Original subtitles

Around 300,000 years ago,

our species, Homo sapiens,

evolved in Africa.

For generations,

small bands of hunter-gatherers explored the planet...

..learning to survive.

Many other species of human walked the Earth alongside us,

but one by one, we supplanted them...

..until only we remained.

For most of our history, our population was tiny and fragile.

Every aspect of our lives determined by the natural world.

And yet...

..everything would change.

Today, there are about eight billion of us,

most of us living in cities, like this one,

able to connect in an instant with people across the planet.

And you might think it was inevitable,

the result of progress over time, but surely, our story so far, if it

teaches us anything, it's that none of this was a foregone conclusion.

So, how did we get here?

How did humanity transform from scattered

groups of nomads into our modern, interconnected world?

What happened in that final chapter of our story

that took us on a path to this place?

On a remote hilltop, in the far east of Turkey...

..stands a prehistoric monument steeped in mystery.

It is so hard to stand here and not have goose bumps.

This is the oldest temple unearthed anywhere on this planet.

It was built 11,500 years ago by hunter-gatherers.

That's 6,000 years earlier than Stonehenge,

and yet somehow, our ancestors were capable of making this.

This is Gobekli Tepe.

There are these incredible T-shaped pillars,

which would've been holding up a huge roof.

And then, if we look at them, they're covered in these engravings.

So, this is a fox, there's vultures here, there's bear,

there's wild boar, and here, this one just has to be my favourite.

It's a leopard, hunting one of those wild boars.

So, notice these holes here.

This was dressed with furs and they were also painted.

So, you get the impression of this place as being beautifully

coloured and textured.

And yet, this incredible feat of architecture is not the most

revolutionary thing about this place.

Gobekli Tepe is not simply a temple.

It is a marker of a species on the cusp of change.

In many ways,

these prehistoric builders lived as their ancestors had for thousands

of years, their days spent foraging and hunting to feed their families.

ANIMAL GRUNTS

But they'd made one fundamental change.

After generations spent as nomads, following the herds...

..here at Gobekli Tepe, they stopped moving and settled down.

The evidence for which lies not in the temple itself...

..but in the rubble surrounding it.

Now, this might not look like much compared to that,

but this small square building is actually

the remains of one of the first permanent houses ever built.

That there is a storage vessel, this is a grinding stone for wild

wheat, and this floor of plaster and stone, this was somebody's home.

This is one of the first villages.

Archaeologists believe maybe a few hundred people

were living here permanently...

..and calling it home.

For 300,000 years, Homo sapiens roamed freely.

But now, they were gathering together to put down roots.

And so, the question is, why?

And why now?

This was a world of plenty...

..warm and abundant.

But the planet had not always been this way.

Only a few generations earlier, Homo sapiens had been

fighting for survival...

..through the brutal peak of the last Ice Age.

Now that local areas could provide plenty of food,

people could spend longer in one place,

and when large groups came together to share their bounty, a feature

of our brain had an opportunity to flourish like never before.

Our almost limitless capacity to learn.

An ability with roots that can be traced way back,

right to the beginning of the human story.

As the distant ancestors of our species were gradually evolving...

..they had begun developing larger brains.

But as their brains grew,

the way they were organised was evolving too...

..becoming increasingly adaptable, and more able to

change in response to stimulation from the outside world...

..until they became us...

..a species brilliant at learning,

both from our experiences and other people.

The major thing that marks our species as different isn't

just the size of our brain, it's also the way they're organised

and their extraordinary flexibility.

Now, we call this flexibility neuroplasticity,

because it's like our brains are plastic.

They adapt, they alter and they change.

It has some profound effects.

Humans have a natural affinity for observing

and copying each other...

..giving Homo sapiens the ability to have a

shared understanding of the world.

At Gobekli Tepe, the symbols of their shared experiences

and beliefs are carved into the stone.

And these indicate a bigger shift in our species.

The odd thing about being human is that we are constantly

surrounded by a bunch of things that are so all-encompassing, and yet we

never really think about where they started or where they come from.

I'm talking here about culture.

Ritual, custom, language, art, stories

and ideas that have been passed down orally through generations,

and have now found physical form.

Places like Gobekli Tepe became so rich in meaning

that our ancestors never wanted to leave, and culture flourished.

Cooperating and building connections

are what our brains are actually set up to do.

Wherever humans settled down, an explosion in creativity

followed, launching an era of extraordinary innovation.

We can see the results of this shift in the archaeological record...

..which begins to seethe with the debris of new technology.

Our ancestors couldn't have foreseen it,

but one innovation from around this time was to have consequences

far greater than they could possibly have imagined.

We start to see the first sparks of something that would come to

shape the way we live today.

Wherever there were humans, there was

a dramatic rise in the bones of goats and sheep...

..far outstripping the remains of the species they hunted.

These changes reveal a key point in the human story...

..the moment we began to farm livestock.

The people had found a safe, reliable way to feed themselves.

They'd stopped chasing their food and started rearing it...

..providing a regular supply of milk, cheese and yoghurt...

..and later, textiles like wool...

..season after season.

The farming of animals marked a watershed moment.

The result of this, I don't think could've been predicted.

This altered relationship that they had with animals, altered them,

because not long after they learnt how to do this,

something fascinating happened.

Their population started to boom.

Now, we're not really sure why this happened,

but the strongest theory is that people staying in one place

and not moving as much, but also having more food, having more

calories, basically led to mums having more energy for reproduction.

As our numbers rose, settlements began springing up...

..scattered across an area which we now call the Fertile Crescent.

As their populations grew, villages transformed into towns.

And the largest of the towns of the Fertile Crescent was Catalhoyuk.

An early prototype of urban living.

Wow!

Every single one of these is a house.

That's right. And you have to imagine, of course,

that each of these houses is a box, with a roof.

But, uh, there's no space really between them.

Like a beehive.

The fact that they're all tightly up against each other means

that the whole thing is much more structurally sound.

There's literally no gap.

The only way you can get in the house is to move along the roofs

and go down through a hole into the house,

because there's no streets.

Each dwelling was small and had its door in the ceiling.

The inhabitants lived much of their lives up on the roofs...

..grinding grain, trading,

and feasting in the bright sunlight above their homes.

In this honeycomb,

their animals were kept in pens right next to the living quarters.

Here, you can see bits of animal bone. These are the sheep bones

from feasting and so on.

But also, there are lots of droppings

and so, this is telling us that, as well as people

living in the village, they also brought in domesticated animals.

And these farmers left behind intriguing signs

that they were here to stay.

What are those holes over there?

These are the ancestors who are buried beneath the floors.

In some houses, there are up to 62 people buried in them.

I mean, Ian, 60-odd people being buried,

that's a graveyard in a home.

We've dug up hundreds of burials here,

and what's fascinating is that people were sleeping just

a few centimetres from the bones of their ancestors.

Between the dead, the living and their animals...

..this thriving town was densely packed.

At its height, some people think there were 8,000 people

living at Catalhoyuk, so that's one of the largest

settlements on the planet at this point.

And so, it's so easy to imagine this straight line from this

population boom to our own huge population of humans on this planet.

And yet, that straight line was severely interrupted,

because the formula for success that was playing out here

also turned out to be a bit of a disaster.

Our pioneering farmer ancestors couldn't have known it...

..but they had opened Pandora's box.

Amongst the many burials of Catalhoyuk...

..were skull after skull with clear signs of violent impact.

And it's something not only seen at Catalhoyuk.

In many early farming settlements,

we start to see the unmistakable signs of violence...

..suggesting the two are connected.

Choosing to live like this, in such close proximity with your

neighbours, with the animals which you're breeding,

with your rubbish...

..in a way that has never been seen before, leads to this cascade.

The densely populated towns had become exposed to new dangers.

Living with their animals spread disease.

Their dependence on crops made them vulnerable to failed harvests.

And with ever growing competition for the land near the settlement,

people were no longer just battling nature,

they were battling each other.

Suddenly, it must have seemed like this perfect world

they'd created was cursed.

Faced with all these challenges,

these towns didn't survive or grow into great metropolises.

Instead, growth was followed by collapse and exodus.

And as the early town dwellers left their homes

and farms in droves, they faced a choice.

To start again and risk failing, or rejoin the vast

majority of humans across the globe still living nomadic lives.

For me, this is one of the biggest mysteries

in the history of our species.

Because for the very first settlers, it was a disaster.

They were facing disease and famine, and yet, at the very same time,

across the planet, hunter-gatherers were thriving.

And that way of life we know works,

because today, millions of people live like that.

They have made it to the 21st century just like the rest of us.

And yet, we know how this story ends.

Most of us live in huge cities like this.

So, what is it that turned a disaster into a success?

Our early attempts to live together in large numbers

had ended in failure and strife.

To make it work, our species would have to find another way.

An answer would lie...

..along a great river.

There are bits of our story where geography just does not

feel like a fluke. Where if it was going to happen,

it was always going to happen here.

Because beyond the thin strips of green that cut through this

arid landscape, there is very little but sand and death.

This narrow strip of habitable land was the only place to grow food

and rear animals.

But to produce enough, they had to control this natural resource.

The people needed to direct the water onto their fields,

and harvest en masse, once a year.

And so, they had no choice but to work together.

Put enough effort in, and more and more of this becomes

productive farmland, giving these guys a massive food surplus

that would be collected in huge grain stores, attracting more and

more people to come and settle here, and join this growing revolution.

The people flooded into the Nile Valley, jostling for space.

But now, instead of abandoning their communities

when the towns became overcrowded...

..they restructured them.

When you live in a small group, you've all got to be good,

or at least competent, at everything to survive.

But living in a large group, you can suddenly specialise.

Some of you might become really good at a particular

kind of textile making.

Others might become stone makers, butchers, bakers,

probably not candlestick makers yet.

All cogs in a huge machine,

at a scale that had never been seen before.

The people of these busy settlements were increasingly collaborating.

Becoming part of a social group

with hundreds or thousands of strangers.

And in the process, laying the foundation for something brand-new.

I know archaeologists are constantly pointing at walls

and trying to convince people of how important they are,

but this absolutely massive wall is pretty much all that's

left of the original city of Abydos.

Abydos being one of the very first cities in the whole world.

But walls like these also indicate a momentous shift

in the way humans lived together,

because to be on this side of the wall meant protection

and access to the grain stores,

but to be on that side of the wall meant to literally be without.

Now, humans have always been tribal, we've always been able to act

and think as part of a group, but what places like this prove

is that tribalism was scalable to the size of a city.

All along the great rivers of the ancient world, huge cities began

to appear, as our ancestors cracked the secret to living at scale.

A change which would propel us forward at an astonishing rate.

As these newly emerging cities grew

and their communities became more complex...

..they started to change...

..leaving evidence which can still be seen here in Abydos.

Not in the city of the living, but in the city of the dead.

This is Shunet El Zebib, and it's so vast, clearly,

but it was actually originally mistaken for a fort.

But it's a temple dedicated to a human, a man called Khasekhemwy,

who's actually buried in a cemetery over there.

Not everybody got one of these, which means that around here,

there were now at least two classes of people.

There was something about cities that was the perfect breeding

ground for producing not just the haves, but the have-a-lots.

We may never know why some people became wealthier

and more powerful than others.

One theory is that those in control of the water

could also be in control of the food supply.

But so long as they shared enough to feed the cities, the cities thrived.

Their newly specialised populations invented, made

and traded an unprecedented number of objects.

And in the process, created a tool, unassuming at first glance,

that would become a powerful instrument.

I know they don't look like much.

They look like just square pieces of bone.

They were found in Abydos, in a tomb, thought to be that

of a king known as The Scorpion King, from about 5,300 years ago.

Now, some of these symbols are very recognisable.

That's obviously a bird.

This is a plant of some kind.

And notice the holes in them.

These are effectively labels, or tags.

These tags were thought to have been attached to offerings

buried in the tomb, but what they reveal is something

happening in the world of the living.

And these symbols represented the provenance where the

item that they were attached to came from.

Perhaps they have a quantity as well attached to them.

And then someone had this absolutely revolutionary idea.

What if they strung them together?

With local agreement on their meaning, symbols became words.

Gradually, the rows of images became more complex...

..until...

..we stopped labelling and started writing.

Detailed knowledge and culture that had previously been

passed down generation to generation to generation was now able to

be preserved in a completely different way.

And the thing with writing is that like

so many of the giant leaps forward that we have made as a species, I'm

thinking here about the invention of agriculture and metalworks

and the wheel, writing does seem like an idea whose time had come,

because it doesn't just happen in Egypt.

Again and again across the Earth,

we invented forms of writing.

Giving our facts, stories and ideas lasting form.

And we still have no conclusive evidence as to how or even

whether these events influenced each other, or

whether they happened organically,

as a result of needing to keep track of things at that scale.

But however it happened, once writing was a thing, once it was

out there in the world, then nothing would be the same ever again.

Now, laws, customs

and beliefs could be recorded permanently in ink.

But with over 700 symbols,

this technology required years of study to master...

..and so was the sole preserve of those trained to use it,

scribes working for the ruling class.

And the ability to send out detailed instructions to people across the

land gave the rulers enormous power to influence, instruct and build.

In 2013, a team of archaeologists were excavating

a cave on the Red Sea coast...

..when, hidden inside,

they found ancient fragments of inscribed papyrus.

Preserved there for over 4,000 years.

It's believed to be the oldest ever found.

And a time capsule from the reign of an iconic ruler.

So, this is... this is your actual excavation notebook from the time?

Yeah, yeah. Every day, I was recording the papyri,

and we were surprised to find most of them have the name of a king.

And this pharaoh is Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid.

Not a small pharaoh.

All the material is giving information about this very

reign, which is the very beginning of the Egyptian state, in fact.

Yeah.

Khufu ruled Egypt for almost a quarter of a century.

And one of world's most familiar structures was built to

honour him - the first of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

We had to wait till the very end of the excavation

to have the best-preserved papyri.

- We only had a small piece left untouched. - No!

And all the papyri were thrown inside...

Into that one spot that was the very last spot

- that you decided to look in. - Yeah, yeah.

The team discovered around 1,000 pieces of papyrus,

revealing a vastly complex construction project.

- Wow! - Yeah.

It belongs to a kind of elite at that time,

because we don't think that more

than 1% of the... of the population was able to read and write.

It's a logbook, and I can see in the small boxes

the number of the day of the month, and for each day,

this official is giving information about what he has done.

For example, here, on the first day of the month, they are

sending a boat to Heliopolis, to fetch the food for the workers.

And when it arrives, it's written in red,

because it's much more important for them than everything else.

About 40 days, you have a precise record of what he is doing.

Egyptian extracted fine limestone blocks that were used

for the building of the outer casing of the pyramids.

So, what it is all about is that they were bringing

stones from the Tura quarries to the pyramid of Khufu at the end

of the reign of this king.

So, this is... this is telling us how they built the pyramids, basically.

- Yeah, basically, yeah. - This is the administration behind it all.

That... That's absolutely incredible.

So, this is a snapshot in time

of the building of the Great Pyramid.

- Mm. - And you found it.

Without all those records, I think

the pyramid would not have been possible.

You can't really overstate the significance of finding

a document like that, one from such a pivotal moment in history.

And when you read the translation, you definitely do get

a sense of what a logistical feat it was,

building these things.

But you do also get a real sense of how mundane

and bureaucratic it all was.

Just kind of ordinary humans doing ordinary human things.

Between the invention of writing and the building of the pyramids,

there were no major technological advancements

that we know of in Egypt.

And so, for 4,500 years, people have looked at these and just had their

breath taken away, and wondered how on earth were they built.

And perhaps the answer is just this simple - writing built the pyramids.

And even though they were originally built for the elites,

they actually became symbols of national identity,

which bind huge groups of people together on an unconscious level.

The unit of human cooperation had grown from tribe, to village,

to town, to city...

..and now, to nation.

But alongside the emergence of these nation states

was a more sinister development.

What had once been tribal skirmishes became state warfare...

..recorded by the victors in art and writing.

The emerging superpowers began launching military

campaigns against their neighbours, for land, resources and manpower.

Bringing thousands of captives back as slaves.

Many of the early civilisations follow this pattern of growth,

innovation, writing and an ever more stratified society.

By 4,000 years ago, we'd clearly made some massive strides to the

modern world, with the rise of these civilisations that were supporting

so many more people, and about 70 million of us walking this planet.

But...

..the disparity in the human condition had never been so wide.

Some people were living gods, and they would go on to build

monuments like these to themselves for centuries.

But many more were slaves, who were forced to

live in the shadows of the splendour that they'd helped to create.

And humankind's powerful new tool, writing...

..still remained in the hands of just a tiny number.

If we were going to get to the future, the here and now as you

and I know it, it was going to require a spark from somewhere else.

Almost 4,000 years ago, a small group of our ancestors were

forced to make a journey to one of the most inhospitable

places on Earth.

Through the baking, barren waste

of the Sinai Desert.

But here, in this desolate landscape,

they would change the world.

This place is stunning and yet, a complete and utter deathtrap.

It was of very little interest to the Egyptian elites.

That is until someone found something in these mountains.

Lots and lots of copper.

And this stuff, turquoise.

Raw materials that could be transformed into jewels

and ornaments of great value...

..if you could prize them from this harsh landscape.

Far to the north was the tiny land of Retjenu.

When Egypt demanded labourers for this treacherous mining mission...

..it was the unfortunate people of this small powerless state,

who had no choice but to answer the call.

I can't imagine what it would've been like to be dragged here

to work in the turquoise mines, in the blazing heat,

in the middle of nowhere.

It must've been like being dropped onto

the surface of a different planet.

And even the Egyptians probably wondered

if they would make it back home.

The Egyptians turned to their gods for protection.

And here, high up on a desolate plateau,

at the furthest edge of their world, they built a temple to ask for it.

A monument which has survived remarkably

unscathed for almost 4,000 years.

Frozen in time by the bone-dry desert.

This temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor,

who is the goddess of turquoise and miners.

And they were documenting and celebrating their presence,

and worshipping their gods.

And each one of these pillars represents one of the missions.

And they are hierarchical.

So, you've got the Pharaoh at the top, and it goes through the ranks.

You've got stonemasons, etc, etc, etc,

until this is the brother of the Prince of Retjenu.

Retjenu is where the miners came from.

And yet, the miners are not here on this pillar, but they would have

come through here, they would've seen this grandeur, this splendour.

Seeing these impenetrable Egyptian hieroglyphics...

..the foreign workers also wanted to immortalise their presence here.

But there was a problem.

They weren't part of the elites and so they couldn't write.

So, the illiterate miners did what we humans have always done.

They copied what they'd seen and made it their own.

This is one of the turquoise mines, and if you look, all over the walls

there are these scratches from where the workers' pickaxes have been.

But here, something else is going on.

There are about 30 or 40 of them all over this place.

Some of these have been copied from hieroglyphics,

but some are completely new, and here's how the system works.

You take the symbol and you say the name,

but you only take the first sound, and you discard the rest.

So, for example, this here.

This is an ox, you can see the horns and the head here.

To the miners, this would be "aleph".

Now, aleph, just take the first sound, "a", discard the rest.

This is another symbol. This is the symbol for house.

To them it would be "bet",

so you just take the "be" sound at the beginning.

And if you put these two together,

you start understanding what you're actually looking at here.

This is the birthplace of the alphabet.

This new script was simpler to learn than hieroglyphics, because

the alphabet did not represent complete words, but spoken sounds.

It was able to convey any thought with only 20 to 30 symbols.

These miners are the ones who gave birth to this,

and their legacy is still with us today, and is so important.

In the centuries and millennia that followed...

..nearly all the early written languages

fell into obscurity as those civilisations waned.

But the alphabet would only grow, spreading across the planet,

reshaping and branching into many different forms.

Eventually becoming the most wildly used writing system

in the world.

Allowing millions, and then billions, of ordinary humans

to access knowledge, to communicate and to document their thoughts,

and their existence, in every corner of the globe.

For me, this is one of the most powerful moments in the human story,

because unbeknownst to the underdog, they had changed the world.

One of civilisation's most profound and revolutionary ideas didn't

come from an educated elite, it came from inside these dark and miserable

mines, through the copying and innovating of lowly migrant workers.

The invention of writing marks an ending and a beginning.

Because prehistory, so the period before writing,

we could only really piece together using fragments and artefacts,

and now recorded time, history, had begun.

And what we see is that as writing spreads,

the pace of human innovation accelerates.

Because that is the power of being able to document

and lay down knowledge.

Generation after generation building on the last, retaining

and accumulating knowledge.

Stone became bronze, iron became silicon...

..and gradually, we built the future.

This is the very final bone of our series.

This is actually one of the three ear bones,

and just like every human bone we've encountered,

whether Homo sapiens or otherwise, it represents a person.

This individual had a family, parents, perhaps children, friends.

But what's particularly remarkable is how much

we now know about these ancient ancestors of ours,

thanks to modern temples of knowledge, like this one.

The scientists here are able to extract DNA from an individual

who, in this case, lived about 1,600 years ago,

from a piece of bone that is so tiny, delicate and precious,

and they're able to ask questions, like whether industrialisation and

agriculture actually affected our DNA, whether we're still evolving.

And to think that our knowledge has got to the point where we're

even able to entertain such huge questions

from something so tiny...

..for me there's a poetry in that.

We can look back on when nature and luck were on our side...

..and when they weren't.

Where we made the right decisions...

..and where we went wrong.

But what underpins our story

and makes it unique is far more than just our will to survive.

It's our cultural drive to come together, to learn from

and inspire each other, to go further than what has gone before.

We are the very last species of human to walk this Earth,

and the most fascinating thing about our 300,000-year-long story

is that we have no idea how much is left.

Is this basically the whole of our story, or are we on the first

act, or even prologue, with a long future ahead of us?

We have no idea.

But we are one species with one future.

Now, you could never have predicted how we got here,

and where we go next is up to all of us.

In this episode, we filmed at Serabit el-Khadim,

a 4,000-year-old mining complex on the Sinai Peninsula.

Where ancient messages were scrolled on the walls of the mines.

The archaeologists who discovered this mystery script in 1905

called it Proto-Sinaitic, but they had no idea what it said.

And until they could read it,

they were ignorant of its true significance.

A remarkable artefact, now in the British Museum, would be

the vital clue to cracking the ancient code.

This amazing object was discovered in the Hathor

temple in Serabit el-Khadim, close to the turquoise mines.

It's a so-called sphinx and dates roughly about 4,000 years old.

Linguists already knew how to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

What the sphynx gave them was a key to decipher

the script they couldn't read.

So, if you look at the piece, we have inscription on both sides,

and I'll show you this side first,

where we only have the Proto-Sinaitic script.

And then if I turn the sphynx, this is the most important and most

fascinating side, because here we have then two different scripts.

On the bottom, Proto-Sinaitic,

and then you see the hieroglyphic right on top.

The message in hieroglyphics at the top was a dedication

to the goddess Hathor.

Linguists deduced that the script below in Proto-Sinaitic

was saying the same thing.

We can start with the hieroglyphs, which reads "Beloved of Hathor",

so we have now the Egyptian goddess Hathor.

Then we have a second part, which allowed us to decipher

the Proto-Sinaitic language, because we know it was the same message.

So, we were very lucky we found this amazing object.

This is the kind of lottery win for the linguists.

These short, corresponding phrases were the key to decoding

the miners' writing.

The probably most important aspect of Proto-Sinaitic is that

it's an alphabetic script, and if you look at these signs,

you probably will not recognise any alphabetic signs we use today,

but the cow head that you see here becomes our A.

Proto-Sinaitic gave birth to the modern alphabet, and unlocked

the origins of the most widespread form of writing in the world.