All language subtitles for BBC_Ascent_Of_Man_1973_E01_DVDRip_XviD-eBwoy

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So that, unlike them, he is
not a figure in the landscape,

he is the shaper of the landscape.

This is the Pacific Ocean.

The California Indians used to say

that at full moon the fish came
and danced on these beaches.

And it's true that there is a
local variety of fish, the grunion,

that comes up out of the water and
lays its eggs above the high tidemark.

The females bury themselves
tail-first in the sand,

and the males gyrate or dance round them
and fertilise the eggs as they're being laid.

The full moon is important because it gives
nine or ten days between these very high tides

and the next ones that will wash
the hatched fish out to sea again.

Every landscape in the world is full of
these exact and beautiful adaptations,

by which an animals fits into its
environment like one cogwheel into another.

Millions of years of evolution have shaped the
grunion to fit and sit exactly with the tides.

But nature, that is evolution, has not
fitted man to any specific environment.

On the contrary, by comparison with the
grunion, he has a rather crude survival kit.

And yet this is the paradox
of the human condition,

one that fits him
to all environments.

His imagination, his reason, his
emotional subtlety and toughness,

make it possible for him, not to accept
the environment, but to change it.

That series of inventions, by which man,
from age to age, has remade his environment,

is a different kind of evolution, not
biological, but cultural evolution.

I call that brilliant sequence of
cultural peaks The Ascent Of Man.

Of course, it's tempting,
very tempting to a scientist,

to hope that the most original achievements
of the mind are also the most recent.

And we do, indeed, have cause
to be proud of some modern work.

Think of the unravelling of the
code of heredity in the DNA spiral.

Or the work going forward on the
special faculties of the human brain.

Think of the philosophic insight that
saw into the theory of relativity.

Or the minute behaviour of
matter on the atomic scale.

Yet human achievement,
and science in particular,

is not a museum of
finished constructions.

It's a progress, in which the first experiments
of the alchemists, also have a formative place.

And the sophisticated arithmetic that the
Mayan astronomers of Central America invented

for themselves, independently
of the Old World.

The stonework of Machu
Picchu in the Andes,

and the geometry of the Alhambra,

are constructions as arresting
and important for their peoples

as the architecture of DNA for us.

In every age there
is a turning point,

a new way of seeing and asserting
the coherence of the world.

It's frozen in the statues on Easter
Island that put a stop to time.

And in the Medieval clocks in Europe

that once also seemed to say the
last word about the heavens for ever.

There's nothing in modern
chemistry more unexpected

than putting together
alloys with new properties -

that was discovered about the
birth of Christ in South America

and long before that in Asia.

Splitting and fusing the
atom both derived conceptually

from a discovery made in prehistory,

that stone and all matter has a structure,
along which it can be split and put together

in new arrangements.

And man made biological inventions almost as early
- agriculture.

The domestication of
wild wheat, for example,

and the improbable idea of
taming and then riding the horse.

So, these programmes or essays

are a journey through
intellectual history,

a personal journey to the high
points of man's achievement,

what the poet Yeats called
"monuments of unaging intellect".

Where should one begin?

With the creation, with
the creation of man himself.

Charles Darwin pointed the way.

It's almost certain now that man first
evolved in Africa near the equator.

This is a possible area, the valley of the
River Omo in Ethiopia, near Lake Rudolf.

The ancient stories used to put the
creation of man into a golden age

and a beautiful legendary landscape.

If I were telling the story of Genesis now,
I should be standing in the Garden of Eden.

But this is manifestly
not the Garden of Eden.

And yet I am at the
navel of the world,

at the birthplace of man, here in the
East African Rift Valley, near the equator.

And if this ever was a Garden of Eden,
why, it withered millions of years ago.

I've chosen this place because
it has a unique structure.

In this valley was laid down
over the last four million years,

layer upon layer...
of volcanic dust.

Four million years ago,
three million years ago,

over two million years ago,
somewhat under two million years ago.

And then the Rift Valley buckled it,

so that now it makes a map in time,
which we see stretching into the distance.

These cliffs are the strata on edge.

In the foreground, the bottom
level, four million years old.

And beyond that, the next lowest,
well over three million years old.

The remains of a creature
like man appear beyond that,

and the remains of the animals
that lived at the same time.

The animals are a surprise because it
turns out that they have changed so little.

This is the topi antelope now.

The ancestor of man that hunted
its ancestor two million years ago

would at once recognise
the topi today,

but he would not recognise the hunter
today, black or white, as his own descendant.

(Birds cry and caw)

Among the animals, the hunter has
changed as little as the hunted.

The serval cat is still
powerful in pursuit

and the oryx is
still swift in flight.

Both perpetuate the same relation between
their species, as they did long ago.

Human evolution began when the
African climate changed to drought.

The lakes shrank, the forests
thinned out to savanna.

When animals like Grevy's zebra
were adapted to the dry savanna,

it became a trap in
time as well as space.

They stayed where they
were and much as they were.

The most gracefully-adapted of all
these animals is surely Grant's gazelle,

yet that lovely leap never
took it out of the savanna.

In a parched, African landscape like this
at Omo, man first put his foot to the ground.

That seems a pedestrian way
to begin the ascent of man.

And yet it's crucial.

Two million years ago, the
first certain ancestor of man,

walked with a foot which is almost
indistinguishable from the foot of modern man.

The fact is, that when he put his
foot on the ground and walked upright,

man made a commitment to a new integration
of life and, therefore, of the limbs.

The one to concentrate
on, of course, is the head.

This is what it looked like
just over two million years ago.

It's a historic skull.

It wasn't found here at Omo, but south
of the equator at a place called Taung

by an anatomist called Raymond Dart.

It's a baby, five to six years old,
and the skull has been badly twisted,

yet Dart instantly recognised
two extraordinary features.

One is that the foramen magnum -

that's the hole in the skull that the spinal cord comes up through to the brain
- is upright,

so that this was a child
that held its head up.

And the other is the teeth.

The teeth are always telltale.

They're small, they're square.

These are still the
child's milk teeth.

They are not the great fighting
canines that the apes have.

That means that this was a creature

that was going to forage with
its hands and not its mouth,

that was probably eating raw meat,
and almost certainly making tools,

pebble tools, stone choppers,
to carve it, to hunt.

Dart called this
creature Australopithecus.

It's not a name that I like.
It just means "southern ape".

For me, the little Australopithecus
baby has a personal history.

In 1950, when its humanity
was by no means accepted,

I was asked to do a
piece of mathematics.

Could I combine a measure of the
size of the teeth with their shape,

so as to discriminate it
from the teeth of apes?

I had never held a fossil skull in my hands
and I was by no means an expert on teeth.

But it worked pretty well.

And it transmitted to me a sense of
excitement, which I remember at this instance.

I, at over 40, having
spent a lifetime

on doing abstract mathematics
about the shapes of things,

suddenly saw my knowledge
reach back two million years

and shine a searchlight
into the history of man.

That was phenomenal.

And from that moment, I was totally committed
to thinking about what makes man what he is

in the scientific work
that I've done since then,

the literature that I've
written, and in these programmes.

I don't know how the
Taung baby began life,

but to me, it still remains
the primordial infant

from which the whole
adventure of man began.

The human baby, the human being,
is a mosaic of animal and angel.

For example, the reflex that makes the
baby kick is already there in the womb.

Every mother knows that.

And it's there in all vertebrates.

Here, at 11 months, it
urges the baby to crawl.

That brings in new movements
and they then lay down

and consolidate the pathways
in the brain, the cerebellum,

that will form a whole repertoire
of subtle, complex movements

and make them second nature to him.

Now the cerebellum is in control.

All that the conscious mind has
to do is to issue the command,

and at 14 months, the
command is, "Stand".

What are the physical gifts that
man must share with the animals?

And what gifts make him different?

(Starter's pistol fires)

The starting response of the runner is the
same as the flight response of the gazelle.

He seems all animal in action.

The heartbeat goes up.

The heart is pumping five
times as much blood as normal

and 90% of it is for the muscles.

He needs 20 gallons of air a
minute now to aerate his blood

that shows up as heat
in infrared films.

The blue, or light,
zones are hottest,

the red, or dark, zones are cooler.

The main chemical action is to get energy
for the muscles by burning sugar there,

but three-quarters of
that is lot as heat.

At this speed, the chemical burn-up in
the muscles is too fast to be complete.

The waste products of incomplete
burning now foul up the blood.

This is what causes fatigue
and blocks the muscle action,

until the blood can be
cleaned with fresh oxygen.

All that, in one way or another, is the
normal metabolism of an animal in flight.

But the runner was not in flight.

The shot that set him off
was the starter's pistol,

and what he was experiencing
deliberately was not fear, but exultation.

The runner is like
the child at play.

His actions are an
adventure in freedom

and the only purpose of
this breathless chemistry

was to explore the limits
of his own strength.

There are physical differences
between man and the other animals,

even between man and the apes.

The athlete grasps his pole, for example,
with an exact grip that no ape can quite match.

Yet such differences are secondary, by
comparison with the overriding difference,

which is that the
athlete is an adult

whose behaviour is not driven
by his immediate environment.

In themselves, his actions
make no practical sense at all.

They are an exercise that is
not directed to the present.

The athlete's mind is fixed ahead
of him, building up his skill

and he vaults in
imagination into the future.

The pole-vaulter is a
capsule of human abilities.

The grasp of the hand, the arch of the
foot, the muscles of shoulder and pelvis,

the pole itself, in which energy is stored
and released like a bow firing an arrow.

It's the invention of the pole, the concentration
of the mind, at the moment before leaping,

which gives it the
stamp of humanity.

If I am to take the ascent of man
back to its beginnings in the animal,

it's the evolution of the head
and skull that has to be traced.

Unhappily, over the 50 million
years or so to be talked about,

there are only six or seven
essentially distinct skulls.

So that in order to
trace the continuity

I'm putting them on a computer,
which will lead from one to the next.

Begin 50 million years ago with this
small, tree-dwelling creature, a lemur,

whose skull is being
turned upside-down.

You can see the foramen
magnum at the back

This is a creature that hung,
not held, its head on the spine.

And it has the essential
marks of the primate.

That is the family of
monkey, ape and man.

From the whole skeleton, we know
that it has fingernails, not claws.

It has a thumb that can oppose,
at least in part, the hand,

and it has in the skull the two features
that really mark the beginning of man.

The snout is short, the
eyes are widely-spaced.

That means there has been
selection against the sense of smell

and in favour of
the sense of vision.

From that, man begins.

In the next 20 million years,

the line that leads to the monkeys branches
away from the main line to the apes and man.

This creature is on the main
line 30 million years ago.

He's large, yet still
lives in the trees.

But from now on, the ancestors of the apes
and man spend part of their time on the ground.

This is ten million years on.

A classical find, proconsul.

The brain is markedly larger, the eyes are
now fully forward in stereoscopic vision.

They tell us how the ape
and man line was moving.

But, alas, this creature is
on a branch line, the ape line.

The teeth show us that it is an ape

because the way in which the jaw is
locked by the big canines is not manlike.

It's the change in the teeth that signals
the separation of the line that leads to man.

This creature is 14 million years old
and we only have pieces of the jaw.

But it's clear that the teeth
are level and more human.

There is now a blank in the fossil
record for about ten million years.

Then, perhaps five million years ago, we
come certainly to the relatives of man.

This is a cousin of man,
not in the direct line to us,

a heavily-built Australopithecus
who is a vegetarian.

The teeth that survive are pitted by the fine
grit that he picked up with the roots that he ate.

His cousin on the line to man is
lighter, visibly so in the jaw,

and is probably a meat-eater.

This is the nearest thing to what
used to be called the missing link -

Australopithecus from
Africa, a grown female.

The Taung child, with which I began this
programme would have grown up to be like this,

fully erect, walking and with a large brain,
between a pound and a pound and a half.

That's the size of the
brain of a big ape now.

But, of course, this was a small
creature, standing only four feet high.

Indeed, recent finds by
Richard Leakey suggest

that by two million years ago the
brain was larger even than that.

And with that larger brain, the
ancestors of man made two inventions,

for one of which we have visible evidence,
and for the other inferential evidence.

First the visible invention.

Two million years ago, Australopithecus
made stone tools like this,

where a simple blow has
put an edge on the pebble.

And for the next million years, man in his
further evolution did not change this type of tool.

The ancestors of man had a short thumb, so
they could only hold this tool in a power grip,

and use it like that.

It's a meat eaters' tool.

The other invention is social.

Skulls and skeletons of Australopithecus
that we've found in largish numbers

show that most of them
died before they were 20.

That means that there must
have been many orphans.

And Australopithecus must have had a
long childhood, as all the primates do.

By the age of ten, they
were still children.

Therefore there must have been a
social organisation, which adopted them,

made them part of the
community, educated them.

That's a great step
towards cultural evolution.

At what point can we say that the
precursors of man become man himself?

That's a delicate question.

Such changes do not
take place overnight.

And it would be foolish to try and make
them seem more sudden than they really were

or to argue about names.

Two million years ago, we were not yet
men, but a million years ago we were,

because by then there appears a
creature who can be called Homo -

Homo erectus.

He spread far beyond Africa.

That's Peking man, 400,000 years old,
the first creature that used fire.

The changes in Homo erectus are substantial
over a million years but they seem gradual.

This is Neanderthal man. He already has a
three-pound brain, as large as modern man.

Probably some lines of
Neanderthal man died out,

but it seems likely that a line in the Middle East went on directly to us
- Home sapiens.

Somewhere in the last million years or so,
man made a change in the quality of his tools,

which presumably points to some
biological refinement in the hand,

and especially in the
brain controlling the hand.

He makes tools which require much
finer manipulation in the making,

and, of course, in the use.

The evolution of the brain, of the hand, of
the eyes, of the feet, the whole human frame,

makes a mosaic of special gifts.

Man is not the most
majestic of the creatures.

Long before the mammals even, the
dinosaurs were far more splendid.

But he has what no
other animal possesses,

a jigsaw of faculties,

which alone over 3,000 million
years of life make him creative.

Every animal leaves
traces of what it was.

Man alone leaves traces
of what he created.

From the ancestral Australopithecus
onwards, the family of man ate some meat,

small animals at first,

larger ones later.

Meat is a more concentrated
protein than plant.

And eating meat cuts down the bulk
and time spent in eating by two-thirds.

But a slow creature like man
can stalk, pursue and corner

a savanna animal, that is adapted
for flight, only by co-operation.

Hunting requires conscious
planning and organisation

by meanss ef anguage, ass
we ass sspec a weapenss

The hunt is a communal undertaking,

of which the climax, but
only the climax, is the kill.

Hunting cannot support a
growing population in one place.

The limit for the savanna was not more
than two people to the square mile.

At that density, the total land
surface of the Earth could only support

the present population of
California, about 20 millions,

and could not support the
population of Great Britain.

The choice for the hunters was brutal
- starve or move.

They moved away over
prodigious distances.

By a million years ago,
they were in North Africa.

BY 700,000 yeass age, t ney wee n aa

By 400,000 years ago, they had marched north,
to China in the east and Europe in the west.

These incredible migrations made man from
an early time a widely-dispersed species,

even though his total numbers were
quite small, perhaps one million.

What is even more forbidding
is that man moved into the north

just when the climate
there was turning to ice.

In that great cold, the ice, as
it were, grew out of the ground.

The northern climate had been
temperate for immemorial ages,

literally for several
hundred million years.

Yet just when Homo erectus settled
in China and Northern Europe,

a sequence of three
separate ice ages began.

The first was at its fiercest when Peking
man lived in caves 400,000 years ago.

It's no surprise to find fire used
in those caves for the first time.

The ice moved south and retreated three
times and the land changed each time.

The icecaps, at their largest,
contained so much of the Earth's water

that the level of
the sea fell 400ft.

In the second ice age,
over 200,000 years ago,

Neanderthal man, with his
big brain, became important.

The cultures of man that we recognise
began to form in the most recent ice age,

within the last 100,000 years.

That is when we find the elaborated tools
that point to sophisticated forms of hunting

the spear thrower, for example, and the
baton that may be a straightening tool,

the fully barbed harpoon and,
of course, the flint master tools

that were needed to
make the hunting tools.

Man survived the fierce test of the ice
ages because he had the flexibility of mind

to recognise inventions and turn
them into community property.

Evidently, the ice ages worked a
profound change in the way man could live.

They forced him to depend less
on plants and more on animals.

The rigours of hunting on the edge of the
ice also changed the strategy of hunting.

It became less attractive to stalk
single animals, however large.

The better alternative was to follow
herds of animals and not to lose them,

to learn to anticipate and, in
the end, to adopt their habits,

including their
wandering migrations.

This is a peculiar adaptation, the
transhumance mode of life on the move.

The only people that still
live in this way are the Lapps

in the extreme North of
Scandinavia, who follow the reindeer,

as they did during the ice age.

There are 30,000 people
and 300,000 reindeer

and their way of life is coming
to an end, even now as we watch it.

The herds go on their own migration

across the fjords, from one icy
pasture of lichen to another,

and the Lapps go with them.

But the Lapps are not herdsmen.

They do not control the reindeer.
They have not domesticated it.

They simply move
where the herds move.

The Lapps have some of the traditional
inventions for controlling single animals

that other cultures also discovered.

For example, they make some males
manageable as draught animals,

by castrating them.

It's a strange relation.

The Lapps are entirely
dependant on the reindeer.

They eat the meat,

a pound a head each every day.

They use the sinews and
fur and hides and bones,

they drink the milk,
they even use the antlers.

And yet the Lapps are
freer than the reindeer

because their mode of life is a cultural
adaptation and not a biological one.

The adaptation that
the Lapps have made,

the transhumance life on the
move in a landscape of ice,

is a choice that they can change.

It's not irreversible, as
biological mutations are.

Making a shelter from
reindeer hides is an adaptation

that the Lapps can change tomorrow.

Most of them are doing so now.

But you cannot change
the colour of your skin.

Why are the Lapps white?

Man began with a dark skin.

The sunlight makes
vitamin D in his skin

and if he had been white in
Africa, it would make too much.

But in the north, man needs to let in all the
sunlight there is to make enough vitamin D,

and natural selection therefore
favoured those with whiter skins.

The biological differences between different
communities are on this modest scale.

The Lapps have not lived by biological
adaptation, but by invention,

by the imaginative use of the
reindeer's habits and all its products,

by turning it into a draught animal,

by artefacts and the sledge.

Surviving in the ice did
not depend on skin colour.

The Lapps have survived, man survived the ice ages by the master invention of all
- fire.

Fire is the symbol of the hearth

and from the time Homo sapiens began to
leave the mark of his hand 30,000 years ago,

the hearth was the cave.

For at least a million years,

man, in some recognisable form,
lived as a forager and a hunter.

We have almost no monuments of
that immense period of pre-history

so much longer than any
history that we record.

Only at the end of that time, on
the edge of the European ice sheet,

we find, in caves like Altamira here, and
elsewhere in Spain and southern France,

the record of what dominated
the mind of man the hunter.

There we see what made his
world and what preoccupied him.

Knowledge of the animal
that he lived by and stalked.

And yet, when you reflect, what is remarkable
is not that there are such few monuments,

but that there are any at all.

Man is a puny, slow,
awkward, unarmed animal.

He had to invent a pebble,
a flint, a knife, a spear.

But why, to these scientific inventions,
which were essential to his survival,

did he from an early time add
those arts that now astonish us?

Decorations with animal shapes.

Why, above all, did he come to
caves like this, live in them

and then make paintings of
animals, not where he lived,

but in places that
were dark, secret,

remote, hidden, inaccessible?

The obvious thing to say is that, in
these places, the animal was magical.

But magic is a word
which explains nothing.

It says that man believed
he had power, but what power?

Here, I can only give
you my personal view.

I think that the power that we see,
expressed here for the first time,

is the power of the
forward-looking imagination.

In these paintings, the hunter was made familiar
with dangers which he knew he had to face,

but to which he had not yet come.

When the hunters were brought
here into the secret dark,

and the light was suddenly
flashed on the pictures,

he saw the bison as he
would have to face him.

He saw the running deer,

he saw the turning boar.

The moment of fear was
made present to him,

his spear arm flexed with an
experience, which he would have

and which he needed
not to be afraid of.

We also look here through the
telescope of the imagination.

The imagination is
a telescope in time.

We are looking back at the
experiences of the past.

The men who made these paintings,
the men who were present,

looked through that
telescope forward.

They looked along the ascent of man
because what we call cultural evolution

is essentially a constant growing
and widening of the human imagination.

The men who made the weapons

and the men who made the paintings
were doing the same thing,

anticipating a future,
as only man can do,

inferring what is to
come from what is here.

All over these caves, the
print of the hand says that,

"This is my mark, this is man."

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