Unearthed from the single largest burial site on Earth comes a whole new tale which has the potential with rewrite history as we know it, revealing for the very first time the true origins of one of the most powerful nations: China.In this special we see historian Dan Snow, physical anthropologist Dr Alice Roberts and scientist and explorer Dr Albert Lin set their sights on a series of grou
An ancient temple is discovered in the Middle East, it's thousands of years older than the Egyptian pyramids and it even dates long before the earliest civilisations like the Mesopotamians, the Minoan and the Mayan. It was built when mankind was still in the Stone Age but who built this temple and why?To solve the mystery, one mantravels back 12,000 years to the end of the last ic
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest place on Earth. It stretches from the foothills of the Andes, a hundred miles westward to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. There are few signs of life here, it hasn't rained in parts for thousands of years but the very dryness of the Atacama has made it the perfect keeper of a unique treasure.Buried in its sands are the intimate secrets of an an
Thousands of mummies in the very heart of Europe, monks, doctors, soldiers and even children, dead yet resisting deaths inevitable decay in the catacombs in Italy's Catholic churches. Some of these mummies are so well preserved it is almost impossible to tel if they are dead or merely sleeping, but who made these mummies and why?First the first time these Italian churches are permitting scientis
The Ancient World is a seven part documentary series presented by historian Bettany Hughes, it was originally aired by British TV station Channel 4 over the course of an 8 year period. Hughes, takes us on a wonderful journey through the ancient world and at each stop on this journey providing us with extensive insight into what it would have been like to be alive at this period in time and how the
August 24th, 79 A.D. was a day like any other day in the ancient roman town of Herculaneum, citizens met in the town square, discussed a little Italian politics, talked business over lavish lunches. Herculaneum was a booming sea side town at the height of the Roman Empire, trade was good and the future looked bright little did this towns residences know that the clock was ticking, their beautiful
We like to think that humans are special, and we are but we are not one of a kind. The past thirty to frothy thousand years in human history have been really unique in the sense that we are alone on our planet. Earlier than this and there were always different types of humans around, those that we met and mixed with.Thanks to well preserved DNA we now know that there were at least four
It shouldn't have happened that Homo sapiens, our species, managed to survive and overcome the odd which have been against us for over 200,000 years. We are not indestructible and there are many evolutionary dead ends but our ancestors managed to not only survive, but also to spread into every corner of the globe.It was only our ancestors who managed to spread and colonise some of the most diffi
Nothing quite represents the mysteries of ancient Egypt more than the Great Sphinx, it is the largest statue ever built by the ancient Egyptians and still makes us wonder how they managed to construct this crouching lion, human headed creature.For 45 centuries the Sphinx has overlooked Egypt's Giza Plateau, with a height matching that of The White House and it's body sp