Here is another great documentary produced in the year 1991 concerning the origin of civilization and hosted by the renowned BBC journalist Michael Wood.
Host Michael Wood traces the rise of both Asian and Western civilization in one global perspective in these thought-provoking videos. From the crumbling ruins in the Iraqi desert to those of Greece and Rome, viewers contemplate thriving cities and complex societies that have vanished, a reminder that other nations prospered for thousands of years. Now all that remains is their legacy.
After thousands of years as a hunter/gatherer, man built the first cities 5,000 years ago on the banks of the Euphrates River. Civilization as we know it began with the glorious cultures of Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon.
Stories From The Stone Age is a three-part documentary that attempts to explain why and how humans abandoned the nomadic hunting and gathering existence they had known for millennia to take up a completely new way of life - the decisive move to farming.
The series utilises detailed re-enactments and short interviews with key archaeological experts. The series asks some intriguing questions. Why did some of our ancestors never become farmers at all? Why do some still continue hunting and gathering despite their contact with farming people and advanced technologies? How and why did our paths become uniquely shaped after emerging as a species from a single genetic family in Africa?
Stories from the Stone Age - Ep 1: Daily Bread
A fascinating journey throughout the Ages of Man – from primitive hunter to urban man. In episode one Daily Bread we examine the changes in people from hunter-gatherers to farmers in the Middle East. One of the Greatest Developments of the Neolithic Revolution, the discovery of agriculture and the cultivation of grains.
The Middle East has always produced some of the most fascinating cultures within its history and none so more than the Natufians. The Natufians emerged in the Late Epipaleolithic, generally dated around 12,000 - 9600 BCE and have been one of the most researched cultures in the Levant.
The culture was first identified by Dorothy Garrod (1892 - 1968) in 1928 when she excavated the cave site of Shuqbah in the dry valley called Wadi en-Natuf in the Mount Carmel hills of northern modern day Israel.
Stories from the Stone Age - Ep 2 Urban Dream
In episode two, Urban Dream we look at the development of urban living in the Middle East and the move to farming in Europe.
Shows the early Europeans 12,000 years ago, living a hard life in nomadic bands. For hundreds of generations they had followed the wild herds, depending on them for survival. But they were about to face a new challenge. This series is about one of the most exciting periods of Human History - The Dawn of civilization.
Stories from the Stone Age - Ep 3: Waves of Change
In this final episode we look at the development of trade in the Middle East and its impacts in Europe throughout the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age.
An Egyptian paper claims that archaeologists have discovered ancient Egyptian coins bearing the name and image of the Biblical Joseph.
The report in Al-Ahram boasts that the find backs up the Koran’s claim that coins were used in Egypt during Joseph’s period. Joseph, son of the Patriarch Jacob, died around 1450 B.C.E., according to Jewish sources.
"One coin had an inscription on it, and an image of a cow symbolizing Pharaoh's dream about the seven fat cows and seven lean cows, and the seven green stalks of grain and seven dry stalks of grain".
How will our world end and just which existential threats facing humanity are the most plausible? End Day is an exciting docu-drama produced by the BBC that depicts various doomsday scenarios and will hold you on the edge of your seat throughout its entire fifty-five minutes of suspense.
The documentary follows the fictional scientist Dr. Howell, played by Glenn Conroy, as he travels from his London hotel room to his laboratory in New York City, and shows how each scenario affects his journey as well as those around him, with various experts providing commentary on that specific disaster as it unfolds.
The following descriptions of the program were released by the BBC:
"Imagine waking up to the last day on Earth..."
"Inspired by the predictions of scientists, End Day creates apocalyptic scenarios that go beyond reality. In a single hour, explore five different fictional disasters, from a giant tsunami hitting New York to a deadly meteorite strike on Berlin."
This one-hour documentary examines the possible causes behind Egypt's downfall. Select images from NASA, along with global climate models and mapping reveal how changes half a world away triggered a chain of events that destroyed ancient Egypt.
We at Discovery Enterprise are elated with the recent discovery, announced at the close of last week, of water on the Moon. We have always maintained our support for a vigorous space exploratory program with the clear goal of establishing a permanent human presence in space that will eventually pave the way for the colonization of the Moon, Mars and beyond. The discovery of water on the Moon only strengthens our belief that it will serve as our stepping stone in creating a Spacefaring Civilization and play an important role in humanity’s future expansion into space.
While scientists have suspected for the over a decade that water ice deposits could be found in the coldest spots of south pole craters that never saw sunlight, the consensus became that the rest of the moon was bone dry.
But new observations of the lunar surface made with Chandrayaan-1, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and NASA's Deep Impact probe, are calling that consensus into question, with multiple detections of the spectral signal of either water or the hydroxyl group (an oxygen and hydrogen chemically bonded).
Today’s video selection is NASA’s Science News Conference on September 24th, 2009 announcing this exciting discovery.
Join us today on Discovery Enterprise as we embark on a journey beyond the Sun, the Earth and the inner planets, into the frigid realm of the giant planets. Fasten your seatbelts for we are about to take an odyssey to the very edge of darkness.
Without the moon, Earth would be a very different and desolate place today--four hours of sunlight with pitch-black nights, steady 100-mph winds spawning giant hurricanes that last for months, and virtually no complex life forms, much less humans. Safe to say, we probably owe our very existence to the moon. But what if it suddenly disappeared?
Venus, the Sun's second planet, is a dark, broiling oven. It is a high-pressure, volcanic world with temperatures soaring above 500 degrees Celsius and air choked with carbon dioxide. How can the planets Earth and Venus, so similar in size and composition, be so different? The Enigma of Venus explores this unique planet's features, including its abundant volcanoes, which have been mysteriously inactive for hundreds of millions of years. Planetary scientists theorize on the current state of Venus, and speculate about what it can teach us regarding global warming on our own planet. William Shatner narrates "Cosmic Odyssey"
In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science -- the expansion of the universe. To honor this king of cosmology, an orbiting observatory named the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 after years of research and delay. Hubble's Heritage takes a closer look at this instrument, from its beginning as a flawed engineering nightmare to its evolution, through corrective optics, into humanity's eyes on the universe. Viewers see some of the astonishing images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope through the years and learn of their significance to astronomers. In this documentary, designers of the next generation of space telescopes explain the challenges that must be met before Hubble's successors can reveal more mysteries of the universe.
Comets are a natural phenomenon that are more violent than earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tornadoes put together. The Story of Comets explores these unpredictable cosmic icebergs, which travel up to 100 times the speed of sound. Viewers discover the surprising influence comets have had over life on Earth, and follow a space mission sent to collect a sample of comet stardust for analysis. Will scientists unravel the mystery of comets and their impact on planets? William Shatner narrates "Cosmic Odyssey".
In Reverend Charles Kingsley’s satirical novel “The Water Babies” his central protagonist Tom, a young chimney sweep, who falls into a river after encountering an upper-class girl named Ellie and being chased out of her house, dies and is transformed into a "water baby. The novel is both a critique of Victorian England’s treatment of the poor and of the closed-minded approaches of many scientists of the day in their response to Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution.
The Water Babies was also a portent of things to come in the field of human evolution because a century after Kinsley’s novel many paleoanthropologists were to greet another theory concerning the distinctly aquatic origins of modern humans with equal vitriolic scorn.
The aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) is an alternative explanation of human evolution and theorizes that the ancestors of modern humans developed the hallmarks of our humanity during a period of adapting to life in a partially-aquatic environment.
Of all the great apes we are the only one with the ability to swim, to control our breathing under water, to possess a naked and entirely hairless skin and a subdermal layer of fat with sweat glands to control body temperature. And, is it just mere chance or coincidence that the only other species to possess a highly developed neo-cortex just happen to be the mammals (whales, dolphins and porpoises) that spend their entire existence in water?
This hypothesis was first proposed in a 1942 book by the German biologist Max Westenhöfer and later exposed by Sir Alister Hardy in 1960 and later championed and expanded in 1967 by a welsh housewife and writer Elaine Morgan read about the idea in Desmond Morris paradigm shaking book “The Naked Ape”.
Now more the than forty years later, and in the year in which we are now celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species”, we may be seeing another major paradigm shift in our thinking of human origins. After more than four decades of neglect, scorn and being ridiculed as nothing more than new age pseudoscience –the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is finally coming in from the cold.
The Aquatic Ape hypothesis has also garnered support from the greatest names in modern evolutionary science - Phillip Tobias, David Attenborough and Daniel Dennett.
So join us today on Discovery Enterprise as we continue our year long celebration of the life and work of Charles Darwin and explore perhaps the most controversial hypothesis concerning the genesis of humanity since the theory of Natural selection with today’s audio visual selection:
Presented by Sir David Attenborough Scars of Evolution is a two part series looking at the history and current status of the 'aquatic ape hypothesis' (AAH), first proposed 45 years ago by Sir Alister Hardy, then elaborated and developed by Elaine Morgan and others.
Today join us on Discovery Enterprise as we mark the occasion of the one hundred and forty third birthday of H. G. Wells, one of the fathers of modern day science fiction, as we present for your viewing pleasure the 1936 film classic “Things to Come” based on Wells’ future history classic "The Shape of Things to Come" published in 1933.
The ancient Maya civilization of Central America left behind a riddle: an intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script carved on stone monuments and painted on pottery and bark books. Because the invading Spanish suppressed nearly all knowledge of how the script worked, unlocking its meaning posed one of archaeology's fiercest challenges. Until now, in this documentary titled Cracking the Maya Code.
Once upon a time in the history of our planet two distinct species of human walked the Earth together. Then some thirty five thousand years ago, in the ultimate contest of survival one species alone would survive to inherit the Earth – Homo sapiens. We are the descendants of the winners of that evolutionary contest.
Eventually we would spread out from the Old Worlds of Europe and Asia into the New Worlds of the Americas and Australia and became a planetary species. We discovered agriculture, built the first cities, developed culture and writing and became the pioneers of a totally new domain of evolution which is distinctly non-biological - Cultural Evolution. It is this new realm of evolution that has made us the most dominant life form on this planet and has set us on a trajectory that will one day take us out amongst the stars.
But, what of that other species that once roamed the planet with us? What happened to them? Their skeletal remains grace the glass cases of our museums and we gawk at them in wonder and fascination. We are haunted by the mystery of their demise. And just as Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick, looking into the face of the Neanderthal we feel the stirrings of unease in the depth of our soul. For in this face we see both kinship and the alien both. Here is a species that was in many respects just like us, yet not of the same flesh.
The Neanderthal was one of the most successful species ever and they dominated Europe for a quarter of a million years - a tenure far longer than that of our own species. They lived in a world ravaged by a long ice age and dominated by furious gargantuan animals such as the saber-toothed cat, the woolly mammoth and the mastodon. Then thirty five thousand years ago they faced the ultimate challenge -the arrival of another human species - our ancestors. The Neanderthal survived the vicissitudes of a changing global climate yet they could not survive us.
Why did we beat them in the contest of Darwinian natural selection? What gave us the edge in this contest of survival? This is the essence of the mystery of the Neanderthal that we will be exploring in today’s video offering.
Human Evolution -- Neanderthal World
The were one of the most successful species ever. For 250,000 years they dominated Europe, a continent ravaged by ice ages and stalked by wild animals. Then 35,000 years ago they faced the ultimate challenge. The arrival of a another human species. This is the story of the last time two different species of human shared this planet . Only one of them will survive.
Human Evolution -- Neanderthal - The Rebirth
Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were found, they have posed fundamental questions for scientists. Were these beings almost identical to us, or were they crude and primitive creatures, an evolutionary dead end?
Human Evolution -- Discovery Magazine -- The Last Neanderthal
A strange stone age burial in central Portugal. Is he human or is he Neanderthal? Or is he both? The answer will lead to a journey of the lost world of Cavemen and end with a stunning conclusion. The Neanderthals may have never died out!
Just what did Neanderthals look like and what was our ancestors' interaction with them? Well Sydney researcher Danny Vendramini believes they looked like monsters and the main interaction was rape and cannibalism:
In his controversial new book, Sydney "biological theorist" Danny Vendramini claims Eurasian Neanderthals almost wiped out early humans, called Cro-Magnons.
"They were as ferocious as lions, six times stronger than modern humans,'' he said yesterday.
"One scientist said an adult male could throw a gridiron linebacker over the goal posts.
Mr Vendramini, a filmmaker and amateur scholar, developed what he calls "Neanderthal predation theory" after dissecting 4000 scientific papers.
"I'd been researching a book on our obsession with monsters and myths and how they do the same thing through history: cannibalism and rape are common themes," he said.
"As I read more and more papers the idea just came to me and I wrote Them And Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans."
He described how the Cro-Magnon population of an area called the Mediterranean Levant, from which every human on Earth is descended, was almost wiped out by Neanderthals.
The 50 survivors salvaged humankind from annihilation when evolutionary mutation transformed them into predatory beings that fought back, killing all Neanderthals and sparking the evolution of modern human physiology, sexuality and ways of thinking...
I'm not sure how accurate Mr Vendramini's theory is but I am sure it would make a good movie.
This sounds like the setting of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel: an undiscovered "lost world" inside a volcano with strange new creatures including giants rats. To bad there's no lost tribe with a pretty princess:
A BBC Natural History Unit found the rat trapped in an extinct volcano - Mt Bosavi - along with up to 40 undiscovered species. The team were filming a series on Mt Bosavi called Lost Land of the Volcano, due to be screened this week in the UK. At up to a metre in length, the rat has been named the Bosavi woolly rat and is said to be “as big as a cat”. The specimen trapped by the team weighed almost 1.5kg. Living almost a kilometre down in the volcano, the rat has thick fur and teeth which suggest a vegetarian diet....
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