The Incredible Human Journey

2009
The Incredible Human Journey

Seasons & Episodes

  • 1

EP1 Out of Africa May 10, 2009

Dr Alice Roberts travels the globe to discover the incredible story of how humans left Africa to colonise the world - overcoming hostile terrain, extreme weather and other species of human. She pieces together precious fragments of bone, stone and new DNA evidence and discovers how this journey changed these African ancestors into the people of today.

EP2 Asia May 17, 2009

In this programme, the journey continues into Asia, the world's greatest land mass, in a quest to discover how early hunter-gatherers managed to survive in one of the most inhospitable places on earth - the Arctic region of Northern Siberia.

EP3 Europe May 24, 2009

When our species first arrived in Europe, the peak of the Ice Age was approaching and the continent was already crawling with a rival: stronger, at home in the cold and even (contrary to the popular image) brainier than us. So how did the European pioneers survive first the Neanderthals and then the deep freeze as they pushed across the continent?

EP4 Australia May 31, 2009

Alice looks at our ancestors' seemingly impossible journey to Australia. Miraculously preserved footprints and very old human fossils buried in the outback suggest a mystery: that humans reached Australia almost before anywhere else. How could they have travelled so far from Africa, crossing the open sea on the way, and do it thousands of years before they made it to Europe?

EP5 The Americas Jun 14, 2009

How did Stone Age people reach North and South America? Dr Alice Roberts discovers evidence for an ancient corridor through the Canadian ice sheet that may have allowed those first people through. But some very ancient finds in southern Chile seem to suggest a very different way into the Americas; an ancient human skull discovered in Brazil even points to an Australasian origin of the Americans. Could a route from Australia across the Pacific have been possible?
8.2| 0h30m| en| More Info
Released: 10 May 2009 Ended
Producted By: BBC
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00klf6j
Synopsis

There are seven billion humans on Earth, spread across the whole planet. Scientific evidence suggests that most of us can trace our origins to one tiny group of people who left Africa around 70,000 years ago. In this five-part series, Dr Alice Roberts follows the archaeological and genetic footprints of our ancient ancestors to find out how their journeys transformed our species into the humans we are today, and how Homo Sapiens came to dominate the planet.

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Reviews

José Pedro Gomes It's modern, it's fresh, it doesn't have boring moments, but... it's too much assertive and does not take into account fresh and relevant possibilities.This documentary was made in 2009, new data was available in 2010. Neanderthals interbred after all with homo sapiens (conclusion by Neanderthal genome Project), and even so if the Chinese Homo Erectus indeed is not a direct ancestor of Chinese people, indeed as modern humans have in their genome traces of Neanderthal's, Asian people have also Denisovans' ancestry who share some similarities (teeth) with Homo Erectus. It's too focused and emphasized only on available data (at the time the documentary was made) and does not focus on other reasonable hypothesis. Not to say is self-centered on Alice Roberts's point of view. It abuses on a linear logic when the result of that logic excludes possibilities outside its own realm. The result could not be scientific, like it wasn't when Neanderthal-Sapiens interbreed hypothesis was excluded just because the majority didn't thought so.Although it's a fresh light palaeoanthropology documentary it has a biased point of view.
HanslH My reference for BBC TV-docu is Simon Schama's a history of Britain that is so packed with information that you need to view it trice to fill all the holes left by former small lapses of concentration. The same can happen here but I'm afraid the lapses of concentration constitute dozing off from lack of input. For example 15 minutes I am looking at someone taking a walk in the heated rough to some sandpit were the oldest human remains were once found. Since the terrain may have altered 100% since then the net info is hardly above 0. I love the involvement of the in the footsteps effect from Michael Wood but this does nothing for me. The next 10 minutes I see a lady spending a night in the wild and seeing how scared she is. And what is the target age for this exactly? I hope the BBC prime interest for docu making is not going to be to please as many people as possible. Entertainment and infotainment are all around. I hope they keep making programs that offer a lot of information too. My minority vote perhaps.