edge

The one thing that
Neanderthals didn't do

that we know that
early modern humans did,

was express themselves artistically

The social systems that humans have,

the richness of communication
between humans,

not just speaking but symbolically,

must be part of the success
of modern humans,

and it may well have given us
the edge over Neanderthals,

and the other species that
were here, 50,000 years ago

That same mind that gave us
victory over our rivals,

one day ask the obvious question

where did I come from?

For over 150 years
we have been searching for
the answer to that question,

and each piece of evidence
has brought us a clearer and
clearer picture of our past

but the search hasn't stopped

Many people say the more you find,
the more there is to find,

but I've been in the field long enough

to know that almost every year,
an important discovery is made

I keep telling my students,
I never give the same lectures twice,

I mean it's a hugely dynamic field

Uncovering our evolution so far
has been a remarkable adventure

but it's one that is still not over

It leads us to, to wonder,
what else is out there?

What else are we going to find?

In the next 10, 20 years,

as palaeontologists
explore parts of the world

that we haven't gotten to yet,

who knows what we're going to find

www.mvgroup.org