Evolution

What Darwin Never Knew

The planet Earth is filled with a vast collection of species, with over 9,000 types of birds, 28,000 types of fish, and more than 350,000 species of beetles. It's Charles Darwin's brilliant theory of evolution that explains how the 1.4 million different species that have been discovered have adapted and changed over time. The theory has been called the best idea anyone ever had but there is one b

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The Real Neanderthal Man

42,000 Years ago, the only humans in Europe made clothes, educated their young, made tools. But they weren't the same as us. Now the very latest technology can reveal exactly how they lived, the dangers they faced and the communities they made in the Neander valley in Germany.We all know the word "Neanderthal" to be an unflattering qualifier for some of our more uncultured and dim-witted fello

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The Mind’s Big Bang

In this National Geographic documentary, narrated by Liam Nelson, we see archaeologist, Randy White crawl deep into the caves beneath the hills of France, in search for a special moment in human evolution. An era cloaked in mystery, when with hardly a change in appearance humans began behaving in a way they had never behaved before. White wants to find out how it was that our ancestors became

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The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestors

Meet “Ida,” the small “missing link” found in Germany that’s created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins. In this documentary paleontologist Jorn Hurum, who led the team that analyzed the 47-million-year-old fossil seen above, suggests Ida is a critical missing-link species in primate evolution.The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionar

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The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey

By analyzing DNA from people in all regions of the world, geneticist Spencer Wells has concluded that all humans alive today are descended from a single man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago.Modern humans, he contends, didn't start their spread across the globe until after that time. Most archaeologists would say the exodus began 100,000 years ago—a 40,000-year discrepancy. Wells's tak

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The Four-Winged Dinosaur

In 2002, the discovery of a beautiful and bizarre fossil astonished scientists and reignited the debate over the origin of flight. With four wings and superbly preserved feathers, the 130 million-year-old creature was like nothing paleontologists had ever seen before. In this program, NOVA travels to the Chinese stone quarry where the fossil was discovered (a famed fossil treasure trove) and teams

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The First Human

The roots of the human race are shrouded in mystery, lost to the depths of prehistoric time. Although every school kid knows that we evolved from the apes the reality is that almost nothing is known about our earliest ancestors beginnings. In October 2000, in a remote corner of Kenya, Africa, a team of French and Kenyan scientists, led by Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut made an extraordinary

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The Family That Walks on All Four

An intense scientific debate has ignited around a quiet but extraordinary family living in rural Turkey-a family with five adults who walk on all fours. Since bipedalism has long been considered one of the defining characteristics of modern humans, such a discovery raises fascinating questions about genetics, society, and the evolutionary history of our species. Is this the anthropological find of

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The Day We Learned to Think

Understanding of humans' earliest past often comes from studying fossils. They tell us much of what we know about the people who lived before us. There is one thing fossils cannot tell us; at what point did we stop living day-to-day and start to think symbolically, to represent ideas about our environment and how we could change it? At a dig in South Africa the discovery of a small piece of ochre

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