Nova: Becoming Human – Unearthing Our Earliest Ancestors

Fri, October 30, 2009
Posted in Program Highlights, Schedule Updates, Web Updates

Nova’s Becoming Human: Unearthing Our Earliest Ancestors, examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives—putting together the pieces of our human past and transforming our understanding of our earliest ancestors.

Part 1. Tuesday, November 3. 7:00 p.m.
Part 2. Tuesday, November 10. 7:00 p.m.
Part 3. Tuesday, November, 17. 7:00 p.m.

The three-part series is the first in-depth televised investigation documenting an explosion of recent discoveries. Featuring interviews with world-renowned scientists, each hour unfolds with a CSI-like forensic investigation into the life and death of a specific hominid ancestor.

Part One

Examines the factors that caused us to split from the apes. The film explores the fossil of “Selam,” also known as “Lucy’s Child”—an amazing, nearly complete child fossil, which helps shed light on our ancestors’ early development and how we began to depart from that of chimps. Paleoanthropologist Zeray Alemseged, who discovered “Selam,” spent five years carefully excavating the sandstone-embedded fossil grain by grain.

NOVA’s cameras are there to capture the unveiling of the face, spine, and shoulder blades of the oldest known child fossil, 3.3 million years old. And, for the first time, NOVA takes viewers “inside the skull” to show how our ancestors’ brains had begun to change from those of the apes.

Part Two

This show investigates the first skeleton that really looks like us—“Turkana Boy”—an astonishingly complete specimen of Homo erectus found by the famous Leakey team in Kenya. These ancestors are thought to have developed many key innovations such as hunting, use of fire, and extensive social bonds. NOVA examines a theory that it was long-distance running—our ability to jog—that was not only crucial for the survival of these early hominids on grasslands filled with vicious predators but also gave them a unique hunting strategy: chasing and running down prey animals such as deer or antelope to the point of exhaustion.

“Turkana Boy” also marks the first time in human evolution that there is strong evidence of an extended period of childhood and parenting. As anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Hrdy explains, “Because they had longer childhoods there was a wonderful opportunity for big brains to evolve.” New analyses of fossil bones and teeth are giving us direct evidence of how, why, and when humans’ uniquely long childhood and parenting began and how the empathy of the family bond got started and why it proved vital.

Part Three

The final program examines the roots of our own species, Homo sapiens, which new evidence pinpoints to southern Africa some 200,000 years ago. What led to the birth of fully modern humans and our unique capacities for culture and creativity? How and why did our species leave Africa and take over the world? New discoveries are upending old ideas and suggesting that our exodus was far earlier than previously thought. A nightmare period of intense cold climate may have played a key role, at one point reducing the entire human population to perhaps only a few thousand or hundred. Our survival was on the line even as we began to leave our African cradle.

THE COMPLETE NOVEMBER SCHEDULE (Revised):