What is it that makes us human and where do we come from? Ever since Charles Darwin put forward the idea that we evolved from apes scientists have wondered about those first creatures that left the ape world and crossed into ours.
In the last 50 years fossil finds have filled in some of the many blanks in the story of evolution, but the bones of our ancestors are few and far between allowing only glimpses of how we slowly changed of millions of years, from ape to human.
In this special Nova and the Nation Geographic gain exclusive access to a unique discovery of ancient remains which are located in an almost inaccessible chamber deep in a South African cave. Most fossil discoveries of human relatives consist of just a handful of bones but what makes this discovery so special is the fact that over 1,500 bones were found scattered throughout the cave. The finding has the potential to rewrite the story of our origin.
The depth of the cave must have been relatively shallow originally. I can’t see them going so far down like those women did, with lights, to get there for a formal burial. They would have gone down in total darkness. I think they just dumped the bodies in a deep hole in the ground so that animals couldn’t get to them, and nature took it’s course to bury them deeper through rains and floods, and the flow of mud and rock…
What a spectacular archeological find! A thorough documentary that puts centuries of theory in a modern perspective.