Mankind The Story of All of Us Episode 1/12 Inventors

We are born to survive, in a world full of danger.

Hardship makes a stronger.

We dream impossible dreams and make them real,

but we are not one.

Mankind's struggles shape our destiny,

and in those struggles, new worlds, new futures are born.

Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet, most species will fail, but for one, all the pieces will fall into place,

and a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.

This is our story, the Story of All of Us.

Narrator: At the dawn of time,

the universe into being,

with it, every atom in our bodies.

countless galaxies and innumerable stars,

and around one of them, a blue planet, our Earth.

No other known planet has both an atmosphere and liquid water,

the conditions needed for life.

Thirteen billion years after the universe begins, an unique species is born: mankind.

Now in the grasslands of East Africa, we begin our struggle against the odds.

A band of brothers, their leader the genetic ancestor of all mankind.

Every man alive today shares a portion of his DNA.

Two inches taller than a modern American, a natural athlete, a born hunter.

This is his home, the Rift Valley of East Africa, a fertile laboratory for life.

In his sights, a thousand pounds of meat, enough to feed his family of six for a month.

Soon, there will be seven. The woman he shares his life is expecting their first child.

Stereoscopic vision to accurately judge distance, ambidextrous hands, speed on two legs,

but he has none of the natural weapons of Africa's other predators;

he can't outrun a cheetah, nowhere near the strength of the lion, or the bone-crushing jaws of a hyena,

so he invents.

Machowicz: Tools make me better. Weapons make me more powerful.

You have to be on two feet.

You have to free up your hands, and freeing up your hands,

and freeing your hands to work with tools changes the game,

and there's no other species on this planet committed to weapon use and tool use like us.

Narrator: Man's ability to project power, the key to controlling our world.

We'll spend the next hundred millennia, perfecting weapons that kill at a distance.

Sheridan: There's a window that's, that's closing.

You've got half a second, and that's the kind of moment, where if you can explode and do the right thing,

then you'll eat and survive, and if you blow it, then you're dead.

Narrator: To prepare the kill, the greatest key to our survival:

at 300 degrees, a spark, fire.

Our planet is the only known place in the universe with the right conditions for fire to burn.

It's the element that makes us who we are.

Oz: Cooking our foods gives us a second stomach outside our body.

Now we begin to digest the fats, the carbohydrates, the proteins,

before we chew the food, making it easier for us to digest it,

which means we get a smaller stomach and therefore a bigger brain.

Narrator: Better nutrition boosts the human brain.

Over 2 million years, it more than doubles in size, with trillions of connections.

The most complex structure in the universe, letting us think, communicate, and love.

Bourdain: It could be argued, any kind of society, began with the cooking of meat over flame.

Narrator: But man is not always the hunter.

[singing]

Fire protects them from other predators,

but this couple will be lucky to live to 30.

Their unborn child has only a 50% chance of surviving adulthood.

There are perhaps only 10, 000 humans on the planet,

fewer people than are born in a single hour today,

scattered in small, isolated groups, always on the brink of extinction,

but around 70,000 years ago, a few hundred pioneers wonder out of Africa, the beginning of an extraordinary adventure.

Gates: Everyone is related to those first pioneers, who did venture away out of their homeland and looked beyond.

Williams: We are a restless bunch, we humans.

We are always looking over there, and over there may mean oceans or mountains

or continents away. This is our hard-wiring, our DNA.

Narrator: Over 50,000 years, mankind settles the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

As we spread out, a slight shift of the Earth's axis away from the sun cools the planet.

Average temperatures drop up to 14 degrees,

a third of the planet under ice.