All language subtitles for 1162FDAE607D796D1CF6692B71A3DFAB_eng

North Africa.

High in Morocco's Atlas Mountains,
Barbary macaques shiver in the icy cedars.

The ancestors of these
monkeys fled here from

a disaster that
overwhelmed their homeland.

Now trapped in this
isolated corner of Africa,

there's no going back
to the land farther south.

Even in this snowy refuge, there's a
reminder of what drove them here.

The unbridled power of the African sun.

Under its intense gaze, the snow can't
last for long.

Meltwater should bring life to the
lowlands.

Hundreds of torrents cascade southwards.

But each is flowing towards extinction.

Just 200 miles south of the mountains,
the rivers are vaporised.

Life has been burnt off the land.

This was the apocalypse from which the
Barbary macaques fled.

The sudden and unstoppable advance of the
greatest desert on the planet.

The Sahara transformed North Africa.

Today, it covers an area the size of the
United States.

One-third of the entire African continent.

This is one of the hottest places on
Earth.

The merciless sun, a colossal
15 million degree nuclear

reactor, blasted life from
the surface of the land.

It still wreaks havoc.

A faint breath of wind can be the
beginning of disaster.

Nomads tell of entire villages being
engulfed.

Camel trains disappearing.

And people buried alive inside their
tents.

A sandstorm can be a thousand miles
across.

It seems miraculous that anything can
survive such devastating storms.

It doesn't seem to be the end of the
world's long-standing devastation.

The Saharan apocalypse wiped out many
creatures.

But today, some still cling on in the lands
around the margins of the great desert.

It's very dry here.

Some years, the rains fail entirely.

A lone greviz zebra.

A lone greviz zebra.

A lone greviz zebra.

A lone greviz zebra.

He weighs close to half a tonne.

And could go for three days without
drinking.

Like the macaques, his forebears were
refugees from the advancing Sahara.

The

land is scrubby and dry.

But this stallion has claimed it as his
own.

He's been waiting months for visitors.

Female visitors.

If they like his territory, they might
stay a while.

It's his first chance to mate for a very
long time.

Hardly a success.

Perhaps his visitors are looking for a
more impressive partner.

There's another setback.

The females were being followed.

A posse of young males.

Every one a rival.

It's time to separate the men from the
boys.

The stallion sees them off.

The females had ringside seats.

And his prowess has not gone unnoted.

Machismo gives way to tentenness.

Around here, you have to take every
opportunity.

Be it for food, for water, or for mates.

Female grevies are a fickle bunch.

The herd have decided to move on.

All of them.

The stallion may never see them again.

But there's a chance that one is now
carrying his foal.

In this harsh land, that must count as a
triumph.

The sun's power cannot, however,
reach far underground.

Below, in stark contrast, conditions are
stable and tolerable.

And home to one of the planet's...

strangest mammals.

Meet the naked mole rats.

These sabre-toothed sausages wouldn't last
a day in the desert.

Special filming tunnels
allow us to see how

well adapted they are
to the subterranean life.

They can run equally well in both
directions, so tight space is no problem.

They have lost their fur.

And, most bizarrely, they live in social
colonies, much like termites or ants.

After time spent digging, the workers come
together to relax.

But one here is very different from all
the rest.

Their queen...

Twice as heavy as her subjects,
and not afraid to throw her weight around.

She is the mother of
every worker in the colony,

and exists in a near-continuous
state of pregnancy.

Even now, two dozen babies are pulsating
within her swollen belly.

Just occasionally, one of her brood is
raised differently.

A daughter becomes a princess.

Until now, this youngster's enjoyed a
lazy, privileged life.

But not for much longer.

She has a destiny to fulfill.

The surface is a place where no naked mole
rat can survive for long.

But a princess...

will risk everything to search for a
partner.

The quest is urgent.

There's an enticing smell in the air.

A seductive scent draws her downwards to
safety.

She's sniffed out a partner.

He too is alone, and eager to start a new
colony in his lonely burrow.

Two months later, the princess has become
a queen.

And a new tyranny begins.

Tough though they are, such refugees,
living on the edges of North Africa,

cannot survive in the heart of the Sahara.

And yet here, in southern Nigeria,
there are creatures preparing to journey

right across the centre of that great
desert.

Barn Swallows.

They spent the winter roosting in a forest
of elephant grass.

But now it's time for them to leave.

All two million of them.

They're tiny, each weighing the same as a
couple of one-pound coins.

Yet the journey to their breeding grounds
in Europe is over 3,000 miles long.

Ahead of them lies a vast death trap.

The Sahara is too large to go around.

The swallows have no choice but to meet it
head on.

It will take one of
nature's greatest feats of

navigation to cross
this lifeless wasteland.

A wilderness that stretches not just to
the horizon, but almost beyond imagination.

It's an immense blank space on the map.

In spite of the Sahara's reputation,
less than one-fifth of it is sand.

The rest is stone and wind-scarred rock.

The sun not only bakes the land,
it warps its appearance.

The superheated air rising upward from the
desert surface distorts the distant scene.

A reflection of the sky shimmers on the
sands.

A mirage.

The sun is an illusionist.

To thirsty travellers, a
mirage can resemble a

lake, which agonisingly
recedes as it's approached.

And swaying camels coming to the rescue
transform into dry, spiny acacia trees.

To cross this confused,
shimmering landscape, many

swallows will need to find
real water amongst the mirages.

Even in the Sahara, rain does sometimes
fall, and that is sufficient for plants to

survive, providing they have the right
adaptations.

Rising from the sand, a dried-out ball of
twigs.

In strong winds, it can travel.

This plant may have been dead for a
hundred years,

yet its name suggests that all is not
lost.

For this is a resurrection plant.

Around here, rain might only fall once or
twice a year.

But if you're searching for decades,
that might be enough.

Dead limbs absorb water and unfurl in a
matter of minutes.

But the resurrection plant needs one more
miracle.

Rain must fall on its branches before they
dry out and close up again.

Within hours, shoots emerge.

In just a few weeks, they flower and
develop seeds of their own.

Then, before they can grow any larger,
the sun kills them.

But their seeds live
on, ready for when the

rains return, even if that
is a century from now.

North Africa wasn't always so brutal.

Scattered across the Sahara are glimpses
of life before the apocalypse.

In the north, a petrified forest.

Trees turned to stone.

Remains from a far-distant wetter past.

White sediments in the
heart of the Sahara are the

dried-out remains of what was
once the world's largest lake.

In the east, ruined cities hark back to a
time of plenty.

And here, a new world begins.

Deep inside Libya is Mesak Setafet.

Carved here are hundreds of images of
animals, all drawn from life.

Ghosts from a greener time.

Remarkably, a remnant of this old North
Africa survives.

Bou Hedma in Tunisia is sustained by
mountain rains.

It's a relic of the savannah that once
carpeted North Africa.

The vast grassland vanished when a shift
in the Earth's orbit drove the rains south.

And in perhaps only a matter of centuries,
the Sahara Desert overwhelmed North Africa.

The evidence suggests this took place
around 6,000 years ago.

In evolutionary terms, that's no time at
all.

And life has had little chance to adapt to
this new world.

Only a few tough specialists can cope with
life amongst the dunes.

Camels are sometimes called sheep.

Ships of the desert.

But like the swallows, they're really only
visitors here.

These ships can certainly cross the
Sahara.

But even they can't make their home in the
harshest places.

Left to wander the desert by themselves,
camels would not survive.

They depend on their human navigators to
find oases and wells.

Saharan folklore is full
of tales of caravans that

missed a well by a few
hundred metres and disappeared.

This is the White Desert in Egypt.

The landscape is littered with giant chalk
pillars, carved by innumerable sandstorms.

This glaring white oven is lethally hot.

Food here is almost non-existent.

But there's a rare gift from a passing
camel.

The smell has lured dung beetles from
miles around.

For them, this is manna from heaven.

One dung ball could
provide enough food to

last this female beetle
the rest of her life.

But she has a problem.

To keep it fresh, she must bury it in
moist ground.

And that's not easy to find.

The temperature has already risen ten
degrees.

This lizard avoids the roasting sand.

Only 30 centimetres above the surface,
it's significantly cooler.

The reversed pushing technique is certainly
the fastest way to keep the ball rolling.

But it does have one drawback.

You

can't see where you're going.

Disaster.

Stuck between two dunes.

The dung ball is twice her weight, but the
urge to keep pushing is inextinguishable.

Now it's 41 degrees Celsius.

Soon she'll be baked alive.

Her survival instinct, in the end,
overrides her love for dung.

Much of the Sahara is uninhabitable.

But there are rare places where there is
some possibility of survival.

Places where, by strange chance,
there is water.

Wauau Namus is an extinct volcano.

From space, it's a remote black sky.

It's the largest car on the Libyan Sahara.

Yet there are other colours here.

Colours rarely seen on the desert floor.

Blue and green.

Rain fell thousands of
years ago when the Sahara

was green and percolated
deep into the ground.

And here, water from this vast ancient
reservoir rises to the surface.

These pools offer another glimpse of the
Sahara's past.

Wherever there's water
in North Africa, living relics

from this wetter time
have a chance to cling on.

This oasis is fed by a hot volcanic
spring.

Slightly away from the stream of
near-boiling water, it's cooler.

And fish can live.

These are tilapia.

Hatchlings stick close to their mother.

There are other dangers here, beside the
scalding water.

Particularly at night.

The crocodiles are stealthy.

And the tilapia are almost blind in the
darkness.

In panic, they all leap to escape the
hunter's approach.

But this female can't abandon her brood.

The crocodiles won't be thwarted.

They too can leap.

With first light, the crocodiles lose the
element of surprise.

And the battle is over.

For now.

The mother fish has survived.

But where are her young?

All present and correct.

They spent the whole night sheltering in
her mouth.

The contest will be repeated at sunset.

There is nowhere else to go.

Oases are always sought by desert
travellers.

But not all are as they seem.

This is the great Ubarri Sand Sea.

In the heart of the Sahara.

These swallows have
travelled one and a

half thousand miles
since they left Nigeria.

Their superb powers of navigation will
eventually guide them to Europe.

But now they and other
thirsty migrants need to

find a speck of blue
amidst this ocean of sand.

And here it is.

Umm el-Ma.

Here too, ancient groundwater wells up to
the surface.

But the birds need to be careful.

For the sun has played a terrible trick.

This oasis is poisonous.

Intense evaporation over thousands of years
has left the water saltier than the sea.

As if to underline the horror the place is
infested by vast swarms of flies.

But this plague is a bird's salvation.

The flies are filled with fresh water.

Filtered from the brine.

So like a desert wanderer
squeezing a drink from a cactus

the birds get all the water
they need from the flies' bodies.

More and more migrants join in.

Wagtails.

This is the birds' only stopover.

It gives them enough fuel to escape from
the Sahara and Africa.

Away from an oasis it seems remarkable
that anything can live at all.

The temperature of the sands can exceed 70
degrees Celsius.

There's not the slightest trace of water
left at the surface.

And when that happens the Sahara itself
cries out.

Billions of sliding grains generate a hum
that echoes across miles of empty desert.

These are the Sahara's legendary singing
dunes.

Over time these avalanches add up.

If you watch the dunes for long enough
something remarkable is revealed.

One and a half years flash past in a
matter of seconds.

On this time scale the dunes are like a
stormy sea.

An unstoppable tsunami of sand.

In this immense, ever-shifting landscape
it's easy to see how a lost traveller

could succumb to what's been called the
Sahara's only endemic disease.

Madness.

Can anything survive the North African
desert when the sun is at its fiercest?

It's approaching midday.

A fringe-toed lizard is hungry.

He's on a stakeout.

Flashy scales reflect some of the sun's
rays.

Nevertheless, the heat is almost
unbearable.

His prey hasn't left home all day.

The lizard is the last animal still out on
the dunes.

But even he can't take it anymore.

To survive longer, you'd need a space
suit.

And in a way, that's what these insects
have.

Silver ants' armoured skin reflects light.

They can tolerate temperatures that would
kill any other land animal.

Even so, they can only survive for less
than ten minutes in the midday sun.

The ants race to find food as soon as
their predators go to ground.

They can't afford to waste a second
getting lost.

So they spin to take a bearing from the
sun.

They log every change of
direction, every footstep, in order

to know exactly where they
are and where their nest lies.

Only four minutes to spare and they've
found a victim of heatstroke.

A meal.

But it's going to take a monumental effort
to get it home.

Three minutes to go and they're nearing
their maximum temperature.

An astounding 53 degrees Celsius.

But there are already casualties.

One minute left and they're not going to
make it.

Something has to change.

The silver ant is the hardiest of all
desert inhabitants.

Even so, it can only survive outside in the
middle of the day for a matter of minutes.

Now the desert belongs to the sun alone.

The sun has scorched life from the sun.

And yet the vast desert it created is a
source of life half a world away.

The advancing Sahara vaporized
the world's largest lake, leaving

behind the silvery remains of
countless microscopic algae.

In winter, the wind carries away 700,000
tons of this mineral-rich dust every day.

It blows from here all the
way to South America, where,

astonishingly, it fertilizes
the Amazon rainforest.

A striking demonstration of the reach of
this mighty continent.

Throughout its long history, Africa has
influenced the entire planet.

It was the cradle of a remarkable array of
land animals that spread across the globe.

And, of course, it was the ancestral home
of all of us.

This is the tale of two of the Africa
team's most challenging desert expeditions.

One focused on a minuscule creature with
an incredible turn of speed.

The other, on a subject so slow,
to film it in action would take years.

In both cases, the
Sahara would push crews

to the limit in pursuit
of the perfect shot.

In Tunisia, the mission is to
capture footage of moving sand

dunes, something that's
never been tried like this before.

The problem is that because
the dunes move so slowly, we're

going to have to leave cameras
here for about 20 months.

And that just means there's a huge
potential for things to go wrong.

And with filmmaking, if something can go
wrong, it usually will.

Two local shepherds,
Amor and Nasa, have

volunteered to tend
the equipment full time.

The camera tower will be the tallest
structure for as far as the eye can see.

And there are three other cameras at lower
angles.

All this toil will yield surprisingly
scant results.

They've programmed the cameras to take one
photo every day.

That's only 365 photographs a year.

Which, when you run it at normal speed,
just over 14 seconds.

It's taken longer to explain what's going
to happen.

And the end result will actually be...

The cameras are left to the mercy of the
sun, wind and sand.

In the meantime, crews are shooting all
across North Africa.

In Egypt, the challenge
is to get into the world of

the most heat-tolerant
desert animal, the silver ant.

They're really small.

They're really fast.

Like, you're not too sure if you've seen
an ant.

The crew have three weeks to gather the
footage they need.

We're going to try a tracking shot on this
ant nest.

Moving forward towards it as the ants pour
out of the hole in their millions.

Not only are these insects super fast,
they also keep anti-social hours.

The thing is, we need to be out here in
the middle of the day to film these ants.

They don't do what they do when it's nice
and cool at 7, 8 o'clock in the morning.

I can't remember ever being
in a place where the wind

was so relentless and the
temperatures were so high.

The insufferable heat is not the only
problem.

Dangers are everywhere.

There's a really fat scorpion.

It's really big.

One, two, three.

This might kill.

Yeah?

Yeah.

It's big and they have a lot of poison in
his dark thing.

What, that thing there?

Don't touch it!

Oh, my God!

Don't touch it!

The scorpion will be released far,
far away from the camp in a shady spot.

No such luck for the team.

They are back to work in the midday sun.

This is, this is too much.

This is crazy.

This is crazy.

Indeed.

The heat seems to have given Cat and
Warwick a touch of Saharan madness.

The plan is to do an experiment to find
out how fast these little ants can run.

So we're going to lay this
along the floor and hopefully an

ant will run alongside it and
we can film it at high speed.

And from that calculate their,
their speed and perhaps try and relate it

to how fast that would be for a human like
me.

Silver ants are expert
navigators, using the

angle of the sun to
calculate their position.

But for our team, even basic mental tasks
are becoming a challenge.

Count a second.

When you see one running, don't count a
second.

It's quite easy to count a second,
isn't it?

No, it's one.

One.

Yeah.

There he goes.

He's gone ten centimetres in four seconds.

Yeah.

But we're running at
five hundred frames per

second, which is twenty
times normal times.

Yeah.

So in fact, he's covered those ten
centimetres in...

We know that he does half a metre in one
second.

Half a metre per second.

Yeah.

Fifty centimetres in one second.

Yeah.

Roughly.

Yeah.

So how many body lengths is that?

He's maybe doing five body lengths a
second if he's two metres tall like I am.

Are you?

Yeah.

That's how much more than a normal man I
am.

Eventually, the duo decide
that if the silver ants were our

size, they'd be doing two
hundred and eighty miles an hour.

They're one of the fastest sprinters in
the animal kingdom.

No wonder we've been struggling to film.

It does explain a few things.

Antletics.

Knowing the exact speed of the ants is all
well and good, but there's still a great

deal of work to be done before the shoot
finishes.

However, in Tunisia, there's no shortage
of time.

And hopefully, no news is good news as far
as Amour and Nasser are concerned.

The final week in Egypt, and the crew seem
to be adapting to life in the oven.

Practice is making perfect, and the
sequence is coming together.

I think we've got some lovely shots.

Every single shot's been really
hard-earned.

But getting down in the ants' world is now
taking its toll on the kit.

Just running to stand still.

The business of blowing dust off these
things.

It's got dust in it.

Oh, crunch.

I think these ants are stunning looking.

Near impossible to film, I think,
because of the speed they had.

But, you know, I've come to love them.

Over the days and weeks.

With a sequence in the bag, Warwick wants
the final, traditional, sunset shot.

It's the best time of day to film sunsets.

In the evening.

That's experience that tells me that.

I've been doing this for years.

You learn these things.

Thanks to Warwick's experience,
including sunsets, he and Kat have

captured the extraordinary life of the
speedy silver ant.

Over a year later, in Tunisia, it's time
to take down these sand dune cameras.

Hello?

Hello!

Hello?

Are you there?

Yes, yes.

So, how's it been, has it been good?

It's OK, but two days ago, we have a
little bit small problem.

After surviving 600 days
in the desert, the small

problem is that the cameras
have been vandalised.

I'm very hot and bothered now,
it's 40 degrees.

And someone smashed the cameras.

It's not been a good start to the day,
to be honest.

There's no doubt the dunes have moved.

But the question is whether the equipment
has survived.

That is amazing the camera is still here.

I guess maybe it just took them so long to
get through the tuff and plastic that they

felt that they had made so much noise they
were worried about the guards coming

because they only sleep a couple of
hundred metres away.

After almost two years of waiting,
it's the moment of truth.

We're going to find out whether or not the
cameras have actually recorded anything.

It's just hugely stressful because it's
never been done before.

The footage is a surreal window into a
secret world.

The private life of a sand dune.

We're going to find out.

The Africa team struggled
under the burning sun

and driving winds at the
hallmarks of the Sahara.

They went home with an enormous admiration
for the creatures that spent their entire

lives battling to survive in this brutal
desert world.