Life on Earth (1979–…): Season 1, Episode 13 - The Compulsive Communicators - full transcript

Why are you going that way?

(INDISTINCT)

You and I belong to the most widespread
and dominant species of animal on earth.

We live on the ice caps at the pole
and the tropical jungles at the Equator.

We've climbed the highest mountain
and dived deep into the seas.

We've even left the earth
and set foot on the moon.

And we're certainly the most numerous
large animal.

There are something like
4,000 million of us today.

And we've reached this position
with meteoric speed.

It's all happened
within the last 2,000 years or so.

We seem to have broken loose
from the restrictions



that have governed the activities
and numbers of other animals.

Why should this be?

Well, the story starts back in Africa.

Ten million years ago,

much of East and Central Africa
was covered by wide open plains,

just as it is today,

and living there were herds
of grazing animals.

The ancestors of the antelope
originally lived in the forest.

Other kinds of animals from there
also ventured out into the open

in search of food.

Apes had come down from the trees.

Like the vervet monkeys of today,

those ancient apes probably stayed close
to the fringes of the forest at first,

but regularly wandered out into the open



to collect insects,
seeds and other morsels.

The earliest of these ground-living apes
were not much bigger than vervets,

but slowly,
as they colonized the grasslands,

they became better adapted
to life in the open

and they grew somewhat in size.

About three million years ago,

there were several species of them
on the African plains,

and this is the reconstructed skull
of one of them.

It has several characters
which are an inheritance

from the tree-living,
ape-like ancestors of this creature.

We can guess that its sense of smell,
for example, wasn't very good.

The nasal cleft is quite small.

On the other hand,
its vision was very good.

It had two large, forward-facing eyes.

Its brain, while quite large,

is only about half the size
of that of modern man.

Although the teeth are missing
in this specimen,

we know from others
that they were remarkably even

and lacked the two long
downward-pointing fangs

which are sometimes present

and which lock the lower jaw
in position.

So we can guess this animal could move
its lower jaw from side to side

and was able to chew roots and nuts
as well as eating flesh and maybe fruit.

Their fossilized bones are very rare.

We still don't know
how many kinds there were

or how they were related.

But on one thing,

all who've studied their remains
are agreed.

Those ancient apes
included the ancestors of mankind.

They can be called, in fact, apemen.

And grasslands like these must have been
the cradle of humanity.

Out on the grasslands,

the talents the apemen's ancestors
developed to cope with life in the trees

were put to other purposes.

Hands, once used for gripping branches,

were not much use
for burrowing or tearing flesh.

But as time passed, they became
more precise and dexterous in their grip

than any other primate's,
and very like our own.

And these enabled the apemen
to pluck not only leaves and fruit

but also to gather
relatively fiddly morsels:

Nuts, seeds and insects.

The apemen were still quite small
and largely defenseless.

This was a serious handicap,

for life on the open plain
was dangerous.

As well as the harmless herds,
there were hunters around.

(GROWLING)

The only way of escaping such enemies

was either to run fast,
which the apemen weren't very good at,

or to climb a tree,
of which there were not many.

So it obviously was
of the greatest importance

to get the earliest possible
warning of danger.

Their ancestors' life in the trees led
to a reduction in their sense of smell

but extremely good vision.

So the apemen must have reared up

to get a good view
of their surroundings.

And the vervets,
faced with a similar problem,

adopt just the same solution.

It's unlikely the apemen stood erect
as a way of increasing speed,

for running on four feet
is a much swifter way of getting around.

A vervet can outpace
any two-legged primate.

But if you habitually rear
on your hind legs,

you can use hands for other things,

and one modern ape,
the chimpanzee, does just that.

Chimps are the only animals that defend
themselves with weapons like this.

(ANGRY CHATTERING)

There's every reason to suppose
those early apemen

could throw sticks and stones
just as modern chimps can.

Indeed, they would be in need
of every form of defense they could get

because their teeth were small
and they had no claws.

So, if threatened by a predator,
they would pick up a stick

to try and defend themselves
out on these African plains,

as indeed I would.

And, what's more,
with this in their hands,

they would stand some chance
of driving off a predator from its kill

in order to claim the meat
for themselves.

And eating meat
has a lot to be said for it.

Getting all your sustenance from leaves
is laborious and time-consuming.

They have comparatively little
nourishment in proportion to their bulk.

So zebras are compelled to spend
nearly half of their days grazing

in order to get all the food
that they require.

The flesh-eaters, on the other hand,
have a much lazier life.

Meat is so nourishing that lions only
need to eat every two days or so,

and then only for about half an hour.

Doubtless, leisure had its appeal
to the apemen too.

Whereas lions simply sleep,
maybe the inquisitive apemen

used their spare time to socialize,
to play, to create.

A kill on the plains,
no matter who makes it,

attracts all kinds of flesh-eaters.

A whole pride of lions
may find more than they need

in a single zebra carcass.

One way or another,
everything is consumed,

even the tail.

And when the biggest and most powerful
have taken all they want,

there are plenty of scavengers
to clear up the remains.

Well, I only had vultures
to deal with that time,

and I didn't even need a stick.

If there'd been hyenas,
I guess I would have needed it,

but I could have got rid of them.

And maybe if I'd had a few companions,
I could have shifted a pride of lions.

But having got here,

how could an apeman with small teeth
manage to get into a carcass like this?

Well, he could take a stone and...

And it's already cutting,

and this is really
a quite ordinary stone,

but one that has just been chipped here
on either side

to produce a cutting edge.

And just such stones have been found
with the skeletons

of the earliest apemen
of about two million years ago.

So, with a chipped stone, a stick
and a pair of manipulative hands,

the apemen could have survived
out on the plains as hunters.

This state of affairs
lasted for several million years.

Slowly, the apeman
became better at walking.

His legs lengthened
to increase his stride,

and he grew to a height
of about five and a half feet.

To mark his new stance,
science has given him a new name.

Homo erectus, "upright man".

The foot acquired an arch
to give a spring to his stride,

and his first toe grew
to take the thrust of the foot.

The name "man" here
has no sexist implications.

It's the scientific name for the genus

to which these women,
children and men belonged.

And a million years ago,

they spread widely
over the African plain.

Their fossilized remains are very rare,

for bodies lying out in the open
are eaten by scavengers

and bones weather into dust.

But stone is much more durable,
and in some places,

the tools made by upright man
still litter the ground in huge numbers.

From them, we can see he was using

his dexterous hands
with increasing skill.

Almost every one of these stones,

which have washed out
from that bank over there,

have been worked by man
in one way or another.

Some of them are far more elaborate
than anything produced by the apemen.

Like this one, for example.
Beautifully chipped.

This was probably a hand axe,
used for digging up roots.

And then there are cleavers like this
with a flat cutting edge.

They may have been used
in butchering animals,

cutting flesh and stripping skin.

These aren't the only tools.

This rounded stone has not been rounded
by a stream,

which would produce smooth surfaces,
but carefully chipped,

and it's probable
that these rounded stones,

of which huge numbers
have been found here,

were used either for pounding vegetables
of some kind, or as weapons.

And the reason we suppose
they were used as weapons

is because also on this site have been
found great numbers of animal bones.

This and most of the bones
found on this site

belonged to an extinct baboon

that was even bigger
than the living baboon.

Most of these bones, like this fragment
from the lower jaw, there are the teeth,

have actually been split open
in order to get out the marrow.

This remarkable site
provides a lot of evidence

about the nature of upright man.

The stone from which tools are made,
and there's around a ton of them,

doesn't occur naturally
within 30 km of here.

So all these stones must have been
brought here deliberately by the people,

and that suggests
foresight and planning.

For another thing,

the baboon they hunted
must have been a ferocious animal.

I don't imagine there are many men
who would fancy the idea of going out

and trying to hunt a baboon
armed with a few cobblestones.

And yet the extinct baboon
was even bigger

and presumably more ferocious.

So it seems likely
that the early people hunted in teams.

Teamwork, foresight, planning.

That argues that they had
some considerable skill

in communicating among themselves.

(SHOUTING)

Letting others know how you feel
is a basic part of communication.

No creature in the world does so
more eloquently than man,

and no organ is more visually expressive
than his face.

Even in repose,
the human face sends a message,

and one we tend to take for granted.

Each face proclaims individual identity.

In teams, recognition of other members
is of great importance.

A hunting dog in a pack
proclaims its identity by its own smell.

Primates, with their reduced
sense of smell but very acute vision,

do it by the infinite variety
of their faces.

We have more separate muscles
in our faces than any other animal.

So we can move it in a variety of ways
no other animal can equal.

And not only convey mood
but send precise signals.

By the expression on our face,
we can call people and send them away,

ask questions and return answers
without a word being spoken.

(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)

Eyebrows are particularly eloquent.

We can use them as question marks
and as greetings.

But are our gestures recent conventions
we've learned from one another?

Or are some inherited
from our remote ancestors?

Did upright man formulate his
hunting plans by pointing and nodding

and express his delight with a smile?

If we could meet modern men who have
never been in contact with our world

and discover whether
we had signals in common,

then we might find clues to the answer.

Ten years ago,
I had the chance to do just that.

A patrol
led by an Australian government officer

was going to cross one of
the last patches of unexplored country

in central New Guinea.
And I went with it.

The tribesmen who came with us

said there were people living
in these forests.

They saw them rarely

and knew only one word
of their language, their name.

Biame.

But no European had ever seen them.

Biame!

We walked for about a week
without meeting anyone,

and then one morning
the Biame quietly appeared.

- Biame!
- Biame!

Biame!

With gestures, they seemed to be saying

we were in the middle
of their territory.

They nodded in agreement,
they smiled to give reassurance.

We wanted them to bring down
other members of their group

and tried to convey this complicated
message with gestures.

Although our two societies
were so different

and had never come into contact
before this moment,

it seemed that many of our gestures
did have the same meaning.

These nods and smiles,
frowns and headshakes

were surely not mere conventions
but deep in us.

It seemed they used
the same name for their rivers

as the tribesmen who were with us.

Their leader counted them for us.

To do that,
he used a quite different gesture,

not a deep-seated one
like a nod or a smile,

but a conventional one,
that has been learned,

and here,
our cultural backgrounds divided us.

He used the fingers of one hand
for numbers up to five.

Above five, the Biame clearly have
their own individual code.

It's easy to follow it
in sequence like this,

but the Biame also use these gestures
individually,

in bargaining, for example.

And then how would we know
this gesture meant "eight"?

This one "nine"?

But before he got to 11
he used two of those facial expressions

that were immediately
understandable to us.

Bafflement,
because we got the names wrong,

and amusement at our stupidity.

Although we belonged
to such different societies

and the only words we had in common
were some names,

we had exchanged complicated messages

using gestures inherited
from our common past.

Gestures that may well have been used
before the emergence of our own species

by our distant ancestors, upright man.

For a long time,
upright man lived only in Africa,

as far as we can tell
from evidence found so far.

But slowly his numbers increased
and he began to extend his territories.

About a million years ago,
he moved north into the Nile valley

and up into the Middle East.

His bones have been found in Asia
dating from about the same time

in a hill near Peking.

Others have been dug up farther south,
in Java.

And about 800,000 years ago,
judging from fossil remains,

upright man was in Europe
in some numbers.

Now the climate of Europe changed.

It got so cold, the ice caps on the
mountains and in the north expanded,

locking up so much water
that the sea level dropped,

exposing bridges of land
across the Mediterranean

and making it easier for man to spread.

Then the weather warmed again.
Four times this happened.

The ice, even at its worst,

never got as far as these valleys
in central France

but at the peak of a glaciation,
this land, now so verdant and fruitful,

must have been bitterly cold.

And in response
to that changing climate,

men took to caves like this one.

There are literally hundreds of caves
along this valley,

and there's scarcely one that doesn't
have some sign of habitation.

Because of lots of excavations in them,
we now have a clear picture

of the sort of lives these people led.

They wore clothes made out of skins

which they sewed
with bone needles like these.

They went down and fished in the river
with bone harpoons

and they hunted with spears and harpoons
in the woods.

Their skill in working stone
reached new heights

and they had a marvelous material
to work on: Flint.

Instead of making three or four blows,

some 400 to 500 precise actions
were required

to get the best out of a piece of flint.

It must have taken a lot of learning.

To chip an edge accurately,
it has to be made even.

A razor-sharp knife
made in about ten minutes.

And a deadly weapon
in the hands of these people.

They were brave and skillful hunters,

and we know from blackened stones
that they had control of fire,

which must have been
a precious possession,

not just to keep warm
but to cook their meat.

This is the skull of a man
that was excavated from just near here.

You can see his teeth for chewing
that meat are now relatively small,

so cooking was
a very valuable technique.

But it's not just the teeth
that have changed.

So has the cranium.

The parts of the brain that
control speech are fully developed,

so this man had probably
a fluent and complex language.

In fact, there are virtually
no significant differences

between this man's skeleton and skull
and mine.

So anthropologists have called him,
somewhat immodestly, Homo sapiens.

Wise man.

The huge difference
that separates this man

leaving such a cave as this
and going down to fish in the river

and a smartly-dressed executive
in Tokyo or London or New York

stepping into his car

and driving off to his office
to consult the latest computer printout

is not due to any change
in the brain or the anatomy.

It's due to the emergence
of a completely new evolutionary factor.

And the first dazzling signs of it
are miraculously preserved right here.

From the back of many of these caves,

tunnels lead down
into the depths of the earth.

And into this frightening blackness,

finding their way by lamps with a rush
for a wick and animal fat for fuel,

went early man.

They made these long
and, surely for them,

most important journeys
in order to do this, to paint.

This for me is one of the most moving
of their paintings.

It represents a stylized horse,

here its small black head
with a long black mane.

And these spots on it,
which appear to be dapples,

probably have some other meaning

because they extend
beyond the outline of the horse.

And here,
perhaps most intimate and vivid of all,

a hand-print of one of those people.

Made probably
by taking a mouthful of black paint

and blowing it over the hand
like a stencil.

These early people
were superlative artists

and drew the animals of their world
with great sensitivity and such accuracy

that often we can identify
the species they had in mind.

These are bison,

no longer to be found in France but
still surviving farther east in Europe.

Aurochs, a kind of giant cattle
now totally extinct.

This gallery contains
a procession of animals,

among them mammoths,
shaggy with long hair.

The oldest of these paintings
is thought to be about 30,000 years old.

The youngest maybe 10,000.
That's an immense span of time.

Five times the length of the entire
history of western civilization.

So it's unreasonable to suppose
they all, throughout this time,

served exactly the same purpose.

Some, however, may well have been
connected with a hunting magic.

By painting images
of animals they sought,

the hunters tried to control them.

Certainly, most of the images represent
animals that were hunted for food.

It's tempting to interpret these signs
as arrows or spears.

Perhaps they were drawn during a ritual

when the men mimed the successful hunt
they prayed for.

And among these sensitive and accurate
drawings of animals,

there are much more mysterious designs.

This has been interpreted
as a human figure,

perhaps even a sacrifice
with spears in its flanks.

As well as these, and this is
significant for what is to come,

there are geometrical symbols
like these paired dots.

There are other odd shapes
that occur again and again.

What these abstract symbols signify
we have no idea,

but the fact they occur at all
is significant for what is to come,

even though we don't know
exactly what they mean.

In one place in the world, however,

we can discover why a nomadic
hunting people paint on rock in caves

because here, in northern Australia,
the aborigines still do so.

They too portray the animals
they hunt for food.

Some are drawn as part of rituals
to maintain the animals' fertility.

Others are made during ceremonies

where people recount stories
of their creation by the gods.

For this cave is a sacred place
for them.

On the back of it,

they've painted the image
of one of their great creator spirits.

It lies on its side,
its head to the left,

its legs stretching out to the right.

And aborigines also draw
abstract symbols.

These lines and dots
are not aimless doodles.

They represent particular things.
Homo sapiens, wise man,

has made a huge step forward
in his ability to communicate.

He's discovered how to represent objects
not by their likeness, but by symbols.

In this great frieze,
the educated eye of a man of the tribe

can read a sacred legend
telling how the great creator spirit

moved across the land
in the beginning of time

and showed men how to make spears
and go hunting.

The ability to distinguish
the edible from the poisonous,

to track and kill animals,

to discover food in all
but the most sterile of lands,

enabled "wise man"
to spread throughout the world.

Many groups of people today still
live entirely by these ancient skills.

In Australia, the aborigines,

by understanding their land
with an intimacy that baffles outsiders,

can survive in desert country

where strangers would die
of starvation and thirst in days.

In the Kalahari desert,
the bushmen too live in a similar way,

with the help of similar skills.

They are the most expert of hunters.

They know how to prepare poison
to tip their arrows

and with them bring down big game,
like a giraffe,

though the hunt may take many days

and demand the greatest bravery
and endurance.

Bushman women can recognize
the characters of a leaf

that tells the knowledgeable
that this spindly stem

leads to a tuber in the ground

that is loaded with water
in the most severe of droughts.

As "wise man" spread through the world,

so his body responded
to his surroundings.

The rays of the sun in excess
can be harmful

and many dwellers in the tropics
acquired black pigment in their skins

which protected them from it.

(CHANTING)

But too little sunshine
can also be bad for you.

The body needs it for vitamins,

so in northern lands, in Lapland,
for instance, races possess fair skins.

(INDISTINCT)

In Asia, there developed a race
with olive skins and slanting eyes.

Some of them migrated across
the Bering Strait into the New World

and down to the rainforests of
South America, where they still live.

They too are skilled hunters,
and some still find all they need

from the wild animals
and plants of their forests.

This was the way
all human beings in the world existed

until comparatively recently.

Nowhere were they numerous.
Their expectation of life was short.

Their birth rate
and the survival of their children

kept in check by the scarcity of food
and the hazards of their lives.

But then came a revolution,

one that was to start that explosion
of man's population.

And the trigger was this.

A wild form of wheat or barley

that grew then as now on the
fertile deltas of the Middle East.

It's got a lot of seeds,

easily separated from the husks
and full of nourishment.

About 10,000 years ago,

man realized he no longer need go
searching for the wild plant.

He could take these seeds
and plant them.

And then he would no longer be compelled
to follow the wandering life.

He could settle down.

Some animals too could be domesticated

and kept permanently
around his settlements,

to be slaughtered when he wanted meat.

So human beings were able to build

permanent homes in groups
close by one another.

And around the eastern end
of the Mediterranean,

in the Middle East and India,
small villages appeared.

The villages grew into towns,
and by 5,000 years ago,

there were great cities like this one,
Uruk,

whose ruins have been excavated
from the sands of Iraq.

It held several thousand people.

Its citizens built walls around it
for protection,

ordered their streets,
dug canals to protect from floods.

And in the center of their city,
they built their temple, the ziggurat,

an artificial mountain
made out of brick,

bonded together with layers of reeds.

Clearly, to build such a carefully
designed monument as this

on such a scale,

the people had to have
real organization.

And they must have led
complicated lives too,

for not only were they
skilled architects,

but they were farmers,

they made pottery,
fragments of it are all over this site,

they were traders
and they probably also paid taxes.

At all events,
they found it necessary to have

some way of recording
their affairs and transactions,

because in this very site
has been found this.

The earliest known piece of writing.

It's thought to be some sort of tally
recording the issue of rations

over a five-day period.

Each column represents one day,
and, incidentally, reads vertically.

The symbols are a mixture
of pictorial representations

and abstract designs.

This triangular one is purely abstract
and is believed to mean "bread".

Whereas this sign looks like
and may mean a wheatsheaf.

The different-shaped dots in front

refer to the quantities
of each commodity.

This tablet was baked
over 5,000 years ago.

But that, in the timescale
that we've been thinking on,

is comparatively recently,
a mere 100 or so generations.

When he marked and baked this,

man turned the surge of evolution
into a new course.

Now, for the first time,
it was possible for a person

to transmit information

quite independent
of his own existence or presence.

And so an individual man
was able to pass on information

about his failures and successes,
his insights, his strokes of genius,

his accumulation of humdrum facts,
from one individual to the community,

from a community to a generation,
and for generations beyond.

The discovery of writing was made
independently by many people worldwide.

So the question inevitably arises:

Are we fundamentally
and crucially different

from all other living organisms?

Or is there an overall pattern

into which we and all other animals
naturally fit?

All living things are continually
influenced by information from the past.

And the more information they get,

the better they can
solve their problems.

Every animal receives that information
inherited from its parents,

and coded not in letters
but in chemicals: DNA.

These are models of just one section
of that giant molecule of DNA,

vastly enlarged.

Many molecules go to make genes,

and genes together can be regarded as
a library of instructions to an animal

on how to solve
the problems of survival.

Clusters of genes in the primordial seas

began to reproduce
some 3,500 million years ago. Bacteria.

If we represent
the immense period of time

between then and now by one year,
and this stage is its first moment,

then more complex micro-organisms
like these

didn't develop until
the middle of August,

over 1,000 million years later.

As time passed,

organisms accumulated more genes
that could carry the instructions

necessary for building
bigger and more complex bodies,

which in turn could solve
more difficult problems of survival.

And so animals found new ways
of living in the seas.

At the beginning of November,
the first backboned creatures appeared.

Towards the end of that month,

the first animals left the water
and colonized the land.

And now the pace quickened.

The backboned animals
also invaded the land.

By the beginning of December,
some had acquired waterproof skins

and broken their dependence on water.

During the middle of December,

one group could generate heat
in their bodies,

and had elaborated their scales
into feathers.

The first furry warm-blooded creatures
appeared around the same time,

but it wasn't until 25th December
that the dinosaurs disappeared

and the mammals came into their own.

The information and instructions
carried by the DNA in the sex cells

was supplemented.

The young mammal, dependent on its
mother for milk and protected by her,

begins to learn from her
how to deal with the world around it.

So animal communities
developed traditions, cultures,

and were able to transmit them
from one generation to another.

Now the skills acquired
during an individual's lifetime

need no longer die with it.
Some at least could be handed on,

supplementing the inborn
genetically programmed skills.

In the early morning of December 31st,
apes and apemen appeared.

And we arrived about two minutes
before the end of that last day.

No creature is so dependent
upon its mother

for such a large proportion of its life
as is the human baby.

And through language,

none learns so much from her
or so quickly.

WOMAN: Come on.
You're not very awake, are you?

ATTENBOROUGH: Our spoken language is
enormously more subtle and informative

than any other system of communication
in the animal world.

It's almost impossible
to prevent a baby from acquiring it.

Are you going to open that?

No.

ATTENBOROUGH: By the age of five,

every child will have mastered
the meaning of 6,000 words

and is able to operate
1,000 rules of grammar,

an astonishing feat of learning.

As their world expands,
they learn not only from their parents

but other children and adults,

so that the whole accumulated experience
of the community can become theirs.

By means of words,
skills can be rapidly taught

and problems quickly explained
and solved.

MAN: Make sure it's nice and strong
and helps the pot.

MAN: Nitrogen dioxide.

ATTENBOROUGH: And they learn, too,
to comprehend abstract symbols

that not only represent spoken words
but completely new concepts.

TEACHER: Di-nitrogen oxide.

Now, as in our previous experiment,
we're going to heat lead nitrate here.

We're getting a nice flow of
colorless gas in the gas jar.

Notice the residue...

specimen to get this orientation,
and this is achieved by

this here, this control here.

ATTENBOROUGH: Over the past 1,000 years,

different cultures have devised ways
of duplicating those symbols

so that one individual
could communicate with thousands.

Printing.

A great library can be seen
as an extension of the human brain.

But it contains far more information
than any single human memory could do.

Here are stored the insight,
the experience,

the wisdom of past generations

so that we can consult it,
benefit from it

and, in turn, contribute to it.

So we're no longer dependent on the very
slow processes of physical evolution.

If we need to fly,
we don't have to wait millions of years

while our arms turn into wings.

Over a few generations, we can study
the problems of physics and metallurgy

and mathematics and aerodynamics,
and build ourselves aeroplanes.

As this information increases
with growing speed,

so we've developed radically new methods
of storing and retrieving it all.

The computer, the transistor,
the microprocessor and the silicon chip,

all developed within
the last decade or so,

now give us greater power to
sort our knowledge, to link fact to fact

so that our understanding
of the nature of the world we inhabit

becomes ever more detailed and subtle.

With the help of electronics,
we can recall information

from data banks,
no matter where they are,

and we can communicate directly
and instantaneously with one another

right round the globe.

We can predict the behavior
of our machines

and make calculations which were once
quite beyond the human brain.

And with the existence
of worldwide communications

and the use of powerful computers,
we can forecast with greater precision

that most unpredictable
of events on earth,

its daily weather.

20,000 years ago,
man drew messages for the gods in caves.

Now he sends them
to extraterrestrial beings in the sky.

In his rockets, he puts images
to greet other beings in other galaxies

in case they exist.

Images of himself
in the gesture of welcome.

Details of his discoveries.

And photographs that he hopes
may give other intelligences elsewhere

some impression
of what life is like on earth.

This is the last programme
in this natural history,

and it's very different from the others

because it's been devoted
to just one animal: Ourselves.

And that may have been
a misleading thing to have done.

It may have given the impression

that man was the ultimate triumph
of evolution,

that all those thousands of millions
of years of development

had no purpose
other than to put man on earth.

There is no scientific evidence
whatsoever for such a belief.

No reason to suppose
that man's stay on earth

should be any longer
than that of the dinosaurs.

He may have learned
to control his environment,

to pass on information
from one generation to another,

but the forces of evolution
that brought him into existence

here on these African plains
are still at work elsewhere in the world

and if man were to disappear,
for whatever reason,

there is doubtless somewhere
some small, unobtrusive creature

that would seize the opportunity

and, with a spurt of evolution,
take man's place.

But although denying a special place
in the world may be becomingly modest,

the fact remains that man
has an unprecedented control

over the world and everything in it.

And so, whether he likes it or not,

what happens next
is very largely up to him.