"When I was a boy of nine, I read a book called The Malay Archipelago, by the great 19th century naturalist, the co-proposer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection," "Alfred Russel Wallace." "This is it." "And in it he describes his travels and explorations through Borneo and Sumatra, eastwards through the islands that are now Indonesia to the western end of New Guinea." "And in it, I saw one illustration that thrilled me to the marrow." "It shows greater birds of paradise displaying in the forests of New Guinea and being hunted by native plume hunters." "It seemed to me then as now, that to see the greater bird of paradise in display must be one of the most thrilling sights in nature." "And it became my childhood ambition to go and do just that." "Well, it's taken me 60 years, but here I am." "(People chattering)" "I first tried to see the birds back in 1957." "But then I could only get to eastern New Guinea, where the species Wallace saw doesn't occur." "And there was another problem - the people used the plumes as money." "These are wedding gifts - pearl shells, mats sewn with cowrie shells but, most valuable of all birds of paradise skins, prepared in the traditional way by cutting off the legs and the wings, to fully reveal the plumes." "There were 21 of them." "The bride seemed pleased, but for us, looking for live birds, there was worse to come - a celebratory dance." "Each man wore plumes of at least 40 birds of paradise, of several different kinds." "Most astonishing were the sawtooth quills they wore through the nose." "These came from the King of Saxony's bird, that then, very few naturalists had even seen alive." "There seemed little chance of finding living birds here, so we decided to go into wilder country to the north." "The headman called for porters." "We got 50." "Once in the mountains, our baggage was taken over by people who didn't wear feathers in their hair." "Instead, they had huge wigs, covered with bark cloth." "We heard calls of birds of paradise, we glimpsed them high in the trees, but we couldn't find a place where we could film them." "And then, after three weeks one morning at dawn, our luck changed." "Low down, in a casuarina tree a plumed bird of paradise." "And there, his unplumed female." "With these pictures, we had achieved something." "As far as I knew this was the first film ever taken of a bird of paradise displaying in the wild." "But our film was not in colour the species was smaller than the one that Wallace had seen and there were not a dozen dancing birds, there was just one." "This was hardly the fulfilment of that boyhood ambition." "But now, 40 years on, I'm trying again." "Wallace arrived in the Far East in 1854 but it was three years before he caught the first glimpse of a living bird of paradise." "And even then it must have been a very distant one." "For, as he wrote, the birds only display in the loftiest of trees." "And they are doing so in this one, right here." "I reckon they are at least a hundred feet above the ground." "Even with modern binoculars, it isn't easy to see exactly what they are doing." "As far as I know Wallace wasn't able to climb the tree to get a closer view of the birds, but these days we've got ways of doing so relatively simply." "You fire a thin line, with a catapult, over one of those high branches, haul up a thicker rope, attach a system of counterweights, then all you have to do, is to clip yourself on, and up you go." "Down goes the counterweight." "And now, I'm leaving that dark world of the forest floor and really entering a completely new one." "Now I'm getting up into the canopy." "Into the world of the birds of paradise." "And here's the top." "The birds are in another emergent tree, just like this one, and I've got an absolutely clear view of them." "It's unlikely that they're going to take fright at my sudden appearance above the canopy, because they've been using that tree for generation after generation, and it will take a lot more than just me to put them off it." "This, at last is Wallace's picture come to life." "He was the first European to glimpse this extraordinary spectacle, and he knew well in general terms, what was happening." "This is a female and she's come to pick a mate from among the gorgeous males who are displaying." "A young male." "He's dancing even though he hasn't yet got his plumes." "They don't develop until he's six or seven years old." "There are several young males here, putting in a little dancing practice." "This, however is almost certainly a female, because the males are starting the second stage of their performance - the bow, head down." "The female has hopped onto the perch of the male of her choice - that's a straight invitation to mate." "Act Ill - the approach." "Head up." "Act IV - the first physical contact." "It looks rough, but presumably she likes this sort of treatment." "She could easily move away if she didn't." "And that's it." "And now there's another to be attended to." "Apparently, there's a queue on this particular perch." "This is all he does as a father." "Now she'll fly away and raise her young unaided." "The males on the other perches, in spite of all their efforts, have no success at all." "He's at it again!" "But his partner is not reacting properly." "She's facing away from him." "He's got it wrong, this is a young male." "All the matings are taking place on this perch, with this male." "But are the females choosing the perch or the dancer?" "It's difficult to tell." "But it's easy to see why these wonderful plumes should be so treasured by local people, and why, when the first examples arrived in Europe in the 16th century, they should have created a sensation, as they did." "Those first specimens had been prepared in the traditional way, and had neither wings nor feet, and the books of the time showed them that way." "But how could such creatures fly or perch?" "This book explained." "The birds had no need to do either because they floated in the sky, feeding on dew, and only fell to earth when they died." "They were literally birds of paradise." "Even 200 years later, the illustrations involved a lot of guesswork." "For still no European had seen the living birds." "This kind, for example, had not only feathers, but 12 long, naked quills sprouting from its flanks." "The artist did give it legs, but he was completely baffled by the plumes." "By the end of the 19th century, thanks to the discoveries of Wallace and others the illustrations are much more accurate." "This is that 12-quilled bird again." "But could it really have its strange quills, or wires, as they're called, bent back over its body like this?" "It seems hardly likely." "Perhaps the artist had been working from a specimen that had been badly packed." "And what about this?" "This is the sicklebill bird of paradise." "Could it, in life, have great fans of plumes projecting above its wings, like fancy epaulettes with a purple rim?" "Even today, some of these species are little-known." "Many display in the thick forest at dawn, when there is not enough light to film." "That was what had caused us such problems 40 years ago." "But now we can resolve that difficulty with special video cameras." "And one of the species I most wanted to see is that bird with the improbable epaulettes, the black sicklebill." "Its display in the wild has never been photographed or filmed, it hasn't even been scientifically described." "But the local people say that a male does display on a perch just near here, but it only does so at first light, just before dawn." "So the only thing to do, is to sit down and wait." "He's there!" "That dim, black shape on the sapling." "This really is seeing in the dark." "(Calling)" "He's calling to attract females, but also to keep other males away." "This is his territory and he'll dance by himself." "Those things like arms are not his wings, they're those epaulettes." "So that's what he does with them!" "It's even more unlikely than the drawing." "It's getting brighter." "Soon we should be able to see him just a little more clearly." "There's that purple line on the epaulette." "But there's still no sign of a female." "Ah, well, obviously time for breakfast." "A pandanus tree." "Sicklebills are particularly fond of its fruit, and there's lots of it around." "That's what he's after - and there's a female half-hidden in the leaves." "There's a second female." "A third!" "All three are almost certainly his mates, each building her own nest and feeding in his territory." "Many birds of paradise species have females coloured like this - brown above and speckled or barred beneath." "And looking at them, it's easy to see that they're all related, even though their males are so very different and various." "The New Guinea forest has an atmosphere all its own." "From one point of view, it's rather disappointing - you don't see many mammals, far fewer than in Africa or South American forests." "But what this place lacks in mammals, it makes up for in birds." "Not that it's all that easy to see them." "You know they're around because you can hear them, but if you want to watch them, you have to move fairly quietly." "And there is one of the smallest of the whole family." "This is the one with those extraordinary sawtooth plumes - the King of Saxony's bird." "There's nothing else remotely like these plumes in the whole of the bird world." "He's calling for a female." "And it's not just his plumes that are unique - so is his way of dancing." "(Soft hissing)" "That hissing noise is his call." "You can tell he's getting particularly excited because he's erected the black feathers on his shoulders into a cape, another of those transformation tricks that seem to be a speciality of this family." "He's so worked up, he's trying to mate with a tuft of moss!" "A female, at last." "Typical female colouring." "And that's never been filmed before." "New Guinea is a huge island." "A thousand miles long from east to west, lying between Australia and the equator." "It was rucked up from beneath the sea some 10,000,000 years ago, as Australia drifted northwards and pushed against the Asian section of the earth's crust." "The ancestors of the birds of paradise, probably starling-like creatures, slowly spread from Asia, down chains of smaller islands until they reached these vast forests." "And here, they evolved into a multitude of wildly different species, that, between them, exploit every kind of feather adornment you can imagine." "But why did this great diversity of species come into existence?" "Well, New Guinea as well as being an immense island, is also an extremely varied one." "Up here, I'm at 11,000 feet, and the land is much poorer in food for birds than the luxuriant tropical rainforests of lower altitudes." "And up here, there lives a bird of paradise that may give us a clue about the ancestors of the whole family." "McGregor's bird of paradise." "And there's an obvious way in which it differs from most of its relations." "This is a pair - male and female look exactly the same." "The reason they do so is connected with food." "There's so little of it up here, that if nestlings are to get enough, the male has to help the female to collect it." "So he can't have a lot of wives." "Just one." "And since he can't, therefore spend his time dancing in trees, he hasn't developed an extravagant costume in which to show off." "His courtship is no more than this quick chase through the bushes." "At lower altitudes things are very different." "The tropical heat and the heavy rains produce a really rich environment." "As there are no monkeys to munch the fruit or squirrels to gather the seeds, there's plenty of food for birds." "Here the females can raise their young unaided and the males can concentrate on dancing." "And since there are no cats or jackals, there's little danger in doing so on the ground." "The superb bird of paradise does just that." "And this log is his dancing stage." "As well as his spectacular cravat, he's got a long sheaf of feathers at the back of his neck." "Extraordinary in itself, but you wait till he unfurls it!" "Here's the female." "Now there'll be some action." "This is the arena of another displaying bird." "I'm not on the mainland I've come to the island of Batanta which is separated by quite a narrow strait." "But it has its own species of bird of paradise, that evolved here and lives nowhere else." "And one way of trying to get a look at it, is to put some leaves on this arena, because this bird is meticulously tidy." "This isn't him." "This is a pheasant pigeon." "Maybe a trespasser on his patch will so infuriate him that he will come down." "(Bird calling)" "(Calling continues)" "I can hear his calls." "There he is." "(Calling)" "Wilson's bird of paradise." "He's got his own fashion gimmick - the bald look." "There goes the first of the leaves that I dropped." "He's really quite small - only the size of a starling." "Now he's starting cutting leaves." "Littering the place up himself." "Presumably he wants to get more light on the stage, so that his colours show up." "That looks like a female." "She's got a slightly less brilliant blue head." "But that's a young male." "He's not yet got coloured feathers on his body, but his bald head is very blue, and he's behaving like a male too." "ls he helping the boss by doing a bit of the housework?" "Probably not." "It's more likely he's come here to practise the skills he's going to need when he's old enough to have an arena of his own." "She looks interested." "So does he." "(Calling)" "He's clearly not much of a dancer." "But with a costume like that who would need to be?" "What an amazing bird!" "I've seen lots of coloured illustrations of them" "I've seen mounted specimens in museums but nothing has prepared me for the splendour of this wonderful thing." "It's as though it's illuminated from inside, the colours are incandescent." "When Wallace collected a particularly spectacular specimen, he wrote in his book, "My heart began to beat violently, blood rushed to my head," ""and I felt more in danger of fainting" ""than when I had been in apprehension of immediate death." ""I had a headache for the rest of the day."" "Well, I haven't got a headache, but I think I know how he felt." "Half a dozen of the 40-odd species dance on the ground like that." "To find another, we left the island of Batanta and went back to the mainland to the Arfak mountains in western New Guinea." "The home of the Arfak parrotia." "This is his display ground." "Here too the forest floor has been cleared and the saplings stripped of their leaves." "He's dressed entirely in black, except for that white disc on his forehead." "Though there is a iridescent patch on his chest that he can reveal when he wants to." "And he does have those six black pennants on his head." "But he dazzles his mates not so much with his costum' e as with his choreography." "And that being so, he is particularly keen on clearing his stage of anything that might trip up a dancer." "Now he's miming, going through the motions of clearing away leaves, even though there aren't any." "The stage is now absolutely immaculate." "And here's another of those juveniles who come to the arenas of their elders and betters to practise." "Amazing!" "But how sad that none of the girls are here to watch." "The master is back." "An audience is assembling." "He is going to show how it should be done." "First, the warm-up - ritualised runs across the stage." "A little more mimed leaf-clearing." "Mounting excitement in the dress circle." "And now, the performance begins." "The absence of ground predators, that has allowed some birds of paradise to display on the ground, has been exploited by another family of birds, that used to be thought to be close cousins of the birds of paradise," "but are now thought to be somewhat distantly related." "and this is one of their constructions." "This is not a nest, it's a jewel box." "And these are not eggs, they are blue berries." "The treasures of a male bowerbird." "And here is one of those treasure-hoarding capitalists, the flamed bowerbird." "He may not have elaborate plumes, but his body feathers could scarcely be more brilliant." "Those on his shoulders have a gloss like spun glass." "But this is about all he does to display them." "It's as if his ancestors once had big plumes, and although he hasn't inherited them, he still goes through the motions of displaying them." "Whether that is so or not he now puts his faith in his jewels." "And here's another to add to that collection." "Now he's chewing up leaves into a paste." "Perhaps he's trying to beautify the bower walls." "The abundance of food in the forest has had the same effect on the bowerbird family as it has on their cousins the birds of paradise." "It's enabled the males to become polygamists." "But whereas birds of paradise attract their wives with plumes on their bodies, these birds do it with jewels and their bowers." "And like plumes, the bowers have been elaborated to an extraordinary degree." "Like this one, for example." "This is a maypole bower." "The builder - a drab little bird." "But then, he relies even less on his feathers and much more on his skill as an architect and builder." "And he's got something to be really proud of." "He decorates this impressive construction with green lichen around the base." "And from the end of the twigs of the tower, he hangs frass - caterpillar droppings." "He does have the vestiges of a yellow crest." "And he's a quite extraordinary songster." "And several of these males will build their towers quite close to one another in the forest." "The females tour them make up their minds, presumably about which is the finest, and then mate with the architect beside his creation." "They then go away and rear their young entirely by themselves." "The father of this nestling may never even see it." "He spends nine months of the year close to his award-winning building, hoping, no doubt, that yet another passing female will give him her vote." "And this is the work of the master builder among bowerbirds." "I'm in the Vogelkop on the far western tip of New Guinea and this is the bower of the Vogelkop bowerbird." "And what an astonishment it is!" "Surely one of the wonders of the natural world." "The bower has been completely roofed over, thatched with these stems of orchids." "It's been built around the base of a sapling, it has a stark pillar right in the middle, and it's got two smaller pillars on the side, to support it." "The whole of the treasury is five or six yards across." "And what treasures it contains!" "Or what a variety of treasures it contains!" "On the far side, there are the black stems of tree ferns." "Here is the lawn neatly planted with moss, and on it, the shiny wing covers of beetles." "There are orange fruit, there are these glowing orange dead leaves," "These are the acorns of the tropical oaks which are common around here." "Behind me, there are black fruits." "All of which has been brought specially by the bird." "Bowerbirds are so dedicated to their work that even if you sit out in the open beside the bower they will often continue to work, provided you sit absolutely still." "This Vogelkop bowerbird is the plainest of his family, with no sign whatever of a crest." "But the more spectacular the display in your bower, presumably the less need you have to impress your mate with bright feathers." "And it's difficult to imagine a more impressive collection of treasures than this." "But they do have to be properly arranged to show them off really well." "Flowers, whenever they appear in the forest have an obvious appeal to a bird who has a passion for interior decoration." "From one point of view, these adornments are better than feathers." "Individual birds of paradise cannot choose their plumes' shape and colour." "They have to display with what their genes have given them." "Bowerbirds, however, can choose." "If a male decides that he stands a better chance of seducing a female with pink, rather than blue then he can decorate his bower that way." "So it's the tastes and fancies of the females, single mothers, who have no need of the help of the male in bringing up their families, that has led to these extravagant exhibitions." "Whether or not the bowerbirds are closely related to the birds of paradise, both families have reacted in remarkably similar ways to the asset they share - the huge richness of this forest." "This really is a paradise for birds." "And the variety of bowers it has allowed one family to build is more than matched by the variety of plumes evolved by the other." "One group of female birds of paradise, for example, fancied glossy throats, and this is the result." "The splendid astrapia." "Tails clearly didn't impress them to anything like the same degree." "But the splendid astrapia has a close cousin, Shaw Mayer's astrapia, and those females had different tastes." "They were hot for tails." "There's no wonder that the result of their selections over many generations is also called the ribbon-tailed bird of paradise." "The female has to sit on a nest and a long tail would get in the way, but because of her and her forebears' decisions about what makes a male attractive he now has the longest tail in proportion to his body of any bird in the world." "The smallest member of the family - the king bird of paradise." "He has yet another kind of tail - two wire-like quills, each tipped with a little green disc like a coin." "Not so obviously impressive as the ribbon-tail but wait till you see what he does with them." "Wingspreads and an extraordinary, scarcely birdlike, call are just the beginning of things." "Just attention-grabbing ways to let any female around know that he's on his perch, and about to display his prowess as an acrobat and a juggler." "What could be more attention-grabbing than that?" "But that's not all." "When he's really excited, he's got a final stunt - the pendulum." "There it is." "Down in the lowlands in the swamps beside the rivers, lives the 12-wired bird of paradise." "He comes to his display post in the early dawn." "This is the bird I used to think had been drawn so inaccurately, but the old illustration was right - the wires, the quills, are indeed bent back in a tangle." "The female doesn't have them." "But do bent-back quills appeal to a female?" "They're hardly beautiful." "Courtship seems to be some kind of game, a variation of I'm The King Of The Castle, perhaps." "Only, with a very special prize." "He deliberately brushed her face with his rear quills!" "He's doing it again!" "It seems that she prefers to be seduced, not by visual thrills, but by tactile ones." "And after the quill flick, the beak poke." "It may be an odd technique, but it works." "I've now left New Guinea,." "I'm 200 miles to the west on the island of Halmahera one of the Malukus, the Spice Islands." "It was here that Wallace made perhaps his most spectacular discovery of all - a completely unknown bird of paradise." "On that today carries his name - Wallace's standardwing." "It was only observed once more in the hundred years that followed his discovery." "And until recently, some people feared it might have disappeared altogether." "So it is one of the least-known of all species." "But we do know that the males like the greater bird, which Wallace made so famous display in groups, and at dawn." "They've gathered in one of these trees, and from the racket I'd guess there are 30 or 40 of them." "(Many birds calling)" "The standards - those long isolated feathers - project not from the tail, the flank or the head but, would you believe, the front-edge of the wings." "These are advertising flights - whizzing vertically into the air to show passing females what's going on." "There he goes again." "I've been watching this perch since very first light, and I must have seen at least a dozen displays, but not one of them has ended with a mating." "I think that's because this is one of the junior perches, the subsidiary ones." "The senior perch, where all the action is, is over there in a much taller tree." "That's where males are winning mates." "A female." "This male is certainly putting on a great performance." "ls she, in fact, assessing and comparing the displays?" "A copulation." "As ever, a matter of seconds." "Another!" "Same place." "There seems little, to my eye at least, to choose between all the several dozen males." "And I don't see how a female could make a proper choice." "Maybe it is the perch in these great assemblies of competing males that is the important thing." "As it also may be among the greater bird of paradise." "If that is so, then in these mass displays, the males are not so much showing off to the females as posturing aggressively to one another." "Using their plumes to demonstrate their strength and vigour, as stags do with their antlers." "That would enable them to establish a ranking between them all, and the boy at the top of the rank gets the number one perch." "One of the mysteries about birds of paradise, as far as I'm concerned, is why, when they have such wonderful colours do they do so much of their displays in the semi-darkness before dawn?" "It's only now that the sun is up that I can really see the full beauty of these wonderful plumes." "The displays are over." "It's time to get smartened up again after all that rough and tumble." "The white standards are looking a bit bedraggled too, and at last I can see exactly how they're attached to the front of the wing." "ls there a more elegant cravat, in both shape and colour, worn by any bird?" "I doubt it." "So, after weeks of work and travel with cameramen Richard Kirby and Mike Potts, we had filmed the displays of not just one species, but representatives of all the major groups of birds of paradise." "And I had achieved the ambition of a lifetime." "Wallace's emotions on discovering such marvels must surely be echoed by all of us who follow him." "This is what he wrote " ""I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations" ""of these things of beauties have run their course" ""year by year being born and living and dying amid these dark, gloomy woods," ""with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness," ""to all appearances, such a wanton waste of beauty." ""lt seems sad that, on the one hand" ""such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms" ""only in these wild, inhospitable regions." ""This consideration must surely tell us" ""that all living things were not made for man." ""Many of them have no relation to him" ""Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates" ""their struggles for existence," ""their vigorous life and early death would seem to be immediately related" ""to their own wellbeing and perpetuation alone."" "Indeed so." "These arrows and this bow belong to a man who has never seen a European face." "So does this house." "I'm in the middle of Central New Guinea and these wonderful mountains all around are one of the few places left on the surface of the earth that are truly unexplored." "Until only a few months ago it was thought that this area of Central New Guinea was completely uninhabited." "And then Laurie Bragg, the Assistant District Commissioner for this area was looking at some aerial photographs to try and map this area, to make sense out of this tangle of mountain ranges and rivers." "And on the photographs he saw one or two tiny pinpoints, which indicated to him that there there were gardens like this one and houses and people." "People who had not been contacted ever by the outside world." "And so it was decided to send an expedition to try and find them." "Aeroplanes first arrived in this country back in the '20s." "The island of New Guinea is immense 1,500 miles long, lying between Australia and the equator, and 50 years ago its interior was virtually blank on the map." "The aeroplane has ever since been a key tool in filling in that blank." "Sometimes by dropping supplies to explorers who had marched for weeks, sometimes by dumping men on a sand bank by an unknown river, sometimes, as now by giving a man like Laurie Bragg a view of what lies ahead of him before he sets off into new country." "And the view is hardly welcoming." "An unbroken carpet of green corduroy, jungle as thick and as sticky as you can find anywhere." "(Attenborough) Does it look OK for the canoes?" "(Bragg) Yes, there aren't many snags." "It's hard to tell the current from here but it looks pretty good." "(Attenborough) How many times have you been here?" "(Bragg) I haven't." "(Attenborough) Has anybody?" "(Bragg) Not beyond here." "(Attenborough) There's a village!" "(Bragg) It's the last known one." "You can start to see some snags in the river now." "It's a bit marginal for canoes now." "(Attenborough) There's some bad rapids." "Will we get this high?" "(Bragg) We won't get canoes here." "Could we go down and have a look at that junction?" "At the foot of that ridge?" "(Man) There's the junction." "(Bragg) That could well be it." " I'm looking for that garden area." " (Man) Eh?" "(Bragg) I'm trying to pick out that garden area I saw." "(Bragg) There's a big garden complex under the top of this mountain here." "(Man) Is that everything you want to see?" "(Bragg) Yeah." "Except for clouds." "(Attenborough) Back at his base at Ambunti on the Sepik River," "Laurie Bragg develops his plans for a major patrol into those unknown mountains to discoverjust what was there." "We'll move from Ambunti here downstream along the Sepik in two work boats the Opal and the Sapphire, and come into the Karawari River here." "Follow the Karawari upstream into the Korosameri." "The work boat should get to about here and then the river'll be too shallow for the work boats." "We'll be towing canoes with the boats..." "the work boats and the canoes will shuttle us and the rations and patrol gear up to approximately here," "where I think we'll run out of sufficient depth of water to take canoes, and from there we'll have to walk." "What's the walking gonna be like?" " Very difficult." " Is it?" " Yes, if we look at the..." " Yeah." "Um, aerial photographs of the area, I don't want to shock you but... (Attenborough laughs)" "(Bragg) That's the Salamei River." "Er, we won't get that far with the canoes, we'll have to walk from here." "We'll be moving up to that junction there, which I don't know what it's called and then we'll be going to this ridge" "and follow that to the crest of the Salamei-April divide." "You can see garden areas there." "See them?" "They're scattered across that face, 2,500-3,000 feet above sea level and we'll establish ourselves on that ridge somewhere where we find people and let the people come to us." "(Attenborough) Patrols are the means of administering this country." "Every few months government officers like Laurie Bragg take a handful of armed native police, leave their stations and travel for weeks visiting the people in their territory." "In the settled areas they see that schools are started and roads built and that the people get some sort of medical help." "In the wilder parts the job's more dramatic." "Tribal feuds must be stopped and elementary law established." "This patrol would be different only because in addition to doing all that, it was going to walk slap across one of the last of those empty blank patches on the map to try and sort out its geography on the ground" "and, if possible, contact the inhabitants, who so far had never seen Europeans." "40 years ago the Sepik river was notorious for its head-hunters." "Indeed, it was news of a spectacular head-hunting raid that made the government decide to establish the station at Ambunti" "240 miles up the river, in what was then the dark interior." "The men of one village had raided their neighbours, lopped off 28 heads, boiled them and scraped them, moulded them with clay and stuck them up for display." "Even today it's not unusual to hear of a ritual murder in the remoter parts, away from the main river and the eye of the government." "90 miles downstream from Ambunti we left the Sepik and turned into a tributary that came in from the south." "This river was shallower and hemmed in by rafts of floating reeds so we had to leave the two big boats and carry on in three canoes with outboard motors." "On the Sepik we'd seen quite a lot of people travelling in canoes but here there was no one, just flocks of ducks and eagles and herons." "After three days of travel we came in to land at the last known village on this river" " Inaru." "This was the end of the easy bit." "From now on we should be walking." "Patrols only come up as far as Inaru about once a year and none had ever been beyond it." "For the villagers, our arrival was an important event, and since there were only 50 of them we represented an almost overwhelming invasion." "The people of Inaru live very simply." "They plant a few vegetables but rely heavily on the forest to supply them with fruit and meat." "The river provides them with fish, mostly black, bony catfish, and once a year it presents them with an enormous bonanza - mayflies." "For three days, millions of them hatch and rise to swirl in blizzards over the surface of the water." "No one knows what particular chemistry in the river or change in the climate causes all of them to emerge at the same time in this fashion." "But the Inaru people know well enough that this limitless gift of food will only be here for a day or so." "All the women and children go down to the river to harvest it." "The newly-hatched insects are soft and juicy and eaten still wriggling, just like oysters." "Our porters relished them just as the villagers did." "Life in the jungle may look blissful and untroubled" "Adam and Eve in a primitive paradise." "But in fact only too often it's scourged by disease." "The headman had a tropical ulcer on his foot the size of a golf ball." "There were cases of yaws and malaria and skin fungus, all diseases easily treated by the medicines we had with us." "The villagers knew that perfectly well and were delighted to see us." "Communication, however, was not easy." "Astonishingly, there are over a thousand mutually incomprehensible languages in New Guinea." "The Inaru language is only spoken by these people and two other villages, about 200 people in all." "(Wailing)" "If we were to meet any new people on the journey ahead interpreters would obviously be invaluable but plans to get them had already run into snags." "We were expecting to get a..." "Bisorio bloke to interpret for us... but we haven't got him yet." "and the Bisorio people live in these hills over here." "And they're nomadic." "And, er, the local people here have agreed to go and look for them but they're not sure they're gonna find them." "(Attenborough) When did they last see them?" "Two blokes from this group, a month ago." "When they came in from the hills over there to trade for tobacco." "Er, since then they've had a party of their own go to look for the Bisorio and they've found their last camp and the houses have been burnt down." "Probably an accident." "I don't know." "But... they appear to have gone further north." "But they're a nomadic group and they're gonna go and look for them but it might take four or five days." "How do you look?" "It's a hell of a big country and there are very few people." "They'll go to a house that's been burnt down and try to find a track from there." "(Attenborough) Do the Bisorios speak to the people we're interested in, directly?" "There's nobody who can speak directly to the Bikaru, which we think are the groups we're looking for." "The only people who can speak to the Bikaru are the Bisorios, who are bilingual." "Or some of them are." "And one of our blokes round here somewhere speaks the Bisorio language, and we'll speak pidgin to our interpreter who'll speak Bisorio, and the Bisorio'll speak to the Bikaru." "(Attenborough) So Constable Caius and two Inaru men set off in a canoe to try and find us an interpreter, a nomad, who might be anywhere in several hundred square miles of forest, and who might not be too keen on being discovered anyway." "It seemed a fairly tough assignment." "The next day we would set off on foot, following the river into the mountains." "Since from here on we should be in uncontrolled country we might have to defend ourselves." "So Laurie issued bullets to the police, and at the same time as the regulations insist, gave instructions in pidgin on when and how a man was permitted to fire." "(Speaking pidgin)" "(Bragg) Or you in supreme court long killing man." "(Attenborough) And so the march began." "There was no track so two men at the head of the column had to cut a path wide enough for people burdened by bulky loads." "Because we had no idea when or where we might find villagers from whom we could get food and shelter everything we needed had to be carried with us on men's shoulders." "Tent, medicines, lamps, surveying equipment, radio gear, personal baggage, trade goods such as beads and salt and knives photographic equipment, axes, buckets and, above all, food." "Food for us food for the carriers of equipment and more food for those carrying food." "We marched up the east bank of the river but most of the unknown country lay to the west, and so eventually we had to cross it." "At this point it was just possible for one man without a load to swim across." "But to get the whole party over we had to build a bridge." "The New Guinea forests provide everything you need to construct a first-rate suspension bridge." "Primarily kunda, a kind of long, straggling cane that grows throughout the forest, draping itself over trees and along the ground like a carelessly laid cable." "It grows, astonishingly, to lengths up to 500 feet long and it's as strong as any rope." "Three lengths bundled together will form the basic cable on which to put our feet." "One on either side will serve as handrails and it's all tied together with string made from splitting kunda." "This kind of bridge is only made by mountain people." "Most of our patrol came from the swamps and plains around Ambunti and had no idea how to do it." "Indeed, they regarded the whole operation with as much mistrust as I did." "But three of our men were true hillmen and they immediately took over the direction of operations." "106 carriers, quite apart from ourselves, have got to cross that bridge." "106 sounds an absurdly, almost ludicrously, large number, but the basic calculation is this - if one man carrying nothing or carrying just a tent or trade salts or a radio is gonna survive in the field for a fortnight," "he needs two other men carrying nothing but food to provide him with food and them with food." "If you want to stay longer than a fortnight, and we do, well, you've either got to arrange for an air drop or else you've got to live off the country." "We can't live off the country because there are very few people here, and anyway, turning up to dinner with 106 porters is hardly a way to endear yourself." "Or else, of course, we could starve." "We're planning to get an air drop." "But first we've got to cross this river." "(Porters shouting in native language)" "The forest, as we'd seen from the air was as continuous as a carpet." "There were no clearings, no patches of grassland, no meadows, and in order to get enough space to pitch tents we had to cut down dozens of trees." "And that takes time and energy." "So every day we stopped at about four o'clock in the afternoon." "That gave us time to make camp and get settled in before sundown." "But since by then we had been marching for nine hours anyway it was none too soon for most of us." "(Yells in native language)" "(Attenborough) Our tents were simply tarpaulins." "There's no point carrying tent poles in a forest thick with saplings." "Next morning at first light we packed up again." "Most of our gear was carried in these metal patrol boxes." "They seemed pretty heavy even when empty but the porters preferred them to odd bundles." "They're also watertight and solved the problem of making loads of roughly equal weight." "You have to watch where you put your hands." "If you grab a branch for support without looking at it closely as like as not you will stab your palm full of long barbed thorns." "It's extraordinary how quickly you become a good practical botanist, able to recognise some sorts of tree in a flash," "Now we had left the main river and were travelling across the grain of the country." "That meant clambering up a steep muddy ridge several thousand feet high, and then slithering down the other side to ford a little tributary, before climbing over yet another ridge." "The first job on making camp in the evening was to put up the aerial for the radio so that Laurie Bragg could report back to his base at Ambunti and they would know just where we were if anything went wrong." "(Bragg) Ambunti, Ambunti portable." "Do you read?" "Roger, now on the aerial photograph, photograph number 5188, we're on the Salamei River immediately north of the nick in the top frame." "Our intention now is to remain at this campsite for one or two days to allow Constable Caius and the Bisorio interpreters he's gone to look for to catch us up." "Have you got that?" "Over." "Yeah, roger roger." "That's all, roger." "After three days of hard walking a rest day is a blessing that everybody's grateful for." "Their bruises and cuts and strains get a chance to heal." "There's one man who's got a dose of malaria and it also gives us a chance to see some of the wildlife in the forests around here." "When you're tramping through it, 110 men lugging patrol boxes about, you make a certain amount of noise, so you don't expect to see much wildlife in the bush." "But moving alone, well, you've got a chance." "But this bush around here in New Guinea is a very strange sort of bush." "There aren't any big mammals, there are no monkeys, no elephants or tigers or lions." "In fact, there are no big mammals at all in New Guinea." "But what this forest does have and which gives it a unique excitement and splendour, are birds of paradise." "We've heard them calling around the camp and with any luck we might see some." "(Birds calling nearby)" "And there is one lurking low down in a tree, swinging his train of yellow plumes." "These marvellous birds assemble in the tops of trees and display to one another every morning." "That is a wonderful enough sight, which few people have seen." "Now, however, it was afternoon and it looked as though we might be even more lucky and see a rare performance of the display dance in the full sunshine." "Undoubtedly these plumed males assembling in their display tree were getting more and more excited." "Slowly they hopped onto higher and higher branches until they reached the top of the tree where they had stripped the leaves from one branch so that they could dance unimpeded." "(Birds calling)" "Now there were eight of these splendid creatures in a frenzy, displaying to one another as their performance mounted to its climax." "This is a males' dance only, a competition not to impress the females but to gain dominance over rival males." "It's always performed in the same tree, and that is their downfall for some tribes hunt them for their plumes, which are used as money." "Here, however in this uninhabited wilderness they can dance unmolested." "And this, apart from the pig, is the biggest mammal in the island, an absurd and endearing creature - the tree kangaroo." "Above it was another, a baby." "It seems quite ridiculous that an animal shaped like a kangaroo should have climbed into a tree." "Its legs, splendid for hopping, seem like a liability up in the branches, and indeed, tree kangaroos are pretty clumsy creatures, and always in imminent danger of falling out of their trees." "Another of New Guinea's splendid and extraordinary decorated birds, the Goura Pigeon." "The largest of all the pigeons, with a silver-spotted tiara, which it uses, like the birds of paradise, in display dances." "It spends most of its time on the ground, and, unhappily for its own wellbeing, makes good eating." "The next day, seven days afterleaving Inaru," "Constable Caius, who had gone to look for the interpreter, caught up with us," "He gave his report to Laurie in pidgin, and it looked like bad news," "(Speaking pidgin)" "(Attenborough) He had found no one, It was a real blow," "But there was nothing we could do except go on," "(Speaking pidgin)" "Now that we had left the rivers we were navigating for much of the time on simple compass bearings," "(Speaking pidgin)" "And then suddenly, two weeks after setting out, as we cut our way up a ridge, the sharp eye of our trackers noticed an old break in a sapling." "Someone else, a few months ago, had passed this way." "That morning, we saw several more." "The ridge must be a route used by those people whose houses we had seen from the air." "They couldn't be far away." "Indeed, they might be watching us as we crashed so clumsily through the forest." "And then, unexpectedly, we marched into a clearing, and there ahead of us was a house," "It was big enough to hold an entire family group of 20 Orso people," "It was also, clearly, a fortress," "Built on stilts for protection, with loopholes through the sides from which defenders could fire arrows," "The question was whether the fortress was manned and whether we, without interpreters to explain, would be taken as friends or enemies," "(Bragg) Oi!" "Oi!" "There was no reaction." "Nothing moved," "The entrance was barricaded with a huge, heavy plank," "It looked deserted but we couldn't be sure," "It could be that the people were simply not at home but out hunting somewhere in the forest," "Or that they had taken fright at our approach and were nearby, watching what we would do," "Or it could even be an ambush," "This narrow corridor is a very effective fortification." "Nobody could get in, armed only with spears and bows and arrows, if the owners didn't want them to." "And this is the only room." "These..." "I don't know what's in here." "From the weight it's quite light, perhaps it's a dancing skirt." "And here, carefully strung on vines..." "These, I think, are the eggs of the bush turkey, the megapode." "The back here..." "These dancing beads, dancing rattles..." "And here at the back - jawbones of pigs, carefully strung-up and preserved." "The pig, all over New Guinea, is of great ceremonial importance." "And this is unusual at least I've not seen it before the jawbones of piglets too." "And this savage and effective-looking dagger... carefully incised on the tip." "This is made from the leg bone of the cassowary, the New Guinea ostrich." "And here are a formidable armoury of arrows." "These, with the bamboo blades are normally used for killing pigs." "And these, with the hardwood points, sometimes the bone points," "I asked one of the local people once what they were used for, he said, "Oh, they killing man."" "These are war arrows." "A rack of firewood." "And above me, the rafters of the roof are most carefully and meticulously lashed with a decorative pattern." "The fireplace." "The stones are still warm." "They were here just recently." "Here's the...the fire stick that they use for making fire." "It's got those notches - you put it beneath your foot and... pull it with a rattan cane." "So they were here quite recently." "But now the place is totally deserted." "We couldn't have stayed any longer for we were running short of food." "But although we hadn't seen the people themselves we had learned a lot about them from the house itself and the objects inside it." "The following day we were due to get an air drop of supplies." "Laurie had previously arranged the date for the drop and picked a place which, judging from the air photographs, seemed suitable." "The ground was relatively flat and the plane could get a decent approach run." "Our problem now was to get there on time and preferably with all our gear dry." "When we got to the drop site we felled trees to make an open space and spread out tarpaulins as markers for the pilot to aim at." "And so several tonnes of stores weren't dropped on the tarpaulins we used as tents, we concealed those with branches." "The pilot would need all the help he could get to find us, so we lit a fire as well." "(Shouts)" "Hopeless!" "Miles off target." "The porters were furious." "It'd be a lot of work climbing around in the bush trying to find those bags." "For the second pass he came in much lower." " Bang in the centre." " (Talking native language)" "(All yelling)" "Three passes, six bags on each drop, 18 bags of rice, tinned meat, sugar and salt, that somehow had got to be found." "Each load is double bagged, the theory being that the outer one splits but the inner one holds." "In practice, both bags split on occasion and the forest is sprayed with salt and rice and tins of bully beef." "Some of those that land off-target get caught in the branches of a tree." "Others hit the ground so hard that the tins are split wide open." "That day our spirits were high." "We had been on short rations for some time and everyone was looking forward to an enormous meal that night." "The next morning, things didn't look quite so good." "The loads which had been getting lighter as we ate our way through them had suddenly become crushingly heavy again with the stores from the air drop." "Always as we marched, Laurie took bearings on mountains and river bends to check where we were on the air photographs, and build up a detailed map of our progress." "One of the least attractive experiences of walking through forests like this are these creatures - ugh - a leech." "Fortunately I managed to get it this time before it started sucking my blood." "But there are plenty of its brothers round here just waiting for me to pass their way." "I can see them even here, on the leaves." "The existence of the leeches in these forests is to me, really, a puzzle because they are creatures which are very specially modified to live only on blood." "Say, a human being's blood, or pig's blood." "But there are very very few pigs in these forests and even fewer human beings." "And yet wherever we walk every day we see dozens and dozens and dozens of leeches." "How they survive I don't know." "Where they get their food from I have no idea." "I just wish they themselves realised that their survival is an impossibility." "And this, on the other hand is one of the most engaging - indeed, slightly lunatic - inhabitants of the forest, the echidna." "An amiable, myopic creature similar to the duck-billed platypus." "It's got warm blood, feeds its young on milk, and lays eggs." "The most dangerous animal in the bush, as well as the biggest, is the cassowary." "One kick can rip open a man's stomach and they will attack anyone if they're guarding a nest." "If ever there was a bird that is sinister for me, it's this one." "There are poisonous snakes in New Guinea undoubtedly in some numbers, but they're hard to find and usually slither away before you can look at them," "This one is quite harmless, a beautiful, emerald green tree python," "And then, once more we came across signs of human beings." "This is a pig trap." "The pig would come down this corridor and trigger a log hanging above with a spear in it." "The trap was old and long since sprung but at least it was a sign that the forest was inhabited." "Day after day we trudged on." "We made careful notes of all the rivers that we crossed which way they flowed and how far apart they were, of the different rocks we saw in the river beds and the kinds of trees in the forest." "We took altitude readings and compass bearings of prominent peaks and rivers." "Certainly we left behind us a trail that would make it much easier for anyone who had to come this way again." "As we made camp on the 25th night of the patrol, it was no good denying that we were feeling pretty depressed." "We had all hoped to get some glimpse of the shy people who we knew lived here but we were now within three days of coming out on the other side of the blank on the map and we hadn't seen anything of them." "(Chatting in native language)" "Laurie reckoned that we must be in the territory of a tribe known to their neighbours as the Biami." "Their name was the only word of their language that we knew, so that evening we sent out a porter to call that name over and over again." "Biami!" "Biami!" "Biami!" "Biami!" "Biami!" "It was very cold that night." "Next morning it was drizzling and no one was anxious to move until suddenly a porter called out, "Biami!" and there they were." " (Man) Biami, eh?" " Biami." "(Man) Bikaru." "Biami." "(Speaking Biami language)" "Setifa." "Setifa." "(Atttenborough) Setifa is the name of a river," "We tried to ask them by gestures to bring in their women and children and to bring us food," "It was not that we really needed their bananas but trade is a decent relationship with dignity and respect on both sides," "We didn't want our meeting to become just a question of the rich handing out gifts to the poor," "They might also persuade their neighbours, the Bikaru, to come in as well but with no proper words between us except for proper names the message wasn't easy to get across," "(Speaking native languages)" "One of the most popular gifts in the remoter parts of New Guinea is newspaper." "It's used for smoking the raw powerful tobacco that every village grows." "Some people will carry a load for a day for a couple of sheets but these people normally use dried leaves and had no idea what to do with the paper." "They took it rather as though it were some sort of useless memento." "This, plainly, was not a success, so Laurie tried salt instead." "This was much better received." "And what with that and cigarettes made for them from newspaper by the police, all looked well." "(Speaking native languages and pidgin)" "(Speaking pidgin, Biami)" "After about an hour when they started to leave, they seemed to be as delighted by the meeting as we were." "That night we reported back to base in a much happier frame of mind," "Except that the radio was giving serious trouble," "I think that's through to base." "Our position is I-1, the bottom of I-1." "If you've got that give us a long roger." "Roger, roger... (indistinct)" "Strength at half, we've got a broken wire in the set." "Over." "(Radio, indistinct)" "I think you said you had nothing for us, I didn't hear it properly." "If you're writing in to the DC you could let him know we've found our first group of people, our first group of people." "We'll stay here tomorrow and maybe some of them will come in." "(Attenborough) But would they be sure enough of us to risk another visit?" "They had seemed happy enough when they were with us but no one was taking any bets." "But the next morning there they were again." "And what is more they were carrying food." "(Speaking Biami language)" "There wasn't much of it not enough to make much difference to the rations of 100 men but it was a proper basis for trade," "Now they seemed confident enough for me to look at their personal ornaments and perhaps, in the process, discover a few Biami words," "In his ear he had what I recognised as a cassowary quill bent into a ring," "Evey one ofthem had two ritual punctures in his nose and he had pegs in them - what were they?" "It turned out they were just little wooden pegs," "There was a bone through his ear as well but from what?" " Kokoma." " Kokoma." "Kokomo?" "(imitates bird)" "(Attenborough) Hornbill," "This was the claw of a tree kangaroo," " Chalam." " Salam?" "Chalam." " Eh?" " Chalam." "Chalam." "(Attenborough) So the Biami word fortree kangaroo is salam," "And now, trading began," "(Speaking Biami)" "This time one of the police offered glass beads, again highly valued by other tribes," "But again, though they accepted them they didn't seem overjoyed," "(Muttering in Biami)" "So we went back to salt," "(Speaking Biami)" "Laurie now tried to put local names to some ofthe rivers on his sketchpad," " Watifa." " Watifa?" " Watifa." "Watifa." " Watifa." "(Speaking Biami)" "(Bragg speaking pidgin)" "(Atttenborough) The Biami decided that we wanted to count all the rivers," "The gestures used in counting vay from tribe to tribe," "If we could discover their method we might learn of their tribal connections, so Laurie listed the names of rivers he'd already discovered," "Six," "(Speaking Biami)" "Eight," "Nine," "Eleven," "The cost of bringing about this meeting has been considerable." "Over 100 men have marched for over four weeks." "There have been three cases of pneumonia and a great number of bruises and abrasions and cuts." "Not to mention an air drop." "ls it worth it?" "Well, nobody knows what are in these valleys, it may be that there's gold here." "It may be, like a valley a hundred miles away, it is rich with copper." "If it is, and if the West" " European man - moves in here with all his technology, the fate of these people is likely to be a very unhappy one." "All we know in the past of people like this who've come face to face with Western technology leads us to suppose that it's very difficult for them to survive that clash." "And so the only chance of bringing these people to terms with the world outside is a gradual process, over years, over tens of years, in which, gradually, they get to know what happens in the outside world," "and get to believe that people like ourselves are their friends and not their enemies." "Gradually they have enough confidence in us to allow us to give them medical help and educational help." "It would have been easy, I daresay, for us have tried to dazzle them now with some of our technological conjuring tricks, to have played back their recorded voice or to have taken their picture on an instant camera." "But when you're faced with encounters like this such tricks seem tawdry and trivial." "It's not that we can do those tricks that they have got cassowary quills through their nostrils or that we happen to live on bits of cows' meat wrapped up in a cunning way in bits of metal." "It is not the differences between us that are important, it is the similarities." "It's the fact that when one of us laughs the other knows what he's feeling." "That when one of us hits his stomach and scowls the other knows that he's hungry." "These are the things that are the bond between us and these are the things that we want to emphasise" "I cannot suppose that they will give us their full confidence." "The next step we are going to try is to ask them to take us down to their house." "Whether they will or not, I don't know but that is the next step." "They led off and we followed." "Though whether they had understood what we wanted we couldn't tell." "But suddenly our relationship had become a little uneasy, a little strained." "Perhaps we were pushing things a little too much." "Oi!" "Biami-o!" "They had gone, Simply vanished into thin air," " Biami!" " (Bragg) Biami-o!" "There was nothing to do but go on," "A hundred yards beyond we found a house," "(Bragg) Biami-o!" "Two days later we were in known country again." "In a year's time perhaps another patrol would come through again, following in our steps and camping on our campsites." "Maybe by then the Biami, remembering that we'd not forced ourselves on them would give more of their confidence and perhaps their world and ours might get a little closer to one another." "And meanwhile that empty blank on the map now contains, for the first time, a few river names and altitudes and a thin, erratic line drawn across it." "(Biami men speaking)" "This strange figure appeared in a New York auction room some ten years ago." "They said it came from Easter Island but they gave it a value far lower than that of a genuine old Easter Island piece." "Maybe they thought it was carved for tourists or perhaps they weren't even sure how genuine it was." "But I thought it had a strange, almost hypnotic power, and I bought it." "But who had made it?" "And where?" "And when?" "And what did it represent?" "In trying to find the answer to those questions," "I set off on a long trail of detection which took me back to the 18th century, to the great days of the European exploration of the Pacific, to the ancient beliefs of the Polynesians, and eventually to one of the great wonders of the world, Easter Island." "Two and a half million years ago, the waters in the middle of the eastern Pacific began to boil." "Lava spewed up from the ocean floor." "As the eruptions continued over centuries, an island grew." "Today, it measures only 14 miles by seven." "It's one of the most isolated fragments of land in all the oceans of the world." "South America lies 2,500 miles away to the east," "Tahiti, in the centre of the Pacific 3,000 miles to the west." "It's a barren, rocky place, hardly a tree to be seen." "There are still three huge volcanic craters on the island, all now inactive." "The one on the western corner has pools of fresh water lying all over its floor." "The island's flanks descend so steeply into the ocean that no fringing coral reefs have been able to grow, and the Pacific breakers crash directly onto its narrow beaches." "Landing is extremely difficult, and at some times, impossible." "Nonetheless, about 1,500 years ago, human beings did manage to reach it, and here, in isolation they developed an extraordinary culture." "They carved gigantic figures of stone." "Today, these statues are among the most famous images in the world, immediately recognisable everywhere, and used in advertisements and cartoons as the symbol of all that is most remote and exotic." "Europeans didn't discover the island until a Dutchman, Jacob Roggeveen, arrived on Easter Day, 1722." "He made a brief note of the huge statues in his journal, but he didn't stay long, for soon after he landed, a fight broke out." "A dozen of the islanders were shot dead and Roggeveen sailed away." "52 years later, Captain Cook arrived, and made the first detailed survey of the island." "14 years after him, a Frenchman, La Perouse, landed there and wonderingly measured the statues." "His artists confronted with such strange images, couldn't record them objectively, and perhaps unconsciously gave them European features." "Some stood 30 feet tall and weighed 60 tons." "But who would carve them?" "How had they been transported and erected?" "The islanders met by the visiting Europeans seemed to have none of the necessary skills." "So began the mystery of Easter Island." "Later visitors invented their own explanations." "One claimed that such colossal statues could only have been put up by a race of giants, now extinct, who stood 12 feet tall, and were endowed with superhuman strength." "By the 19th century, European artists who had never been to the island were portraying the people as degenerate savages, who conducted unspeakable rites before the stone idols." "In 1947" "Thor Heyerdahl left the west coast of South America on his raft, the Kon-Tiki and sailed toward the island to prove his theory that the islanders had come from Peru bringing with them the Incas' famous skills in working stone." "In more recent times some writers have seriously suggested that the only possible explanation was that the statues had been raised by people arriving from outer space." "But the islanders also carved small wooden figures like mine." "What could be the connection between the great stone monoliths and these relatively tiny carvings?" "Today they still carve wooden figures for sale to visitors." "It seems that they've been doing this for 150 years or more." "Some of them are fairly crude, some less so." "But it seemed to me that mine was much more powerful and certainly older than any of these." "But was it?" "One of the best collections of early figures still untainted by the demands of tourism is in London." "So off I went with my figure, to the Museum of Mankind the ethnographic department of the British Museum." "In its hall stands one of the very few stone figures to have left the island, collected by a British warship in 1868." "But it was the wooden figures that I had come to see." "This is some kind of grotesque monster, half reptile, half human." "Its head appears to be like a lizard's, and yet it has what seem to be wings, a fattish body, human buttocks and legs, but then a long tail that projects beyond the legs." "This, on the other hand does seem to be a human being." "It's got a very human face." "But it's a human being wearing a bird costume of some kind because he's got a mask with a bird's beak on his head and instead of arms what appear to be wings, but then again, very human-looking legs." "And then there are much more naturalistic human figures." "This is a female." "Her flat body but overall human proportions, fairly naturalistic." "Most common of all are the figures of men." "This is a particularly fine one." "We know from museum records that it was collected in 1820." "It's the body of a normally proportioned man, but one who's half starved for his ribs are very prominent." "He has a more or less naturalistic face with a goatee beard, a smile showing the teeth, but very long ears, and legs of normal proportion." "But none of these seem to me to have the characteristics that set my figure apart." "They don't have the goggling eyes, the crest, the toothless smile stretching from ear to ear, and this enormously elongated body, with elongated arms, and fingers that are also equally elongated." "I looked not only here but in catalogues of museums around the world." "There was only one place in the world where I could find an equivalent figure." "To see that, I'd have to go to Russia." "St Petersburg, the old capital of Russia, once the home of the czars and still today one of the country's great cultural centres, rich in art galleries and museums." "I was heading for one of the oldest museums, the Kunstkammer founded by Peter the Great, and now the main anthropological museum." "Here are gathered the art and the artefacts that have been brought back by Russian travellers and explorers from all parts of the globe." "Their Pacific collections are not huge but I had seen from the museum's catalogue that they included two strange wooden figures from Easter Island, one of which has an exceedingly long, thin body." "And they had them out ready for me." "And here it is." "So how close is the resemblance between this and my figure?" "Museum regulations here require you to put on gloves before you touch any of their objects, so of course I did." "Well, the resemblance is astonishingly close." "It has the same goggle eyes - spheres surrounded by a single ring." "There are three ridges above the eyes, a mouth which stretches from ear to ear in a toothless smile." "The same rod-like arms the same elongated body." "It's surely impossible to believe that whoever carved one was unaware of the features of the other." "The museum's other figure is of less relevance." "But it's nonetheless very remarkable." "It's a bird-man a bit like the one in the British Museum." "So where did these two Russian figures come from?" "Well, the museum records show that they were transferred here from the Maritime Museum of the Admiralty Department in 1824." "So they must have been collected by Russian explorers before that date." "They both belong to a group numbered 736." "There were only two Russian explorers, before then who went to Easter Island neither of them stayed for any length of time, and there's no record of either trading for figures." "So all I can say as a consequence of finding the similarity between these two, is that my figure therefore is probably early 19th century, and no more than that." "So to some extent, this identification is something of a disappointment." "I must admit I had hoped that it might prove to be somewhat earlier in date." "I'd run out of clues." "My investigations seemed to have come to a dead-end." "It seemed that the origin and identity of my figure would have to remain a mystery." "But then, a stroke of luck." "A couple of years after I bought my figure, some drawings held by the State Library in Sydney were published." "They had belonged to Captain Cook himself." "After his death they passed to his widow, who in turn gave them to a naval officer who looked after her in her old age." "I had to go to Australia anyway, so I went to have a look at them." "This is a scene in New Zealand by the expedition's official artist, William Hodges." "And this too is by Hodges, a moving portrait of a Maori." "And here is a picture of HMS Resolution, Cook's ship." "And this was drawn not by Hodges, but by Able Seaman Roberts, who was the draughtsman on the voyage." "This sketch of the ship was done, one imagines, for his own pleasure, but his actual job was recording profiles of coasts, making charts, as has been done here." "These were profiles that were of use to any ship that might try to follow in Cook's wake." "And as well as those he also drew records of some of the objects that were collected on the expedition." "Here is a club and here an axe or an adze and a spear." "And here is a drawing by Roberts which, when I first saw it made my heart miss a beat." "Because here, correct in every detail, is a drawing of that enigmatic, mysterious, bird-headed man figure that's in St Petersburg." "Correct even down to the number of ribs on the chest." "And next to it, even more exciting from my point of view, here is a drawing of that female stick figure, again correct in every detail, even the number of these two little peg holes in the eye," "which aren't pupils of the eye but holes where pegs were placed to fix a piece of shell, perhaps, to give the eye a glint." "So there can be no doubt whatever that these are drawings made on Captain Cook's ship in 1774, of objects that are now in St Petersburg." "How on earth could they have got there?" "Perhaps the answer to that question would also shed light on the origins of my figure." "And when I unexpectedly got the chance to visit Easter Island itself, I took it." "The first human beings to reach Easter Island sailed there by canoe about 1,500 years ago." "We now know from genetic and other evidence that they were Polynesians from islands 1,500 miles away to the west." "The Polynesians were and still are superb navigators, capable of immense voyages over the empty waters of the Pacific." "Today, jet aircraft fly right across the Pacific." "But some do drop down to Easter Island and refuel." "Even with today's high-speed air travel, it's still a six-hour flight from Santiago in Chile to the island." "Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to land in Easter Island," "Please return to yourseats" "On that first evening, I couldn't resist climbing up the flanks of the volcano to look at the stone statues which I had read so much about." "It's easy to understand the astonishment of the first visitors to the islands." "How were these immense sculptures made and moved?" "Thor Heyerdahl in 1955, led a big archaeological expedition to the island, and spent several months there trying to find out." "He excavated around them." "Some, he discovered were buried up to their waists, and had strangely elongated fingers." "He showed by practical experiments that carving them was not as difficult as it might seem, for the rock is volcanic ash and when it's first exposed, it's quite soft and easily cut with stone mauls." "He then showed that in fact it wasn't too difficult to drag the sculptures from the quarries where they'd been carved, provided that you had enough people." "Later still, American archaeologists transported a replica statue, standing upright, using rollers, though there were no trees on the island to provide rollers in Cook's time." "But whichever way they were moved, these investigations made it clear that large teams of people were needed, and that implied that there must have been, at one time a flourishing and coherent community, who would work together to create these astonishing monuments." "Captain Cook arrived here in his ship, s, the Adventure and the Resolution on the second of his great voyages of exploration, on Sunday 13 March 1774." "He anchored about a mile out there." "Two men from the island paddled out in a canoe, with plantains for food." "Cook noted with surprise that their canoe was wretchedly small, and certainly not suitable for travel farther out to sea." "We knowjust how small, because a member of his expedition made a quick sketch of it." "The following day, Cook found an anchorage, and went ashore to trade for food and water." "He distributed gifts of one kind and another including bronze medals with the head of George Ill on one side and his two ships on the other." "In return, he got sweet potatoes and more plantains." "The following morning, an exploration party left the ship and landed here on the west coast." "It included two young lieutenants, the expedition's official artist, William Hodges, and their official naturalist a German called Johann Forster." "Cook wasn't with them because he had been feeling unwell, as he had been for some time." "It wasn't long before the party encountered a group of islanders, and Hodges sketched their portraits." "A man in a feathered headdress with pierced and distended earlobes." "And a woman with tattoos on her forehead wearing a straw hat." "But the encounter was uneasy." "And islander snatched one of the party's bags and ran off with it, so one of the lieutenants fired a warning musket shot over his head." "The man dropped the bag and they retrieved it." "Johann Forster, in his journal, says that one of the islanders was armed with a kind of battleaxe with a head carved on each side and black flints instead of eyes, much like the one shown in the drawing that's now in Australia." "They went on to inspect and measure the great stone heads." "Many of them, like those, had already fallen, and had clearly done so some time earlier." "So whatever the beliefs that had led the islanders to set them up, those beliefs were clearly no longer strongly held." "But some of them were still standing, and Hodges went on to paint them." "Cook's men asked about the statues and were told as far as they could understand, that they did not represent gods, they were not worshipped." "The were memorials to great chiefs." "So although later visitors may have thought it necessary to invoke giants or spacemen as the creators the islanders themselves were perfectly clear then, as now, that the figures had been carved by their ancestors." "In the afternoon Captain Cook felt a little better, so he too came ashore and with him came Johann Forster's assistant, his son George, and a young Polynesian lad, 18-year-old, who the expedition had brought with them from Tahiti," "3,000 miles away to the west." "His name was Mahine and he is to become a very important character in this story." "We can get some idea of his personality from William Hodges' revealing portrait of him." "Cook started to barter for food." "The people seemed to him to be wretchedly impoverished." "He couldn't imagine how they could have had the technology to erect and carve those gigantic stone statues." "What they wanted mostly, it seemed, was cloth, for they were almost naked." "In exchange, they offered small wooden figures." "George Forster describes those figures in considerable detail." ""There were several human figures" ""made of narrow pieces of wood," ""about 18 inches to two feet long," ""and wrought in a much neater and more proportionate manner" ""than we could have expected" ""after seeing the rude sculpture of the statues," ""They were made to represent persons of both sexes" ""and the features were not very pleasing," ""The whole figure was much too long to be natural," ""However, there was something that was characteristic in them" ""which showed a taste for the arts," ""The wood of which they were made was finely polished," ""close-grained, and of a dark brown,"" "I could hardly have hoped for a more accurate description of the St Petersburg figure, or indeed, of mine." "Cook and Forster apparently didn't think very much of these wooden carvings." "But Mahine, the Tahitian interpreter, thought they were rather good, much better, he said, than the sort of thing they carved back home in Tahiti." "Just the thing for mementos." "So he bartered for and acquired several." "And he also got an extraordinary wooden hand with extremely elongated fingernails." "But Cook was in urgent need of more fresh water and food than the islanders could supply." "So after five days, he left and sailed back to Tahiti." "On board ship, it seems that the naturalists who made representative collections of everything they found, rather regretted not collecting anything much from Easter Island." "Johann Forster persuaded Mahine to give him the wooden hand, and on the return of the expedition he presented that to the British Museum, where it now is." "But Mahine wouldn't be parted from those wooden figures "much too long to be natural"." "So it seems likely that they got one of the ship's draughtsmen to draw a record of them." "And that is the sheet that is now in the library in Sydney." "Five weeks later, Cook's ships dropped anchor again in Tahiti." "The expedition scientists prepared to make astronomical observations which were one of the main objectives of the voyage." "William Hodges painted the magical scenery, and the crew, after so long at sea, rested and relaxed." "And there Mahine left them taking his mementos of Easter Island with him." "Once again, it's George Forster, in his journal, who tells us what happened next." ""All Mahine's relations who were extremely numerous," ""expected presents as their due," ""As long as the generous youth had some of those riches left" ""which he had collected at the peril of this life" ""on our dangerous and dismal cruise," ""he was perpetually importuned to share them out," ""And though he freely distributed all he had," ""some of his acquaintances complained that he was niggardly,"" "So now, here was first-hand, direct eyewitness evidence that the St Petersburg wooden figures had left Easter Island with Cook." "But how could they have got to Russia?" "Well, in the first part of the 19th century," "Russian explorers were very active in the Pacific." "46 years after Cook had been in Tahiti, on 21 July 1820, the Russian Admiral Bellingshausen landed there in his ship, the Vostok." "By now, European missionaries had converted the king of Tahiti and many of his subjects to Christianity, and their appetite for European things was huge." "The king, Pomare, wanted above anything else, European cloth." "He pleaded so persuasively for it, offering all kinds of his own possessions in exchange, that Bellingshausen eventually had to surrender the sheets from his own bunk." "On the last day of his visit, trading reached fever pitch, as Bellingshausen records in his journal." ""The king and all the other islanders" ""arrived in the morning to do business," ""and brought all sorts of handmade goods," ""which we purchased, and later placed in the Museum of the Imperial Admiralty,"" "So once again, the Museum of Ethnography in St Petersburg should have the answer." "If Pomare had used the Easter Island figures for trade, then Bellingshausen must have understandably regarded them as part of his Tahitian collection." "But did the museum receive the objects brought back by Bellingshausen?" "Yes, indeed." "And here they still are in that big lot, number 736." "This is a pandanas mat." "Mats are of great importance." "They're almost sacred in Polynesia." "In giving this, King Pomare was making a great gift." "He offered it to Admiral Bellingshausen as a present to the Russian emperor, saying, rather disarmingly and modestly," ""I'm sure you have better things," ""but this is the work of my subjects, and I offer it to you."" "And with it there's a superb Tahitian drum, a Tahitian god, a Tahitian coconut splitter, and in the same group, the two figures from Easter Island." "Since King Pomare and many of his subjects were now Christian, it's hardly surprising that they were quite happy that some of their pagan idols, such as this should be carried away by Admiral Bellingshausen, as well as the two odd figures that had been lying around on the island" "for the past 50 years." "And what does this tell us about my figure?" "It certainly has all the stylistic features of the one that I now knew for certain had been collected by Mahine." "But could it be a deliberate copy made at some other time in some other place?" "Could it, in short, be a forgery?" "Well, in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew there are scientists who can identify wood very precisely." "And I took my figure there." "The expert at doing this is Dr Paula Rudall." "She took a tiny shaving from the figure and prepared it for examination under the microscope." "We think it's made of wood from the toromiro tree which, of course, is the only native hardwood tree on the island." "We think that because we've cut sections of it from that fragment we took from the carving and looked at the anatomical characters and it matches our reference material in every respect." "What kind of characters are those?" "Well, if you'd like to look at the slide, the sorts of things we're looking at are the thickness of the fibres." "You can see it's a very dense wood with very thick-walled fibres." "Those sorts of characters, together with the shape and size of the raise, which we look at in cross-section like this, and also in longitudinal section, tell us the pattern of the wood and help us to identify it." "And have you seen anything like that before?" "Does it match anything in particular?" "Yes, because we looked at the Easter Island hand from the British Museum fairly recently, and it's a very close match to that, almost identical." "So we can be fairly certain that they're the same wood." "Well, that's wonderful news for me." "Thank you very much." "So now I knew that my figure must have come from Easter Island for the toromiro tree grew nowhere else, and the islanders always preferred its dense, hard wood for their carvings if they could get it." "But when did my figure leave the island?" "Could it possibly have been among those collected by Mahine?" "Now another fact about toromiro wood becomes crucial." "Not only did it grow nowhere else except on Easter Island, but over the decades it became rarer and rarer." "By 1956, all that was left was a single dying stump inside one of the craters." "The islanders had run out of carvable toromiro wood long before that, and soon afterwards even that lone survivor had died." "Toromiro was extinct on the island." "But photographs of the St Petersburg figure weren't published until 1973." "So no Easter Islander in recent times could have been aware of the appearance of that strange figure." "And by the time pictures did reach here, there was no toromiro wood from which to carve." "The long trail of detection seemed to be over." "The identity of the wood proved that my figure had been carved on Easter Island, and the similarity with the female figure in St Petersburg meant that it was either carved by someone familiar with that figure, or that it was among those that Mahine had carried away with him." "But if that was so, how could it have got from Tahiti to the United States where, 200 years later, I found it in an auction room?" "That, at any rate, wasn't difficult to explain." "During the 19th century, whaling ships from the United States were frequent visitors to Tahiti and Hawaii." "It would have been easy enough for one of the sailors to have bought it in Tahiti and taken it back to America as a memento of his adventures in the Pacific." "But two further questions remain to be asked." "First, why were these extraordinary figures carved?" "And second, why were no more carved to replace those that Mahine took away with him on Cook's ship?" "To answer that we have to go back to Easter Island." "When the first Polynesian colonists arrived 1,500 years ago, the island was thick with forests of palms." "The palm trees gave them enough timber to build canoes, so they were able to fish way out to sea." "In the first centuries after their arrival they were well fed." "Their numbers grew." "By the tenth century, there were enough of them to allow the people to indulge their taste for statuary, and celebrate their great men with the huge stone statues." "It seems that the first colonisation however, was something of a fluke." "At any rate, no other colonists came from the Polynesian islands away to the west, and this extraordinary culture developed in its own amazing way in isolation." "But one headland on the island supplies important evidence of the people's last cults and beliefs." "I'm at the southwest corner of the island on the top of a thousand-foot high cliff." "Purely by chance, Captain Cook happened to have landed at a beach only a little way up the coast." "Up here, there are the remains of 50-odd stone houses that were once a great ritual centre." "This is the sacred village of Orongo." "Its site is dramatic indeed." "From the few surviving traditions, we have some idea of the beliefs of those early Easter Islanders." "Not surprisingly for a people who were imprisoned on a tiny island thousands of miles away from anywhere, they worshipped birds that had such an enviable freedom of the skies." "And in particular, judging from these carvings on the rocks, they worshipped the frigate bird, that still has the freedom of these skies." "They were, perhaps, the more mysterious, the more sacred, because the islanders never saw them come down from the skies." "They never nested on the island, and they got their food by stealing it from other birds in the air." "No wonder the marooned islanders thought them magical and imbued with power." "And among those carvings of supernatural birds, occasionally a staring mask with goggling eyes, which the islanders say represent the creator spirit, Makemake." "Just off shore from Orongo, lie three small rocky islets that were specially valuable to the people, for there boobies and terns regularly nested in considerable numbers." "The birds arrived in September, and their appearance was a sign of the renewal of fertility, when fresh food, eggs, became available once more." "Every year, each chief sponsored a youth in a race to collect the first egg." "The youths swam across, supporting themselves on rafts of reeds, and the first to collect an egg swam back, carrying the egg in a headband." "Daringly, he climbed up these huge cliffs." "He raced up this slope, carrying the egg, and presented it to his sponsor, the great man who waited for him inside one of these huts." "And as he presented the egg to him, so that great man became sacred, taboo." "For the next year, he would live in seclusion." "He wouldn't feed himself." "That would be done by an attendant." "He didn't cut his hair he didn't cut his fingernails, which grew to an extraordinary length." "He was the representative on Earth of Makemake the great creator god, the god of fertility." "His clan now ruled for the next year, and he himself remained magically powerful for the rest of his life." "When he died, his body was buried on a platform in his clan's territory, and a stone figure put up in his memory to stand alongside those of his predecessors." "So he continued to gaze over the land that was once his and protect it with his "mana", his supernatural power." "Now the meaning of those elongated fingernails becomes clear." "They were as he grew them during his year of sacred power." "But that extraordinary culture didn't last, and this barren landscape explains why." "As the numbers of people grew, so they started to cut down the forest that had once covered their island in order to make fields to grow crops." "When they cut down the last tree, they lost the timber to make ocean-going canoes." "The people were marooned on their island." "Nonetheless their numbers continued to grow." "Soon they had far outstripped the land's capacity to feed them all, and faced with starvation warfare broke out." "One clan attacked another and overturned the great stone statues to which they thought their rivals owed their power." "By 1774, the population had reached the depths of poverty and wretchedness in which Cook found them." "The past glories of their culture were eventually forgotten." "Destitute and quarrelling among themselves over dwindling supplies of food, they no longer worked together in teams to carve and transport the giant stone statues." "Perhaps by now they had even forgotten how to do so." "Eventually, even the bird-man ceremonies were abandoned." "The cult houses up here at Orongo, where once the sacred chiefs had lived surrounded by ritual and hidden from the eyes of the common people, now stood deserted." "When Cook arrived and started to barter what more likely than that the islanders should have gone up to the cliffs immediately behind the beach, anxious to get things to exchange for Cook's cloth and nails and gathered up the last remaining wooden figures" "that lay outmoded and discarded in the cult houses." "That would explain why no more exist today." "The islanders didn't carve any replacements because the cults were out of fashion." "And no models remained on the island for future generations to copy." "But what did these figures actually represent?" "The wooden hand with its enormously elongated fingers, clearly relates in some way to the rituals connected with the great chiefs, with their uncut fingernails." "The bird-man in St Petersburg is the frigate bird-god, with its characteristic hooked beak whose image is carved all over the rocks at Orongo." "And the figure in the British Museum represents a man in a bird mask, perhaps a priest dancing to honour the frigate bird-god." "And what of these two human figures, made to represent "both sexes", as George Forster described them," ""about 18 inches to two feet long, much too long to be natural," ""and wrought in a much neater and more proportionate manner" ""than we could have expected" ""after seeing the rude sculpture of the statues."" "Well, there are a number of odd things about both of them that set them apart from all other surviving figures." "Their eyes are not set in eye-shaped sockets like those of the giant stone statues or the wooden starving men." "They're circular, surrounded with a ring, and they protrude, just like the mask of Makemake, engraved on the rocks of Orongo." "And the hands." "The female's body is so worn that you can't see them." "But on the male figure they're still plain." "Hugely elongated, as by now you might expect, but with not five but six fingers." "And an unhuman-like number of fingers elsewhere in Polynesia is used to indicate a god." "So now I knew." "The goggling eyes and the six-fingered hands made it clear that this figure represents a supernatural being." "The resemblance of its face to the mask with the staring eyes engraved on the rocks of Orongo suggests that this is Makemake." "If that is so, then this is the most complete image of him to have survived." "Doubtless, when the people looked at their barren fields on their once fertile island that they had stripped of its trees, they thought he had deserted them." "So they could have had little hesitation in exchanging his image with Captain Cook and Mahine for some nails and a few strips of cloth." "But in fact, of course it was they who had betrayed him." "Australia." "This is the home of what is, for me one of the most extraordinary of all families of birds." "They're extraordinary because they're artists - sculptors and painters." "And the males use their creations and the treasures that they collect, in order to impress females in a way that is parallelled by no other kind of animal on earth." "Except for, of course, us." "These are the treasures." "Each one specially selected and all arranged with meticulous care." "And behind them, an extraordinary two-walled construction." "This is not a nest it's an art gallery or, perhaps, a treasury." "And these are the jewels that it's been built to show off." "Bones." "Snail shells." "Pebbles." "They have one thing in common." "They're all white." "Because the artist that built this has a passion for the white." "And if I retreat and have a little patience, he may well appear." "This is him - the western bowerbird." "And this is his bower." "It dominates his life." "If it's sufficiently impressive, then female after female after inspecting it, will mate with him." "Each will then go away and rear her family entirely by herself, while he stays here, doing what he can to improve his bower's appearance, rearranging and adding to the treasures it contains and hoping for yet another mating." "This is a female, who's touring in the neighbourhood, seeing what's around." "How does this bower compare with others that she's seen?" "He watches her closely to see what her reactions are." "Maybe he can add a little spice with a dance." "All other male birds, when displaying, have only their bodies to show off to females." "A lyrebird uses his tail feathers." "A bird of paradise flaunts special plumes." "Coloured bald patches are effective, and inflating a throat pouch works well." "So can wattles, particularly if they are as splendid as a tragopan's." "The male cock-of-the-rock wears a cocked hat." "The King of Saxony bird of paradise bounces up and down to show off his amazing head plumes." "Some male pheasants sprout iridescent feathers of breathtaking beauty." "All these are bodily decorations with which to impress females." "We ourselves find some of these plumes so beautiful that we hunt the birds which grow them and use their feathers ourselves for exactly the same purpose." "Men in New Guinea who live alongside birds of paradise, not only use their plumes to impress women, but bounce up and down, similarly, to display them." "Indeed, all kinds of males in all parts of the world, have always tried to rival the peacock." "In 16th century England, few were finer, or vainer, than Henry VIII." "Prisoner's first name Thomas Cromwell..." "Do you think I look like a bridegroom?" "Hm?" "Eh?" "(Courtier) Magnificent," "(Henry VIII) I want that girl more than anything in my whole life," "(Attenborough) And needless to say, he got her, again and again." "But most birds, unlike kings, have to grow their decorations." "Supposing, instead of showing off your body and the feathers you've grown, you were able to impress females with the beauty of inanimate objects that you collect, and the way you display them, you wouldn't be encumbered with all those feather decorations" "you have to carry around all the time." "And what is more, the female, when she comes to inspect your treasury, would be impressed whether you were there or not." "And that's just what this bird does." "The tooth-billed bowerbird." "The objects he uses for display, leaves, could hardly be more unremarkable, and his way of displaying them, in what was perhaps the first kind of bower developed by the family, is simple in the extreme." "It's no accident that all these leaves are pale side uppermost." "The bird clearly prefers them that way, and I can easily prove that by turning one of them the other way up." "That's better!" "And, while he's at it, there are also some bits of twigs and leaves that some litter lout has left around the place." "That must be put right too." "But no matter how attentive and conscientious he is he has to go off to feed sometime, and that means leaving his treasures unattended." "And no sooner has he left than another male appears." "But this one is behaving rather differently." "He seems nervous and apprehensive." "He's a neighbour." "These leaves have come from a tree nearly a mile away." "Why fly all that distance to get more, when these are nearby?" "To prevent that kind of thievery, each male spends as much time as possible beside his court, and when he's not working on it, he tries to attract the attention of females by singing." "He listens to his neighbours and tries to outdo them by mimicking the songs of other species in the neighbourhood." "(High-pitched squawking)" "(Short, staccato whistles)" "(Rapid-burst clicks, then whistle)" "A female has arrived." "Immediately, the male comes down to his display ground... and hides." "He's only allowing her little glimpses, as if trying to make her curious as to where this strange clicking song of his is coming from." "She seems interested." "Now's the time to increase her curiosity, to go up a gear, with a little fancy footwork and a gargle." "It's a somewhat alarming way of demonstrating his charms, but it must, presumably, be the sort of thing that turns on a female." "No, not good enough!" "Or at any rate, not yet." "North of Australia, across a narrow arm of sea, and almost on the equator, lies the huge, thousand-mile-long island of New Guinea." "Its thick, rain-drenched forests were once continuous with those in tropical Australia." "So it's hardly surprising that the bowerbird family has representatives up here too." "It's not easy country to travel in." "It rains almost every day, so everything in the forest is permanently wet." "And over great areas there are no roads, only thin tracks, so the only way to get around is on your own two feet." "But it's a journey worth making, for here there are species that build some of the most extraordinary bowers, one that not only uses a toothbill's technique of decorating the ground, but drapes the branches above as well." "In this forest where every tree is hung with moss, you might walk straight past this bower, unless, that is, you noticed that there were blue berries balanced on this branch." "And then, behind you, dried orchid stems hung round this sapling like tinsel on a Christmas tree." "And they go ten, twelve feet up, and extend twenty feet beyond me." "And then, as you walk into the heart of this bower really conclusive evidence of what it is." "Here, lots and lots of wing cases of beetles and most extraordinary and conclusive of all three of the amazing head plumes of the King of Saxony bird of paradise." "They could never have fallen like this naturally." "They must have been deliberately placed there by the owner of this gigantic, somewhat untidy bower." "And this is the proprietor, Archbold's bowerbird until recently, the least-known member of the whole family." "That yellow, curly crest shows that this is a male." "A beetle's wing cover is clearly out of position." "This is the female." "She doesn't have that yellow crest." "Her arrival is the cue for him to display." "He seems to be playing hide and seek, like the male toothbill." "It's a way of drawing her attention to the wonders he's laid out on the ground." "When the female comes down to inspect them, he chases her, in a ritualised way, back and forth across the floor of the bower." "But whether he's successful or not who knows?" "No ornithologist has ever seen the mating of Archbold's bowerbird." "It takes a practised eye to immediately recognise that bower, but there's another kind in these forests that you can't possibly miss." "It's easy to imagine how baffled early European travellers must have been when they found something like this in the depths of the forest." "It's based around the stem of a tree fern." "These aren't tree fern roots." "They're separate twigs, each individually placed." "On the end of many of them, there are pendants made of caterpillar droppings." "This is a rim round the corridor made of impacted moss." "And on the top of it, little black objects." "They're actually fungus, but rare fungus." "It's very hard to find these if you look in the forest here." "Here's the owner MacGregor's bowerbird." "Fungus, clearly, in any well-appointed, properly tended bower, should never be found in the runway round the base of the maypole." "Keeping the bower smart requires such continuous attention that the male has little time for other things." "So when he goes to forage, he brings back as much food as he can carry and stores it nearby." "That way, he doesn't have to leave the bower when he wants a snack." "His reproductive success will depend on his having, in the eyes of the females, the most impressively ornamented bower around." "One can never have too many caterpillar droppings hanging on one's maypole." "But suspending them is not easy." "What next?" "Another twig." "That could go on the very top of the maypole." "We know that the females tour all the bowers in the neighbourhood, assessing them and presumably making a choice between them." "And there must be 15 or 20 within a mile of where I'm sitting now." "So on what basis do they choose?" "Well, they aren't judging as to whether the bird is going to be a good father in the sense of helping at the nest because these male bowerbirds have no part in either building the nest or feeding the young." "So the females, presumably, are judging on the way that the bower has been built, how it's been decorated and how he dances within it." "And that means that the females mus, t have some kind of aesthetic sense artistic sense." "The interesting thing is, in recent years," "European sculptors have also thought that there is great aesthetic power in constructions like this." "Andy Goldsworthy is one of the most highly-regarded artists who create what has become known as land or environmental art." "My art is unmistakably recognisable as the touch of a person," "I am not a bird, and I do not mimic the things that I see birds and animals make," "However, there are parallels to be made," "It seems undeniable that both bowerbirds and artist find something attractive, rewarding, satisfying, in constructions made of natural materials which carry, in Andy Goldsworthy's words, "the touch of a person"." "Just as each human person has his or her individuality, so does every male bowerbird." "The sculptures are a response to place, light, atmosphere, the day, time, but it starts with the material," "That's the beginning, If there are a lot, of branches that have curves in them then that takes me in a certain direction," "It allows me to work the material in a way that I cannot with a straightbranch," "So if this is a work of art, as it certainly is in the opinion of many critics, why is this not?" "This artist, if that is what he is goes in for multimedia." "He backs up his sculpture with a song." "There's the female." "He uses the standard family technique of trying to arouse her curiosity by hiding." "She flies off to one side and he dodges to the other, to keep out of sight behind his pole." "But she's going to look elsewhere." "He didn't perform his full display." "That is a very rare sight indeed, for he only does it when a female comes right down into the runway." "And females are extremely choosy." "But this one has done so." "The final revelation - the full display of the crest that until now he's kept hidden, though still he will only give her glimpses of it." "Less than one in ten male bowerbirds in the area manage to persuade a female to reach this stage and then copulate with them in the forest nearby." "But those few winning males will mate with many females." "All bower-builders try to be polygamists." "Five of the 18 species of bowerbirds build their bowers on the maypole plan and each species does so in its own particular way." "In the Australian rainforest there's another." "This is a rather more complex bower." "It's similar in many ways to the maypole but instead of having one maypole, it's got two." "Here's one around this sapling and here, not quite so big, is another." "Every single twig has been brought in and on this kind of bower you nearly always find they've been glued together with a kind of fungus." "And between the two maypoles, there is a horizontal branch and it's there that the jewels are placed by the bird." "There are lots of these translucent seed pods." "But mostly, it's this yellow lichen." "And if I put this on there," "I don't think he'll like it." "That might bring him in, and I will go and wait over there to see if we're in luck." "(Various birdsongs)" "The forest is full of sound." "(Piercing cackle)" "That's him." "That's his scolding call." "You have to keep as still as possible if you sit out in the open like this." "(Mosquito buzzes)" "Trouble with this forest is it's full of mosquitoes." "I daren't flap my hands too much." "(High-pitched song)" "That's the whip bird." "It's a very typical sound in this Queensland rainforest." "(Song like a whip cracking)" "That's the whip bird again." "He's coming down to the bower." "There's the bowerbird." "That's one of his approach posts." "Here he comes." "No, he certainly doesn't like that bit of lichen where I put it." "(Mosquitoes whine)" "Back again." "This time, he's brought a jasmine flower, one of his favourite decorations." "There must be a female nearby." "He's playing peek-a-boo like the MacGregors, only this time he's not using a sapling but a very substantial tree trunk." "That's her." "She's come down to the bower." " (Piercing squawk)" " That's him again." "Here he comes." "But he's behaving very strangely." "What's he doing?" "He's not rearranging his decorations, he's throwing them away." "This must be a stranger, a neighbour, a rival intent on damaging this bower in order to make his nearby seem better." "Just as some building sites in a city are more valuable than others so it is with the sites of bowers in a forest." "The longer a bower has been established the more valuable its site becomes." "That's for two reasons." "First of all, all the females in the neighbourhood will know where it is and where to come to look for a mate." "Secondly, the owner of the bower will have been depositing his droppings in the neighbourhood." "They necessarily contain the seeds of the fruits on which he feeds." "So if the site has been occupied for a long time, there will be an unusual concentration of food plants there." "This particular site has been occupied for at least 22 years." "Two years ago, disaster struck." "A tree fell and smashed the bower." "But did the male abandon his property?" "No, he did not." "It was far too valuable." "He simply moved a few yards and built another construction." "And one that, if anything, is even more spectacular than the earlier one." "And he's back within seconds to keep it so." "The mountains of New Guinea away to the north are much higher and wetter than those of Northern Queensland." "It's on their flanks, in the most leech-ridden part of the forests, that you have to go if you want to see the almost unbelievable complexity to which a maypole bower can be brought." "And this is the work of the master builder among bowerbirds." "I'm in the Vogelkop on the far western tip of New Guinea and this is the bower of the Vogelkop bowerbird." "And what an astonishment it is, surely one of the wonders of the natural world." "The bower has been completely roofed over, thatched with these stems of orchids." "It's built around the base of a sapling." "It has a stark pillar right in the middle." "And it's got two smaller pillars on the side to support it." "The whole of the treasury is five or six yards across, and what treasures it contains or what variety of treasures it contains." "On the far side, there are the black stems of tree ferns." "Here is the lawn neatly planted with moss." "And on it the shiny wing covers of beetles." "There are orange fruit, these glowing, orange, dead leaves." "These are the acorns of the tropical oak trees which are common around here." "Behind me, there are black fruits." "This individual nearby, however, has completely different tastes." "His bower is just as large and as splendidly thatched but he has taken advantage of a bush coming into bloom and has decided to try and impress the touring females with floral decorations." "It's not without significance that the builders of the most elaborate of bowers are the plainest members of the family, with no crest of any kind." "Only a few hundred yards away, a third bower and yet another quite different display." "This bird is experimenting with brown - brown fungus and brown leaves." "Another short walk and yet another bower, another quite different collection." "Black berries, orange fruit and blossom from a mountain rhododendron." "And this bower is again different." "Each female in the species must be deciding which composition she likes best." "She must be selecting a male for his skill as an artist." "Another branch of the family builds bowers along totally different lines." "To see the simplest of these, you have to go back to Australia." "You might think that this is just a rather untidy mess that some reckless bird has put on the ground." "But in fact, it's not a nest at all." "It's another bower." "It has two sides to it." "It's an avenue bower." "At that end of it is a cleared patch." "Just one or two treasures nothing spectacular." "Just a few little green leaves." "That, you may say, is not much of a temptation to display to a female." "But you wait till you see the bird that made it." "The regent bowerbird has the most spectacular plumage of the family, while his female like all in the family, is very plain." "It seems there's a rule among bowerbirds." "The more elaborate your bower, the less vivid your plumage." "And conversely, as in this case, the simpler the bower, the more colourful the male." "Since the male has such brilliant plumage, he understandably attracts the females initially by perching in the topmost sunlit branches where he can be seen to the best." "Having got her attention, he must now lead her down." "His bower may not be much, but she has to have a sight of it before she'll accept him." "And she follows." "What will she make of it?" "Perhaps because his collection is not as huge as some others, he picks up particular gems to show to her individually, just in case she's missed some of their finer points." "He also makes sure she realises how splendid he is personally by showing her the back of his neck." "It seems to be a family habit, shared with other species that have crests on their napes." "(Fly buzzes)" "And what about this for a real treasure?" "The moulted skin of a cicada." "That may well have done the trick." "They go off together into the bushes." "In the forests a little farther north another member of the family builds a rather more substantial avenue." "Taller walls, more treasures." "The male satin bowerbird is not quite as splendidly plumaged as the regent as you'd expect, since his bower is bigger, but he is nonetheless a beauty." "He regularly chooses leaves as decoration." "And he does something more." "He adds to the impressiveness of his bower by painting it." "He chews up leaves and smears the pulp over the inside walls." "One can only assume that the females of this species have a particular liking for interior decoration." "When it comes to jewels, blue is undoubtedly his favourite, objects like this berry." "Presumably, since satin females clearly find blue feathers attractive, this is an obvious way of adding to his appeal." "But his tastes are wide." "He likes a touch of green, curiosities like cicada skins oddly shaped bones and skulls and skeletonised leaves." "Carrying a jewel around is a sure sign that he knows a female is near." "(Sharp cry)" "She's landed just behind him." "Here she is." "Walking into the avenue is a strong hint that she's interested." ""What could be finer than this, madam?"" "Away she goes." "And so does he Leaving his collection unguarded." "That's reckless, bearing in mind the family's tendency to thievery." "Here comes his neighbour." "Thieving is a widespread habit throughout the family." "It happens when one's personal wealth becomes separate from one's body." "But it's not the only way a bowerbird can damage the appeal of a rival." "The Australian desert has its own species, the western bowerbird the one we saw at the beginning." "He builds particularly high walls to his avenue." "But this is not the owner of this impressive bower." "This is a rival." "Sheer vandalism." "He works fast." "The owner may be back any minute." "And if he's caught, there could be trouble." "Hours of work destroyed in a few minutes." "If a female comes by before the owner of this bower can rebuild it the vandal with an undamaged, even if inferior, bower nearby will have the advantage." "But not all interactions between male bowerbirds are vindictive." "In fact, they can be quite the opposite." "This in front of me is the work of the great bowerbird which builds the biggest of all these avenue-type bowers." "But it's not been produced by a single male." "That is a juvenile, a young lad, as it were, and he's one of a group of about half a dozen young, immature males, lads, apprentices, who are learning their skills by working together on this bower." "The techniques of wall construction seem to come as easily to a bowerbird as nest-building does to other birds." "But home decoration is another thing and these youngsters seem to have their own ideas." "They've built a bower here in Townsville in the municipal cemetery." "Cemeteries offer special possibilities to an imaginative bowerbird." "Marble chips." "And lots of them." "That, of course, could be a disadvantage." "The thing that impresses a girl about diamonds is that they're rare and therefore expensive." "You couldn't say that about marble chippings here." "Still, they could work." "You can vary them a bit." "Snail shells, a few fragments of beer bottles, a hair band." "But marble chips are the favourite." "If you can't impress with rarity, then quantity could be the thing to go for." "But shifting marble chippings in large numbers is thirsty work." "(Man shouts orders)" "The other side of town the army barracks, and that has other possibilities for a bowerbird." "Camouflage green is used by the modern army for all sorts of things." "And the bird that owns this bower clearly thinks it's just the colour with which to dazzle the female because it's assembled a whole collection of green objects here." "There are foot powder packets, bits of flex... but mostly water bottle tops in green." "But is he just choosing green because that is what happens to be around?" "Let's find out." "He's back within seconds." "I carelessly shifted that bottle." "That's the first thing to put right." "And then, what's that?" "That certainly won't do." "(Man shouts orders)" "You might think there would be enough military paraphernalia here for everyone." "On the other hand stealing from one's neighbour not only improves your collection but damages his." "The owner is back and there must be a female around." "He's starting his display." "His only bright feathers are in that small pink crest on the back of his neck." "That's her." "This is the moment to add to his attractions by showing her his crest and drawing her attention to one of his choicest possessions." "And while he goes through his display rituals, so do his human neighbours." "(Snare drum roll)" "(# Band plays marching version of Waltzing Matilda)" "(Man) If you make a nest, that'll be great." "A few miles away, there's a school." "There are lots of things here for an avant-garde bowerbird who wants to impress females by showing what innovative tastes he has." "And indeed, there is a bower a big spectacular one right in the school grounds." "It's been built by another collective of young males practising their art." "(Teacher) He's flying above it." "Is he carrying anything back to his den?" "Take some over to the free square." "Come on." "The lads move in." "There are all kinds of things to be tried out." "So the bowerbirds have come to town." "Like anyone else coming into, the big city for the first time they're discovering all kinds of new visual excitements that they never knew in their old homes in the country." "Who knows what such extraordinary bird artists will do with such new materials in years to come?" "No other male animal seeks to impress his mate not with his strength, beauty or physical skill, but with the wealth that he's accumulated through industry, thievery, or artistic inspiration." "Except, of course, one." "Us." "But in both cases, it does seem to work." "(Bell chimes)" "(Clicks and whistles)" "Yeah, that's nice." "(MUSIC:" "Piano playing)" "Music, of some kind or other for so many of us, is a very important part of life." "It certainly is for me." "It's rousing, it's calming, it's thrilling." "It's endlessly fascinating." "But equally fascinating for me is the connection between the sounds that we make and the apparently musical sounds that some animals make." "ls there, in fact, a trail of clues if only we could unearth it, that leads from, say, a humpback whale to Jimi Hendrix?" "From the songs of birds to the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach?" "This is a search for the origins of human music." "It will lead us from some of the most beautiful music and animal sounds of today, back to the dawn of our species." "And we start with the skylark." "(MUSIC:" "Vaughan Williams:" "The Lark Ascending)" "And the music of Vaughan Williams." "The Lark Ascending." "When Vaughan Williams composed this, he was clearly trying to translate the lark's song into human musical terms and so evoke a mood." "Many people would argue that a general inspiration can be the only real link between human music and animal sounds." "But maybe that's not so." "Scientists are now beginning to ask whether there is a connection that goes much, much deeper." "So, rather than just being a cultural phenomenon, is music part of our fundamental human nature, with perhaps some of the biological functions as choruses and songs have for some animals that make them?" "Animals make an extraordinary variety of sounds." "(Wolves howl)" "But do any of them share anything fundamental with our own musical compositions?" "The howling of wolves certainly has an unearthly beauty." "But sounds can be beautiful without being musical." "Human music is far more structured and complex than these howls." "So beauty alone is not enough of a clue." "(Bats squeak)" "The high-pitched calls of bats are certainly complex." "Lowered in pitch so that we can hear them, they can sound musical." "The bats use them as a kind of acoustic torch." "A glint of sound reflected by a fluttering wing, and the bat has its prey." "But music is most definitely not a way of seeing in the dark." "So complexity alone is not enough of a clue, either." "(Rumbling purr)" "Down at the bottom end of the sound spectrum, elephants make rumbles deeper than any church organ." "Some, indeed, are below the range of the human ear." "They make a great variety of higher-pitched sounds, too." "(Rasping)" "At dawn and dusk, when still, cool air traps sound close to the ground, their rumbling calls can be heard over enormous distances." "Such sounds as these, we know help to coordinate the movements and lives of an elephant community." "Each sound seems to have a particular meaning." "Elephant calls, in fact, are more like straightforward signals than music." "Dolphins are probably the most acoustically sophisticated animals." "But as far as we know they still use their sounds either as a way of echolocation, like bats, or as a part of a sizeable vocabulary of signals, like those sounds made by elephants." "Despite the complexity and often the beauty of these different animal sounds, there's nothing to link them to music." "So, what sort of characteristics should we be looking for?" "What does music have that all these sounds lack?" "Well, for a start music from any human culture has to be listened to as a whole." "A single note has no meaning in itself." "But put notes together and musical phrases begin to emerge." "(MUSIC:" "Jazz violin and vibraphone)" "Phrases can be connected to make melodies." "And melodies become themes." "Themes evolve through variations and all may be combined according to particular rules." "Those are the basic elements of our music." "And there's one animal that uses all those elements and more to produce what is undoubtedly the most complex and longest song we know about." "I've come here to the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean to hear it for myself." "It is, of course, the humpback whale." "One of the first people to suggest that humpback whale song might be truly musical was Katy Payne of Cornell University." "She took me to listen to whales here in Samana Bay where they congregate each winter from all over the Atlantic Ocean." "Why would whales pick this particular patch of sea?" "I suppose because it's warm." "These whales come from the North Atlantic." "They're coming here to bear their calves and take care of them in the first months." "Also to breed again and to sing." "Singing, that's what I'm keen on." "How can I hear them singing?" "You have to put a microphone in the water." "That we can do, but perhaps a little farther out where the males who are the singers, are most likely to be." "Our search for any whales, let alone a singer, was a long one." "There was supposed to be something like 200 humpbacks in Samana Bay, but they weren't coming up anywhere near us." "Finally, Katy caught sight of the telltale blows." "They're down at the moment but can come up on either side." "There's one!" "(Payne) Yes, I think there are three or four." "At least one will be a male." "He's probably an escort to another which is a female." "And if we will leave them alone and put down our hydrophone, he may calm down, go under and begin to sing." "(Whale song)" "Some people maintain that these sounds are the origins of myths about the sirens of the sea and their seductive songs, when old-time sailors heard whale cries resonating through the wooden hulls of their ships." "Our approach to listening to humpback song was rather more high-tech." "Are these astonishing sounds truly musical?" "Could they give us an insight into the biological origin of our own music?" "(Whale song)" "We must be very close to one." " Really?" " Yes." " Is that just one whale?" " Yes, you can tell by the rhythm." "(Droning song)" "All one, long phrase." "(Long moan)" " Did you hear that before?" " Now we're repeating." "Now we're in a long, long theme." " Let's see if it repeats." " (Long moan)" "Remember?" "As we eavesdropped on oursinger," "Katygave me a lesson in the structure of humpback song," "Right?" "Heard it before?" "All the whales in the bay sing the same song, made up of five or so themes sung in strict sequence," "A whale may repeat each theme as many times as he likes but then he must always move on to the next one in the cycle," "You could write similar rules for the structure of a symphony or a jazz improvisation," "(Whale song)" "So you're saying that this is all one, long song." "Oh, this is just a tiny fragment so far of a song that could last half an hour." "And how long would he go on singing that song?" "Well, he might cycle around once he gets to the "end"." "My word." "Begin again, for as much as 24 hours." "(Crackling)" " We've hit the bottom." " We better pull her up a bit." "I'd had my doubts about whether a whale song was really musical but now Katy and the whale were convincing me." "But the song's musical quality only emerges if, like Katy, you listen over the years, because, slowly, in a logical musical way, whale song evolves." "(Payne) Let me sing you an example." "(Low coo)" "(Growls)" "(Grunts)" "And the ocean was full of that." "All theme five sounded like that." "Two years later, it was different." "And yet it was derived and it appeared in relation to the other themes of the song." "And it went... (High coo)" "(Purrs)" "(Grunts)" "So, you predict." "What's it gonna do next?" "Does your mind work like a whale's mind?" "Add another one, does he?" "A grunt at the bottom?" "About two years later, he'd added four more grunts." "And by the beginning of the next season, there were 13 grunts." "(Whale grunts)" "(Attenborough) Music!" "(Payne) Yeah!" "I know, it's musical." "It's composition." "It's innovation." "And, of course, we wonder why." "If we knew why and if we accept that their song is musical, then we might get some clue about the original function of human music." "Let's look at another group of animals that might shed light on that question of why?" "Birds." "I've come here to fight a duel." "My chosen weapon is a territorial song and my opponent is just over there." "It's a great tit." "During the winter, this bird established a territory in which he and his mate will rear a family." "But now he has to defend that territory against rivals." "Song is his first line of defence." "And it's also the weapon used by any male that's trying to invade his territory." "Which, of course, is what I'm doing." "And I've armed myself with the recording of a song." "I'll give him a first salvo." "(Musical chirping)" "As he listens to my recorded challenge, he's able to judge my physical fitness and strength." "Singing is a good indication of that because it takes a lot of physical effort for a little bird to sing with vigour." "He should now sing back." "I'll try him again." "(Chirping)" "And there's his response." "His message is simple." ""I'm a great tit and this is my patch."" "But if he sings it with enough vigour, it also amounts to saying," ""I'm so strong that you would never win if we came to blows."" "The winner of a contest like this is the one who demonstrates his superior fitness by singing the longest." "This little chap is clearly not going to give up, so I'll beat a retreat." "A bird's territorial song is simple, like its message." "But as spring advances, the sounds in the woodland change." "The birds are now singing songs that are far more elaborate than is needed for territorial defence alone." "These males are not just singing to each other." "Now they are also singing to females." "And that's when musical complexity really takes off." "This superb lyrebird from Australia has one of the most complex songs of any bird." "He continually adds elements to it and will incorporate just about anything he hears just to demonstrate how accomplished he is." "A kookaburra." "(Whistles)" " A car alarm." " (Mimics)" "Even a logger's chainsaw." "(Chainsaw buzzes)" "So why should a simple territorial cheep be elaborated into something as complex as this?" "There's a visual parallel to be found in a bird's feathers that explains that." "The peacock's tail is the visual equivalent of a complex song." "And it evolved to delight the eye of the peahen." "(Squawking)" "In the distant past, the male peafowl had a short and simple tail, much like this juvenile's." "But the females happened to develop a preference for males with slightly longer, more decorative tails." "Their male offspring inherited those longer tails and their female offspring inherited a stronger liking for them." "They were choosing mates, in fact, for aesthetic rather than practical reasons." "Over generations, the results snowball and now peacocks have the biggest and most beautiful tails on the planet." "In just the same way, this process of sexual selection can, over generations, change a simple signal into a song of great complexity." "But are females attracted to the song because of its beauty alone?" "Or because it reveals something practical about the quality of the male as a mate?" "To find the answer to that" "I paddled out to the reed beds on Lake Kvismaren in Sweden." "This is where Dennis Hasselquist and his colleagues from the University of Lund have been studying the song of the great reed warbler." "It's all males that you hear singing around us here." "So, immediately, when they arrive here in early May, they start to sing this loud, intensive, long song." "They don't seem to take any notice of us." "No, at this time of year, they are pumped with testosterone." "Theyjust sit high in the reed and sing 20 hours per day." "You can hear each little burst of song is made up of 10-15 different syllables, different sounds." "I don't think I can hear that, actually." "No, it's pretty hard for us to distinguish." "But we know that these great reed warbler females are very good at distinguishing syllables." "So they always mate with males with the largest number of syllables in their song." "So this is the sort of beauty that a female great reed warbler is drawn to," "And the best way for a human listener to appreciate it is to record the song and to play it back slowed down," "Just as with notes in human music there's no meaning in an individual syllable," "(Slowed-down chirping)" "But put together and listened to as a whole they can win a great reed warbler a mate." "I can clearly hear the different syllables." "How many do you need to count as a really good song?" "A bad singer, they only use about 25 different syllables." "But a really good singer, he can have a much higher complexity in the song." "They can sing up to 45 different syllables." "So why is a female drawn to a male that can sing 45 syllables rather than to one who can only sing, say, a mere 40?" "She can hardly have the strength of her offspring consciously in her mind." "She just prefers more trills." "But Dennis Hasselquist and his team, after 15 years of intensive research, have discovered that, in practice, the offspring of the best singers are the best survivors." "And by choosing a male with the most complex song, the female is ensuring that her offspring will have the best genes to succeed." "So, a male's song is, in effect, a musical window on his genes." "That is extraordinary." "Now, off you go." "So, does our understanding of the territorial song of the great tit and the mate-attracting song of the great reed warbler help to explain the complex musical song of the humpback whale?" "Everything these whales do is on a grand scale and their song is no exception." "(Payne) I think they are just the birds of the sea." "On a huge scale, the birds." "The song travels large distances." "100 miles for the lowest part of the calls." "Probably working out to help males maintain floating territories, protect mates that they are claiming for their own." "The high frequencies in all their variety perhaps attracting... females who like variety." "And why should they change from year to year?" "You know, we don't really know." "But it certainly seems to be functioning or working the same way fashion works in humans." "Attracting females by the virtue of its very innovation." "So, "this is the song for the year and I'm the boy to be with"?" "This is the song for the month or the song for the week." "You're the boy to be with if you're singing the right one!" "(Laughter)" "Complexity to attract a mate and simplicity to claim territory." "Sex and territory are, it seems, inextricably linked in the greatest animal song on Earth." "So, if whales sing for good, practical reasons, did human music also originally have similar practical functions?" "There are so many different styles of human music around the world it's hard to believe that they could all share the same biological explanation." "But the fact that every single human culture has some sort of music suggests that you really can't be human without it." "And if we are all doing it, maybe we are all stimulated to do so by the vestiges of some ancient biological prompting." "If that were true, you would expect humans to have been making music since our species began." "And the search for evidence of that leads way underground." "In some caves visited by our Stone Age ancestors, there are drumming marks on the stalactites which suggest that they were played like xylophones." "There are also marks painted onto the cave walls that seem to indicate areas where sounds are particularly effective." "Were our ancestors singing there?" "Were they playing instruments?" "The best evidence we have comes from a handful of reed pipes 30-40,000 years old." "Graeme Lawson, an archaeologist from Cambridge University, led me into the world of Stone Age music." "Here we are." "This is the kind of space in which we find the instruments." "From one cave in the south of France we have a series of 24 separate finds." "And I don't just mean sticks that you hit together," "I'm talking about pipes with finger holes." "Several finger holes, which were capable of playing musical melody, perhaps as we would now know it." "Here's a facsimile of one of these pipes." "The original was made of vulture wing bone." "I brought along a reed of a material that would've been readily available at the time, and you get a sound something like this." "(Reedy drone)" "Well, that's actually lovely." "But I suppose the strange thing about it is that it is both extremely modern but also timeless." "One of the fascinating things about looking at these instruments is how sophisticated they are, when you consider that these are the first evidence that we have for music concrete evidence for music in the world." "If that's 35,000 years old and fairly sophisticated, when do you think the traditions started, how long back?" "Well, my guess is that we are looking at the tip of a historical iceberg, which probably stretches back, for pipes with finger holes, say, 50-60-70,000 years." "As to other kinds of music-making, singing, stamping, dancing, movement, rhythmic percussion, that's a long way back." "So we're talking about the very roots of our species, even before homo sapiens." "It may well be, and may well be that music was one of those things which made us what we are." "(MUSIC:" "Pipes and percussion)" "The fact that music exists in every human culture, and seems to have done so since prehistory, suggests that it did at least start out with a fundamental biological role." "So, what was it?" "The trail of clues leads high into the Bolivian Andes." "For the Macha people, music is as important a part of life as their llamas." "Each year, throughout the region, villagers rehearse and prepare songs for a huge festival, the Tinku." "In May, they converge on the town of Macha." "But this is no light-hearted concert." "Neither is it a competition to decide the best song." "This is musical war." "A group from each village blasts their opponents with volleys of song." "They taunt one another with music and dance." "And, as if to emphasise the seriousness of this musical conflict and to demonstrate to the other side that they haven't gone soft, the Tinku traditionally escalates into physical violence." "The inevitable injuries, sometimes even fatalities with the police trying to control the skirmishes with tear gas, are all part of this traditional musical battle." "It's a battle without winners but one prime social purpose." "A musical reinforcement of territorial boundaries." "(Yells)" "Such traditional territorial displays still appear in all sorts of contemporary activities." "The intimidating haka of New Zealand's national rugby team started out as a Maori war dance." "You see such territorial song displays at sports grounds all round the world on and off the pitch." "# Rule, Britannia" "# Britannia rules the waves... #" "National anthems and patriotic music have the same function." "# Rule, Britannia.... #" "They're a way of proclaiming national identity and of drawing a line between your social group and those outside it." "# Rule Britannia... #" "And that line doesn't have to be a geographical one." "# Britons never, never, never shall be slaves #" "Fashions in pop music that, together with dress, change markedly and deliberately over the years, draw lines between generations and social groups." "# Wanna be yourself..." "# Don't wanna be a slave... #" "But music that marks out these social or geographical boundaries not only sends messages to outsiders, it also creates bonds within the group." "# Adieu mon pays... #" "Singing may not be what soldiers of the Foreign Legion are best known for, but it is, in fact a central part of their training." "They are taught to sing specifically to bond the group and create loyalty." "And here's a key difference between these human territorial songs and the songs of the birds and the whales." "Whereas they sing as individuals, human beings do it in groups." "ls that a part of our biological prehistory too?" "In the jungles of Sumatra lives an animal that might provide the answer to that, and much more." " Is that them?" " Yeah." "Coming down the trunk." "There it goes." "Yeah!" "With one swing of the arm." "It's the siamang gibbon," "Björn Merker is studying it because he believes this primate relation of ours, more than any other animal, might hold the key to the origin of human music," "(Merker) Siamang song, unlike other gibbons, is not melodious, but contains highly rhythmic phrases." "They sing together with different parts for the male and female." "The song builds up to a crescendo, which is the female great call, and at close range, it is a deafening and incredibly impressive spectacle." "When I met him" "Björn had been using his transparent sound reflectors and microphones to map out the singing territories," "He'd also perfected a remarkable imitation," "(Hoots)" "It's one simple, barked phrase." "Yes, and was that male or female?" " This was a male." " Give me the female." "(Rhythmic screeching)" "(Howls)" "Appetite whetted, we headed into the forest to record the real thing from as close as we could get." "(Merker) What we have here is the most magnificent siamang habitat I've been in." "There are about six family groups, defending their territories by singing." "We could hear them singing in the distance but if we set off after a family in full song, they would probably have finished by the time we reached them," "Our best chance was to find a family that hadn't yet begun their daily performance," "The branches about 20-30 yards ahead of us are swaying and shaking." "They're certainly in there." "So, if we're patient and wait for a bit, there's a good chance we might hear them singing." " (Hoot)" " And there is the first bark." " From a female?" " Yes." "And we should be hearing booms." "Here come the booms." " (Hooting)" " Yes." "Yes." "(Merker) That's the male." "The song was impressively loud," "It was easy to see that this could give a good indication of a group's strength," "This is building up nicely." "But you can't perfect a coordinated recital like this without a lot of practice," "And both animals are doing this." "See their mouths moving?" "So, performing it regularly does two things," "It strengthens the bonds within a family and advertises the family's strength to the neighbours, just like the singing foreign Legionnaires," "Here comes the great call." "This is the female alone." " (Rhythmic hooting)" " Wow!" "Now she's gonna start accelerating." "(Accelerates)" "There comes the male, bi-tonal." "And now all hell will break loose." "(Massed hooting)" "Whoa!" "Siamang gibbons perform their song as a family because it's the family that holds the territory," "On the other hand, our ancestors according to some scientists, held their territories as male groups, as chimpanzees do today," "That, says Björn, is how human group singing mighthave begun," "(Merker) I personally happen to believe that we ourselves were singing apes, maybe something like these animals in the trees here before we became talking humans." "In that case, broadcasting a vocal signal to the neighbours outside the territory, the territorial rivals and potential encroachers, would obviously serve a function." " So this was a family defence." " Yes." "But you see the human singing ape, as it were... behaving as a group much bigger than a family." "(Merker) Much bigger than this." "And they probably sang to scare the living daylights out of their neighbours." "I have a hunch that they might have." "(Gibbons hoot)" "But coordinating a large group of singers requires one further element." "And that is rhythm." "(Rhythmic chanting)" "This is the Balinese kecak a re-enactment of a Hindu myth, danced to the rhythmic chant of men imitating the calls of monkeys." "No other species can do this." "Humans are unique in their ability to sing to a rhythmic beat." "(Rhythmic chanting)" "And once you can sing together, you can move together." "And that is the basis of the archetypal war dance." "This is probably the closest thing that you can see today to the rhythmic territorial display of our distant ancestors - a war dance on the Sumatran island of Nias." "It's a display of fitness and strength, like a bird's territorial song, and a show of group coordination and solidarity like the siamang gibbon's." "(Singing in Chechen)" "On the other side of the world, in the middle of all-too-contemporary war, these Chechnyan men perform a rhythmic song and dance that asserts their strength and unity and national identity." "It's musically simple but like the great tit's song, there is no need for it to be complex to make its territorial point." "So the origins of rhythm, and indeed the origins of all human music, may have connections with territory." "But what about sex?" "(Singing)" "These men, Wodaabe nomads in West Africa are preparing for a festival of singing, dancing and display." "The Wodaabe women will choose a man to mate with by the quality of his performance." "Music is just one part of this but it does look as if the whole ritual has been elaborated like the peacock's tail, as a consequence of female choice." "This woman is discreetly signalling her decision." "It's this man." "Whichever sex is doing the choosing, you see the same thing at clubs and parties all over the world." "It's hard to imagine an event like this without music." "(Classical music)" "Even Western classical music although not overtly sexual, has its own allure." "(Woman) "My dear, I cannot close my eyes to sleep" ""till I've returned you 10,000 thanks" ""for the inexpressible delight I have received" ""from your ever-enchanting compositions" ""and your incomparably charming performance of them."" "This love letter was written to Josef Haydn, then in his late fifties, by an English admirer." "He dedicated this piano trio to her." "(MUSIC:" "Piano)" ""Oh, how earnestly I wish to see you." ""My dearest, I cannot be happy till I know." ""Do tell me when you will come." ""Most faithfully and affectionately yours, Rebecca."" "In a biography written at the time," "Haydn is quoted as saying that he couldn't understand how, in his life he had been loved by so many pretty women." ""They can't have been led to it by my beauty," he said." "Not his beauty, perhaps, but his music." "(MUSIC:" "Wild Thing)" "In the last half-century, Western pop music has put the link with sex centre-stage." "# Wild thing" "# You make my heart sing... #" "In the best tradition of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, male pop musicians are renowned for their many liaisons with female fans." "There seems no doubt that music did for Jimi Hendrix what whale song does for a humpback." "# Come on and sock it to me one time" "# Whoo!" "#" "(Latin percussion)" "So, like the music made by animals, human music can be about territory and about sex." "And you can see them both in the Carnaval in Rio." "While neighbourhood bands compete in a military kind of way, the dancing is overwhelmingly sexual." "Maybe human music started out as a simple territorial display and then mate choice acted as it did on bird and whale song, to add virtuosity and complexity, so that now sex and territory are inextricably linked in performances like this." "We can never be certain in exact detail of just how territorial and mate-attracting song evolved amongst our earliest ancestors." "Music, sadly, doesn't fossilise." "And even the very earliest instruments that we find can't tell us how the music they produced was being used." "But there seems very little doubt that music did have its biological origins in those two functions and that even today, consciously or subconsciously, it can serve those two purposes." "But surely sex and territory can't be the explanation of all our music." "(Choral singing)" "What about the music we use at weddings and funerals?" "What about film music?" "Opera?" "Or music like this, written by Bach in joyful praise of his God?" "The biological connection here is very hard to see." "Unless, that is you turn from the performers to look at the reactions of the audience." "All this types of music are written to stir the emotions of the listeners." "But why is music so extraordinarily good at stirring our emotions?" "The answer may lie once again in biology and in the effect that birdsong, gibbon song and whale song has on those animals when they hear it." "(Payne) I often wonder what it's like for whales to hear their own songs, how they experience those songs." "Being an animal myself," "I'd be astonished if the whales are counting the number of grunts at the end of the phrase, and saying, "This one is new, therefore I'll go for this male."" "It seems to me much more likely that the song is entering the whale as a whole and somehow charging the whale up with emotional feelings that increase the desire either to fight or to mate." "(Merker) If indeed we sang before we talked all of this would apply to us as well." "And we would have ready-made in our nature the emotional equipment to respond to these vocal signals." "And after that, all you need to get to what we call real human music is, of course, to elaborate it." "(Attenborough) In other words, what human societies everywhere have done is to take music's biological ability to arouse basic emotions and elaborate that." "From nursery rhymes onwards, we are taught the different nuances of the emotional meaning in the music of our cultures, giving musicians access to a whole palette of emotional colours." "That is why Bach can write emotional praise of his God and why Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascending does more than imitate the skylark." "It raises the human spirits to the sky as well." "And all of these have their origins in the same biological roots as the songs of animals." "(Birdsong)" "So perhaps it's here, in the way we respond to music through feelings and emotions, that we share the most with the birds the gibbons and the whales." "So now, when I listen to a pop concert, or play the piano, hear birdsong, or drop in to the sound world of the whale with these insights into what human music and animal music share" "I shall be listening with new and open ears." "(Whale song)" "(Woman sings)" "(Pipe plays)" "(Violin plays)" "(As Attenborough) Tonight on Life On Earth we look at a creature whose survival in the modern world continues to baffle scientists and laymen alike." "He's best known as a broadcaster one of that select band who can transmit their enthusiasm to a mass audience." "He's looked after BBC documentary series and other endangered species for what seems like forever yet he grows younger every year." " He is David Attenborough." " Sir David Attenborough." "David Attenborough." "(Attenborough) I personally get huge pleasure from seeing, let us say, a lake covered with flamingos in the early dawn in Africa, which is a marvellous thrilling, exciting sight!" "If I can communicate that pleasure to others through various devices, like television cameras that is a great reinforcement of the pleasure for me," "If you look back before David started his broadcasting career, who knew what a coral reef what a tropical rainforest was?" "He's seen more things in the world than any other living being," "In Australia, North America in Europe and here in Africa..." "Here in the tiny Comoros islands." "Here in the tropical rainforest of Sumatra." "Six feet beneath the surface of the earth." "200 miles south of Java." "(As Attenborough) And...here we are... (Laughter)" "(Richard Attenborough) He's always been that person, Hair all overthe place," "If you took a picture of Dave aged 12, it would fit perfectly with what he is now." "OK, standing by." "Sound's running." "Do you want a rehearsal?" " Some level, please." " Two, three, four, five, six..." " (Woman) Going for a take." " Sound." "Speed." "Action." "(Palin) If Attenborough has seen more things in the world than anyone, he's also brought most of them back with him," "Shifts And Expedients Of Camp Life, Travel And Exploration." "This is really what I need." "I've known David since Monty Python days, when he was one of the bosses of BBC Television," "He likes to play a sort of quiz game on unsuspecting visitors," " Number three is...?" " It's extremely heavy." "I would have thought it was an egg of some kind, but I can't imagine..." " Yes." "Yes." "It's an egg." " It's come from inside some creature?" " Dinosaur egg." " Full marks." " Really?" " Ten out of ten." "I can't help feeling it's a playful way of hiding a very serious obsession," "Do you get books of every place you go to?" "Your shelves are stocked." "Almost every book on Papua ever written in English." " That's important to you." " Don't ask me if I've read them all." " If you haven't got one, you get it?" " Yes." "Do you?" "No." "A man possessed by his enthusiasms, ls this the key to David's unique success in television?" "Do you know what that is?" "I've a feeling it's enormously significant because everything else here is." "It's very heavy." "I'm really not sure." "An early design for a portable television?" "(Laughs) The programmes have deteriorated." "We all know this author, zoologist, producer, David Attenborough." "Did you have any ambition to become an actor like Dickie?" "No, I was quite happy to leave it to him." "He was stage-struck from when he was that high and he was always putting up shows of one sort or another and wanting casts, and who better to recruit than his brother?" "He went on to drama school and I went on to take a science degree and I think we're equally surprised to find ourselves in television now." "Action." "Using their long chimp-like arms... (Palin) So how did David become such a world-renowned broadcaster?" "Are there clues in his upbringing?" "I don't think my childhood was particularly different from other boys'." "I think children are excited by what they see and by finding out about the world about them." "Everybody's interested in why tadpoles turn into frogs, which is extraordinary and marvellous and wonderful." "Everybody thrills to see a butterfly climb out of a chrysalis." "The family used to go on holiday in North Wales, on Anglesey." "I used to go on a farm and dress up as a farmer and Dave would disappear, you couldn't find him anywhere." "He was on the beach on Penmon Point on Penmon Island fascinated by the puffins or whatever but mostly collecting quartz, rocks, fossils, anything that created an atmosphere of the wild and the outside." "(Palin) It sometimes seems that David's simply pursued this love of the wild and his passion for fossils ever since," "I used to come to these old ironstone quarries in Leicestershire as a boy." "And the moments of success when the rock fell apart and revealed a shell that hadn't seen the sun for 200 million years and that I was the first human being to see seemed to me then as it still seems to me now" "to be moments of magic." "Oh, gosh!" "(Palin) After studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge," "David did his stint of national service and then worked for a publisher in London," "But it was a far cry from wilderness," "He wasn't enjoying himself until one day," "(Attenborough) I saw a job advertised in the Times for a BBC radio producer," "I applied for it and I didn't even get an interview," "Two weeks afterwards I got a letter from the BBC which said," ""We've seen your application" ""and are interested in your qualifications." ""You didn't get the job in radio but we've got this new thing called television." ""A lot of people are rude about it but we think there could be something there."" "(Palin) BBC Television was then based at Alexandra Palace, or Ally Pally," "(Attenborough) And there were the first cameras in the world to produce a public television system," "In 1952 there were perhaps ten to a dozen people who did all non-fiction broadcasting in the United Kingdom." "All." "So we all did everything." "Gardening and ballet and short stories and quizzes and political programmes and prime ministerial broadcasts and archaeology and natural history." "Everything." "(Palin) David started as a production assistant on a programme called Animal, Vegetable Or Mineral?" ", which obviously left quite an impression on him," "Good evening and dobry vecer." "I'm sure that's wrong, but I have to say it because tonight we have the National Archaeological Museum of Prague." "And here is the first object." "Ah." "Lovely, isn't it?" "A very spirited animal, Glyn." "And obviously, like our spirited chairman, from the Celtic fringe." "How are we doing?" "Two things you can always say." "Either it's a ritual object or else money." "You can always say it's one or the other." " And that is money." " Ritual..." "Oh." "And they are what my Hungarian colleagues would call a Pécel bowl." " It's silica of some kind, volcanic..." " It is silica." " Volcanic, yes." "Two marks." " Two marks." "Out of how many?" " It shines like this..." " Shine's quite good." " Is it something you look into?" " Yes." " A mirror?" " Really." " Is it?" "Really?" " Yeah." " 2000 BC." " Wow." "Yes, very good." "I'm going to give you three marks." "(Attenborough) The programmes were all live," "And cue the music and fade up camera one and Bill came on the screen and he said (Cockney) "Now, I am a rat-catcher" ""and I'd like to show you what it is I catch."" "And he produced this appalling thing of rats." "Then he produced the other one and he said" ""This one is Rattus rattus norvegicus, a brown rat" ""and this one is Rattus rattus rattus the black or sewer rat" ""and he's the one I'd like to show you first."" "And then to my horror he got hold of the cage, lifted the lid and plunged his hand into this mass of rats and got the biggest rat I've ever seen by the tail, whipped it out, slammed the lid shut and started doing this." "While he was doing it, something went in his mind." "He looked at the camera and said" ""I don't want you to suppose that I am in any way maltreating this rat," ""but unless I get him slightly dizzy, the bastard'll bite me."" "(Palin) It feels as though David's always been on our screens, but there was a first time, in 1955," "(Attenborough) We hatched a scheme with London Zoo to collect animals," "It was going to be presented from the studio with little bits of film which we would shoot on location in Africa and then the man from the zoo would show the animals," " Sierra Leone." " Right." "Wow." "We were going to look for a bird called Picathartes gymnocephalus." "No one had seen its nest and very few people had seen it alive, so the zoo wanted one and we went for it." "(Attenborough) As well as Picathartes, we hoped to take back a representative collection of the whole of the animal life of this part of Africa," "That's Jack Lester." "He was keeper of the reptile house in London Zoo." "In charge of the trip." "Our job was filming him." "A gaboon viper, and just as deadly as the cobras," "When Jack heard of it he was delighted and came running, anxious to catch such a handsome snake for his reptile house," "But we were able to produce some magic of our own," "While the dance was going on, I recorded the music on my tape recorder," "This was the object of a great deal of curiosity," "I always played the music back and let the singers listen to themselves," "Blank astonishment was always followed by huge grins of delight," "(Singing on tape)" ""Yes, I love David Attenborough's programmes."" "That's remarkable." "(Singing continuing)" "Dear Jack got very ill as a result of this trip." "The BBC said, "If Jack Lester can't appear because he's ill," ""Attenborough, go down and do it."" "That's the only reason I appeared in this thing at all." "A month ago, Charles Lagus and I returned from spending four months in search of a dragon." "But we didn't keep our eyes shut on the way," "We looked at many other things," "At the time, that's what zoos did," "A, so that people could see the wonders of the world" "B, so that they could learn about them, scientists could learn about them and C, so that you could learn how you might be able to breed them," "All of which were perfectly laudable propositions," "I still think zoos have a very good function, but you can't go catching in the free way we did 50 years ago," "You've got to provide them with much better cages than we did," "Enclosures would be a nicer word," "I think with dismay at some of the birds that we happily put in aviaries," "I don't think birds of prey should be kept in aviaries." "The only reason I've gone on appearing is that I realised after a bit it gave you some power to dictate how the programme's going to go," "When I caught up with them at the top of the pass," "I found, to my horror, that the men were refusing to go any further," "They told me very firmly that this was the end of their tribal frontier," "I said, "Come on, lads."" "See?" "And they said, "No good, no good."" "I said, "Why not?" They said, "We no go along him."" ""Why not?" I said." "They said, "Him no good." "He kai-kai man."" "That means they're cannibals down there." "I said, "Now, lads, if it's another sixpence a day he wants," ""we can have a proper organised talk about this."" "And they said, "No, him no good." "Bad fellow."" "While we were saying this, with me being very British about the whole thing," "I suddenly looked down the slope and I saw behind a tree a white cockatoo feather flash." "I turned round and there behind a boulder was a glint of a knife." "And I thought, "Oh..." being, you know..." "And while I was in the process of thinking, "Oh", suddenly, out onto the track, about 70 or 80 men suddenly jumped out of hiding and ran down towards us brandishing spears and waving knives." "To say I was alarmed is to put it mildly," "Charles Lagus, who was my companion with a camera, had the presence of mind simply to turn it, so I know what happened." "I walked towards this screaming horde of men and I stuck out my hand and heard myself say," ""Good afternoon."" "It's true." "To my enormous relief, they greeted me not fiercely, but with considerable enthusiasm," "Laughing at myself, I discovered that this, in fact, is merely the normal New Guinea welcome," "So, at last, we sailed safely into the wide, calm bay of Komodo," "This was the home of the dragon which we'd come so far to see," "Within half an hour there was a rustle in the bush and there was the dragon," "He looked almost as though he had walked out of some prehistoric age," "This was tremendously exciting for us," "Our first sight of this magnificent monster, the climax of four months of arduous travel," "All we had to do was to wait," "And down came the door," "Hastily we piled boulders on the door so that he couldn't lift it up," "We had got him," " Oh!" " Respect." "Respect." "That's fantastic." "(Palin) Zoo Quest ran to six series and brought fresh supplies for David's collection," " So egg, nul points." " I don't get any points for that." "OK." "Erm, well, I don't know really where to begin." "It looks like it's come from some almost extinct animal." "Yes." "I actually found it myself in bits in Madagascar." "Aepyornis, the elephant bird." "The heaviest bird and the biggest egg that ever existed." "If you got an egg that was any bigger than that, it would have to be so thick to hold the contents that the young chick would never be able to hammer its way out." "Thus invalidating the process." " How many pieces was it...?" " Quite a lot. 30, I should think." "They were all found in one place and I stuck them together with camera tape and it's lived with me ever since." "(Palin) By the early '60s David was a well-established television personality," "Now it was time for something completely different," "# Come on over, baby Whole lot of shakin' going on" "# Well, come on over, baby We take the bull by the horns... #" "In 1964 the BBC created a second television channel offering greater choice," "It received a mixed reception," "Some programmes were seen as elitist and there were too many repeats," "To breathe life into their fledgling channel, the management turned to a rising young star," "Not yet 40 years old, the new head of BBC2 was David Attenborough," "(Attenborough) It was an invitation you simply couldn't refuse," "You were offered several million pounds." ""Go out and create programmes."" "You'd say, "What sort of programmes?"" "They'd say, "That's why you've been appointed."" "What's wrong with having something different for a change?" "We begin by welcoming everyone who hasn't been with us before to Late Night Line-Up." "That was a thrilling opportunity," "I said, "Right, we'll make new programmes" ""with either subjects or treatments that no other network has ever done," ""We won't produce carbon copies of what already exists,"" "In other areas, in light entertainment, we shall continue to look for the new, experimental stars, people who try new lines in comedy." "The two successes have been The Likely Lads and Not Only But Also with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore." "In every area we hope to be trying these new things, these different things." "I think we must proffer our heartfelt congratulations to Mr David Attenborough here." " Bless his heart." " Bless his heart." "Bless his cotton socks." "Who moved on from the heady world of making wonderful documentaries about the mating habits of Armand and Michaela Denis... to pioneer a system of television unrivalled throughout the human world." "(Palin) It was David who masterminded a dramatic new look for BBC Television," "(Man) Championship point for the third time for Laver," "(Palin) In July 1967 he oversaw the launch of Europe's first colour television service," "It's out and that's the championship," "(Palin) Colour opened up new opportunities," "Sports that had been meaningless in black and white became popular viewing," "We may not realise just how much he created the television we know today," "The World About Us was the first hour-long documentary strand," "Its success led to greater things," "We just did let ourselves go a little and set up a programme called Civilisation which showed in colour the loveliest pictures and buildings in Europe." "It does seem hard to believe that European civilisation can ever vanish." "And yet, you know, it has happened once." "(Palin) Civilisation, presented by Kenneth Clark, was the first of the landmark series jewels in the crown of BBC television," "(Attenborough) I was most proud of the dynasty that started with Civilisation and went on to The Ascent Of Man," "Those two, it seemed to me inaugurated a new kind of television documentary... which have had a number of descendants but in their time they were innovative and I think they actually enriched people's lives, and what more do you want?" "And for his achievement in pioneering the philosophy of colour television programmes in Britain the winner is David Attenborough." "(Brass fanfare)" "(Palin) David was rewarded by being promoted to BBC Director of Programmes," "But he missed his film trips to wild places and asked that occasionally he be allowed out of his suit," "I think he was very proud of colour and Two and so on." "I think he derived great satisfaction from that, and pride, rightly." "But it wasn't his scene." "Sitting in an office was not his scene." "His scene is out somewhere in those ridiculous trousers that are likely to fall off at any moment, or up to his eyes and knees in God knows what." "That's Dave's world." "There's a whole generation watching who never saw that moment in Borneo when you were underground in the cave full of bats." "You were standing in the 20-foot-high pile of..." "What will I call it?" "Droppings?" "Nor is it just simply bat droppings or bird droppings." "It's much more complicated than that because the entire surface of it is covered with a glistening, moving carpet of cockroaches." "(Clive James) I've always wanted to ask this question." "How did you feel?" "Well, I tell you, I stood at the top of that pile, choking with ammonia." "This cave, this particular part of it," "(Sniffs)... makes... (Coughs)" "This ammonia is really quite choking." "The director, who was at the bottom of course, was shouting up." "And he said" ""Say something." "Talk to the camera about what it's like."" "So I looked at the camera and said..." "This immense number of bats flying round here in a panic, not one of them is colliding with the other." "Nor, indeed, am I in any danger whatsoever of being hit by them." ""And they don't fly into your hair because they are so clever," ""with this ultrasound."" "The old fear that people have of bats getting caught in their hair is actually quite unfounded." "And the director said, "Terrific." "Cut." And a bat went boom!" "(Palin) Through the early '70s David led a double life half senior manager at the BBC, half explorer and film maker," "In the series Tribal Eye he pursued his passion for anthropology," "David was the first film maker to visit Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands the scene of a violent rebellion against the white man's rule," "(Attenborough) We sent all kinds of messages," ""David Attenborough and team, can they come?"" "I wasn't at all sure what kind of reception we'd get." " You'd no idea?" " No." "It's not set up at all." "And I thought they were not too friendly," "Were you frightened at all at this moment?" "I was trying to get out." "(Shouting)" "(Palin) Lifting the whole canoe out of the water with you in it," "(Speaking in local language)" "Welcome." "How do you do?" "How do you do?" " He come latertime," " Later," "What did you think was going to happen?" "I'd no idea." " Yes, please." "I lead you to him." " Thank you." "We'd sent a message by radio to say that David Attenborough was coming," "(All) # God save our gracious..." "Fantastic." "# ...our noble Queen" "# God save the Queen" "# Send her victorious" "# Happy and glorious..." "They actually, I think, thought I was the Duke of Edinburgh." "They got the message wrong." "Attenborough and Edinburgh." "Seems to happen a lot." "# God save the Queen #" "And it got slightly more embarrassing because since they wanted to reject everything to do with Westerners, they said that we had to get rid of all our European clothes in order that I could go any further." "A stranger might only go into this house of memories if he showed proper reverence to the ancient gods and discarded his alien Western clothes," "(Palin) Good heavens, Very casual," "Vey cas," "(Attenborough) I can tell you, wetbark cloth around the loins is quite a strange feeling," " Did the camera crew have to strip?" " Yes, we all did." "I wonder what the Duke of Edinburgh would say," "Bending with the hands behind the back is quite tricky," "(Singing)" "(Palin) Meanwhile at the BBC Natural Histoy Unit in Bristol, an ambitious television series was being developed," "It became very clear to us in Bristol that what should naturally follow from both the Bronowski and the Clark series was a major work about natural history." "We already had a reputation for doing some pretty good programmes, but we didn't have an army of specialist wildlife cameramen and the confidence of the people in London to do it," "Can we make a start, please?" "Nevertheless a number of people in Bristol," "Richard Brock, John Sparks, were all of the same idea that if it was going to be done, Bristol would do it," "We'd heard rumours that David who'd been elevated up and up through the BBC administrative hierarchy was beginning to get disenchanted." "Everybody could see, I reckon, that an obvious candidate for that kind of treatment was the natural world." "I was on fire to do it myself but I couldn't do it while I was controller of BBC2 or director of programmes." "I was frightened that somebody else would get it before I could manage to resign and do it myself." "I got home quite late one evening and there was an urgent message to phone Dave." "The moment I came in I had to ring him at once." "I dialled the number and said, "Dave..." "Hang on," he said, "I'm coming down."" "I thought, "My God, something terrible's happened."" "He rushed into the house and said "Dick, I'm at my wits' end." ""I don't know what to do or what to say." ""I'm likely to be asked to be the new director general."" "I said, "So?"" ""I can't do that, can I?"" "I said, "No, Dave I don't suppose you can."" ""God, of course I can't." "Behind a desk?" "There's no way I'm going to sit..."" "I said, "You're right." "Are you asking my opinion?"" ""Yes." "What is your opinion?"" ""You'd be a bloody fool if you accepted it." ""You should go on doing what you're marvellous at and what you love."" "(Palin) David decided to go with his heart and the result was a quantum leap in wildlife programming," "(Attenborough) There are four million different kinds of animals and plants, four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive," "This is the story of how a few of them came to be as they are," "(Parsons) What it did do for the first time was it integrated in a satisfactory way a very big story with David's knack of presentation, which bound the whole thing together into a unity," "The rocks here are getting on for 2,000 million years old." "It was the first time we'd really taken the story along by the first half of the paragraph being spoken in Tunisia and the second half of the paragraph being spoken in South Africa." "And then, about 20 or 30 years ago, people realised that they'd been looking in the wrong rocks and in the wrong way." "These are the right rocks." "You could pick him up in a location 3,000 miles away and remind him of what he said and he'd go away into a corner and..." ""OK, I'm ready to do that now."" "He'd come out in front of the camera and do it." "He'd probably do it in one take." "(Palin) In the series, David told the story of evolution, from the first fossilised signs of life to the most complex living creatures," "Here, at least, we can get some idea of what things may have been like when their distant relatives the trilobites swarmed in the seas of long ago." "Life On Earth was a continuous story from programme one right to the end of programme thirteen, and people were saying halfway through the series," ""We don't want to stop watching this." ""We want to know what happens next."" "That's an amazing ability and something that's quite special." "(Palin) The highlight of the series was perhaps one of the most memorable moments on television " "David's encounter with mountain gorillas in Rwanda," "And this is how they spend most of their time lounging on the ground grooming one another." "Sometimes they even allow others to join in." "There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know." "We're so similar." "Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to ours that we see the world in the same way as they do." "Suddenly you've got quite a lump in your throat, that you suddenly saw, that for the first time and it was the first time it was possible for a single unit and a single man and a single viewer" "to get a comprehensive view of the planet as a planet," "(Palin) The success of Life On Earth spawned an entire generation of definitive natural history series," "The Living Planet looked at how life adapted itself to different habitats and cast David in the role of action man," "All living creatures on the earth and all material objects on it are subject to the pull of one great force." "The force of gravity." "Were that to be suspended even for a moment the most extraordinary things would begin to happen." "I, for example, would suddenly float into the air because I, at the moment..." "..am flying in an aircraft on a very special course which, in effect cancels out the effect of gravity." "Trudging up the face of a dune like this is extremely hard work." "Not only am I in the middle of Asia, hundreds of miles from the sea but I am over two vertical miles above its level." "Fine ash is falling all around." "There are gusts of choking poisonous gas." "At night it gets so cold that it can freeze." "And that makes this the deepest valley in the world." "The thing about jungles is that they're like a sea of trees," "The leaves are at the top, 150 feet up," "That's where the sunshine and the wind is, and all the life." "As you go down it gets darker and there are fewer animals." "I thought, "There must be a way of getting ladders to get up there."" "A chap called Adrian Warren, who is ludicrously fit," "He said, "It's perfectly simple." "We will get up there." "We'll get up on ropes."" "I said, "Now, look, lad." "How will we get up on ropes?" He said, "Easy."" "I said, "How?"" "He said, "You've got handles with ratchets on them which will go up," ""You have slings, you put your legs in them and work your way up," ""When you want to come down again," ""you take the rope and pass it round here and bring that round there." ""Then you unclip this and make sure you undo that." ""Then you do the other, take four turns round the rope, fall back and you're OK."" ""Oh, yes," I said. "Fine."" "So I start up this and for the first 18 inches it's good." "Amazing," "After about two feet you think it's quite tiring and after about three foot six you think, "Blimey, I'm a long way up,"" "When you get actually about 60 or 70 feet up, it is alarming," "It suddenly dawned on me that if I couldn't actually remember what Adrian Warren had told me about the knot there was no way that anyone was going to come and say," ""Left over right and right over left,"" "cos I was up there, spinning slowly, you see." "I thought, "I've had enough of this," ""I think I'll do my little bit where I come down now,"" "And I felt very alone," "And so I started talking to myself." "I was saying things like, "Now, there is no need to panic." ""All you have to do is to remember" ""the little rabbit came out of his hole and went round the log three times" ""and then went back in there."" "And then I started swearing." "And I looked down and I saw the boys from the crew falling about with laughter." "I couldn't think why." "I'd fallen for the oldest trick in the game." "I had forgotten that I'd got a radio mike on and they were hearing every word I'd said." "(Palin) Tales told by those who've travelled with David confirm that vanity is not one of his vices," "(Man) I shared a tent with David," "I hadn't a clue how to put it up, but he did it." "He'd sweep it out in the morning." "I'd think, "This guy used to be managing director of the BBC." ""He's sweeping out my tent."" "We did one trip in Virginia and he was wading around in the swamp up to his midriff." "We finished that, went to the airport and then me and him flew to New York." "him still in his swamp trousers." "Given three cases to carry, he will always pick the heaviest, and we're all running around like little hens round a rooster trying to stop him doing some damage to himself by taking the heaviest case." "(Ross) His suitcase would go for a high price in the Antiques Roadshow," "It's ancient, battered, held together with camera tape, Araldite, and he will not give it up." "His trousers have done a few series now." "When I was filming in Borneo the bottoms of his trousers were frayed." "Vanessa said "We can't have those trousers."" ""Why not?" "I've worn them for years."" "Before a take you'll tell him to smooth his hair down and tuck his shirt in." "He's always got wine and food stains on his shirt, but that makes him human." "He was always a mess." "If you look at pictures, I'm rather over dapper and Dave with his socks down over his shoes and his trousers splitting and his shirt filthy dirty." "He doesn't smell." "They're quite clean, but he doesn't give a damn." "(Palin) David favours a wardrobe of sturdy predictability," "Regulation blue shirt and trusty beige trousers," "People say, "Why do you always wear the same thing?"" "There are very practical reasons." "It enables you, in terms of continuity, to cut things together so that stuff you shot two years ago, if you really wanted to stick another thing in, you could put the two together." "The other important thing for me, it seems to me that if you change your costume and wear, I don't know some kind of fashionable thing, people say, "Why has he done that?" "Is it trying to tell us something?" ""Has the climate changed?" "What's he trying to do?"" "So you are asking for attention away from what it is you're trying to talk about." "It's much better that the narrator should have the same things so he doesn't suddenly appear with a funny hat or with a feather boa." "I think you should try the feather boa, David, next time." " 155." " Action." "(Palin) On camera, David is the complete professional," "The world around him is less reliable," "It's so effective that even a rich woodland like this can seem totally devoid of birds." "But that's a completely different sound." "That's an aeroplane." "Cut." "There is some life actually within this snowfield itself because this snow is not white..." "(Laughs)" "Each one of them has his own harem." "I estimate that this one has about 100 females in his and his sole object in life at the moment is to make quite sure that he and he alone mates with every single one of them." "And to that, he must fight." "He is so charged up, this being the breeding season, that he will display to almost anything...including me!" "The volcanoes of today are mere feeble flickers... (Laughs)" "66, take three." "ls there anything you wouldn't do?" "I've never made a secret of the fact that I'm not in love with rats." "I've had many good reasons for not being in love with rats, but I had the best reason for not being in love with rats only a few weeks ago." "I'd been reckless enough to boast that I hadn't had a stomach upset for 25 years and I was in India and I got one." "I ran for the loo and I got rid of my problems and as I was sitting there in extremis a rat emerged from the depths of the loo and jumped out from between my legs." "And I reckon that was not an endearing act." "(Palin) David's programmes have never avoided the darker side of nature," "The Trials Of Life shocked us with the apparent cruelty of killer whales," "(Attenborough) Often the successful hunter takes its victim straight out to sea without even killing it, and there it plays with its catch as if it were exulting in triumph," "(Palin) How could the natural world be so needlessly violent?" "I often get letters, quite frequently people say how they like the programmes a lot but I never give credit to the Almighty Power that created nature." "To which I reply it's funny that people, when they say that this is evidence of Almighty, always quote beautiful things." "They always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." "But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in West Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball turning him blind before he's five years old." "I reply and say," ""Presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well."" "And I find that baffling, to credit a merciful God that action and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truthful and factual and allow people to make up their own mind about the moralities of this thing" "or indeed the theology of this thing." "We made a film about chimps hunting monkeys," "That was an extraordinary and powerful and alarming and dismaying thing to see," "(Shrieking)" "(Attenborough) They've got one!" "The hunters are tearing it apart." "Again people say, "How can you put on such savagery" ""of a predator catching prey?" ""You are milking it for violence."" "If they saw what you put out on the cutting room floor, of this animal in suffering..." "It's a very narrow line you have to tread." "You cannot, in my view, eliminate it entirely." "That is to sentimentalise and to distort reality." "But, equally, some of it is very hard to take." "But it was about the reality of what chimps are and we are very close to what chimps are," "And there's the reward for that long chase." "The divided body of a colobus monkey." "And if we are appalled by that violence and bloodlust, we might also see in that too perhaps the origins of the teamwork that have, in the end brought human beings many of their greatest triumphs." "(Palin) An Attenborough classic," "But is this style of presenting now seen as uncool in the steamy jungle of tabloid television with its prowling packs of aspiring nature jockeys?" "Or is there life in the old dog yet?" "David's presentation style is sort of traditional but what he allows you editorially is to leap into subject areas that you wouldn't go to otherwise." "And the Natural History Unit's reputation" "I think has been largely built around those pieces, the things that no one else would actually do." "I know that whenever I go and see David and say, "Right, David, what's next?"" "I know I'm not going to get an easy..." "The subject coming back is going to be something you think, "Oh." ""We're going to go there, are we?"" "This is a picture of a mountain that has haunted me, well for nearly 50 years, since 1954." "Roraima." "It's supposed to be the origin of the Conan Doyle novel where you wonder if there were dinosaurs..." " The Lost World." " That's right." "Fantastic book." "I love it." "I didn't get up it for 40 years." "Desperately needing an excuse for a programme to take me up Roraima." "Three of us came up with this very sensible programme idea which was going to be about ecologies, about animals and plants." "Plants, we thought, needed to come into the equation but you can't do too much on them because they don't move." "We heard that David had an idea for his next series and was thinking on the same lines." "It is such a spectacular mountain." "When you see it on the far distant horizon and then this fabulous huge, great, vertical sandstone wall, it's just a kind of magical, extraordinary place." "We went to his house and David as always, listened to our idea and nodded and was very complimentary about it, then said, "But I was thinking about something a bit bolder."" "The plants that grew up there had been isolated for so long and are in such a different environment from anything down here that new species of plants had evolved up there." "Sure enough, by the end of lunch, we had all signed up to do six hours on plants." "I still remember coming down the M4 back to Bristol." "Suddenly we all looked at each other and thought, "My God." ""We've agreed with David to do six hours on plants."" "Not an obvious one, but I was able to work that into a series about plants." "Talking to the Americans, in this case Ted Turner over a breakfast, I think, saying," ""Look, Ted, I want to do a series about plants"" "and Ted saying, "They're not very interesting, are they?"" "And Jane Fonda, I think who was there at the breakfast piped in and said, "Ted, I love flowers." "We gotta have this series."" "And so we got the money from America." "(Attenborough) Plants cut off up here from the hot rainforest below adapt to their surroundings in their own individual way," "Here it rains almost every day and sometimes for days on end," "I'm in South America, on the top of an immense sandstone plateau 9,000 feet high, five miles across, surrounded by huge vertical cliffs," "This is Mount Roraima." "It was such a ridiculous idea to try and bring to the BBC1 audience things that don't move, but it ended up capturing people's imagination." "And this is how they do it." "(Attenborough) The programmes I've been involved in always, always the major credit belongs to the cameramen," "But it has never been greater, never been more so than in this instance when the cameramen who did the time-lapse produced such wonderful things," "I mean, my jaw sags." "What I like about travel you want to go somewhere, you say, "Perhaps you could fit this in."" "It's about enthusiasm." "If you've somewhere you want to go, you can..." "There are a number of places I want to go that I haven't been to so I don't suppose I'd go back to Roraima." " Like where?" " Oh, western Tibet." "The forests of southwestern China." "Haven't been there." "Have you?" " (Palin) Never." " What are you doing?" " Wasting your time!" " I'm about 25 series behind you, David." "(Both laugh)" "(Palin) David has seen great changes to the natural world over his career," "Although he's worked behind the scenes to help conservation causes, he's been reluctant to make overtly campaigning programmes," "In The State Of The Planet he revealed his true feelings," "The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action." "Many individuals are doing what they can but real success can only come if there's a change in our societies, in our economics and in our politics." "I've been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer." "Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy and habitable by all species." "(Palin) But preaching has never been David's style," "He's always seen himself as a storyteller, an enthusiast," "I can have enough of people leaning out of the television screen and saying," ""You lazy, irresponsible, ignorant chaps" ""sitting there in your comfortable suburban home!" ""Why don't you care for this, subscribe to that or go out and do the other?"" "I think the best way of taking the message to the people is by showing them the pleasure, not saying every time, "You've got to do something about it."" "By saying, "Isn't this lovely?" the other bit follows." "(Palin) This is what he does best, for 50 years, David has turned his private passions into public entertainment," "He's probably done more to stimulate our love of nature than anyone else alive," "And to do that, they stood upright on two feet, as I'm doing." "(Woman) And cut." " (Mimics monkey cries) - (Monkey screeches)" "Ooh!" "Ah!" "How are you?" "Nice to see you." " (Laughter)" " Hello!" "You reached the official retiring age of 65 eleven years ago." "Since then, you've made six major series." "Does the word retirement mean anything to you?" "Not much, I have to say." "I mean..." "I'm doing what I want to do and it's just remarkable that it could be seen as being a career." "Erm..." "I mean, I'm extremely lucky that people should want me to go on doing it." "While one has breath in one's body and can get around and it's not too much of a drag and people want it, that's great." "I'm extremely lucky." "I don't know what I'd do otherwise." "The giant Arum of Borneo develops the biggest undivided leaf of all." "This is the loneliest and the coldest place on earth." "This is one of the wettest places on earth." "This is the biggest flower in the world." "This is the most massive living thing on earth." "This is the biggest creature that exists on the planet." "The biggest one that has ever existed." "The blue whale." "I can see its tail just under my boat here." "It's coming up!" "It's coming up!" "There!" "There is a substance so strange and so beautiful whenever people encountered it, they thought they'd found something magical." "And its magic is real." "This material has travelled through time, bringing with it passengers from the distant past that have wonderful tales to tell." "This extraordinary substance has fascinated me since I first held a piece... this piece...when I was 12." "My first piece of amber arrived in a very unexpected way." "In 1938, during the build-up to the Second World War my parents helped some of the many children fleeing from Germany." "They had left their families behind and brought almost nothing with them." "I remember one girl in particular." "Her name was Marianne." "She was 12, about the same age as I was." "She came from a city on the Baltic coast, where her father was a doctor." "He had given her one small but precious thing as a sign of his thanks to whoever it was who would look after his daughter." "And this is it." "It felt surprisingly warm and light in my hand." "But what made me fall in love with amber was what I discovered inside it." "I found something miraculous." "There were insects preserved in astonishing detail." "I burned with questions." "What sort of world were they from?" "They must have lived a long time ago, but how long?" "Years later, my brother Richard would play a scientist in a movie which made amber famous the world over." "Welcome to Jurassic Park." "Richard's character extracted DNA from dinosaurs' blood trapped in amber and with it brought dinosaurs back to life," "Could that ever be done?" "How did you do this?" "I'll show you." "I started my journey with the amber time machine by taking Marianne's gift back to where it came from." "To the shores of the Baltic Sea." "The amber comes from rocks on the seabed some distance from the coast." "But people don't find it until it washes up on the shore." "Little bits like this are quite common." "Sometimes, if you're lucky, particularly after a storm, you can find bigger bits." "Some even have barnacles still attached to them." "People have been collecting such bits for thousands of years but had no idea how amber originated." "Some said it was solidified sunshine." "Some that it was the tears of the gods." "And then around the year 77AD, a great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, conducted a simple experiment." "He did this." "The smell...unmistakable." "Pine resin." "Several types of plants, among them conifers, seal any wound inflicted by storms or insect attack by producing a sticky resin which oozes out from them." "And because it continues to gently flow around whatever it traps, it can preserve creatures in the finest detail." "As the resin hardens around its captives, they become suspended in time." "Of course, many creatures are fossilised in rock." "Like this small flatfish, for example." "It's a kind of ray." "It was squashed, its soft parts decayed, even its little spines turned into rock." "But amber preserves creatures in a quite different fashion." "When this little bee touched this drop of resin, she was caught by its stickiness." "And she was instantly and perfectly preserved in three dimensions." "These eyes saw a world which existed long before mankind evolved." "She scented flowers before the first human being ever smelled one." "I can even tell that she was working hard when she died by the bundles of cargo on her hind legs." "It's hard to imagine a more perfect time capsule than this." "This little bee has been trapped in there for literally millions of years." "Amber's ability to travel through time can take us back into more recent history." "Our history." "Stonehenge is one of the earliest manmade structures in the world." "These stones have been standing here for something like 3,500 years and we know that even then the people who erected them treasured amber." "But they weren't the first." "It was considered to be precious way back in the Stone Age." "And this may be why." "When you scrape its rough surface with a flint blade, perhaps, you quickly reveal the wonderful golden colour inside." "It's quite magical." "Stone Age people also carved bone and stone in order to make tools." "But amber was different." "It seemed to have had no practical use." "So they must have valued it for some other reason." "The carvings they made around 10,000 years ago give us an idea of how they viewed the world." "In particular, which animals mattered most to them." "Imagine the value of amber to a Stone Age hunter who believed that capturing an animal's spirit by carving it in amber made the animal itself easier to hunt." "The people who built the great stone circle at Stonehenge lived in the Bronze Age, several thousand years later." "But they, too, treasured amber." "None but the wealthiest of them could afford a material as rare as this." "Once, there were a thousand beads in this necklace." "Over 3,000 years, their surfaces have become opaque and crumbly." "But when they were new and freshly polished and glowing, it must have been a wondrous piece of jewellery." "One woman's grave contained a rather more mysterious object." "A disc of amber, now browned with age, encircled by gold." "It was certainly a remarkable piece of personal decoration." "But maybe it had a rather deeper significance." "The sun is central to our understanding of Stonehenge." "The monument may have been used as a solar calendar." "And it may be that its builders treasured amber because it captured the warmth and the light of the sun." "It may or may not have been considered magical in prehistoric Britain but it was most certainly rare, for it came from far away." "This is the Baltic city of Gdansk in Poland." "The jewellery worn by the people of Stonehenge and buried with them came from around here." "It's evidence of one of the world's first long-distance trade routes." "But what brought the big boom in amber was the rise of imperial Rome." "The Romans brought it for prestige." "Amber carvings cost more than the best slaves." "Even the Emperor Nero treasured it." "He decorated the Colosseum with tons of it to show how unbelievably wealthy he was." "So, Baltic amber can take us back at least 10,000 years into our own past." "But it reaches back much further than that." "To find out how far, I went to one of the Gdansk workshops where amber jewellery is made, to meet Elzbieta Sontag." "Very thin." "It's most probably with inclusion inside." "Elzbieta is a biologist who comes here to look for inclusions - animals and plants trapped in the amber," "It takes a practised eye to search through as much raw amber as this," "I was delighted to get a lesson from the expert," "How do I start?" "I mean, there are a million pieces." "All right, a thousand." "ls there a particular colour I should look for?" "Sometimes colour, yes." "Because white...and milky is without..." " Are these good?" " No, not good." " It's bad." " So we don't want that." "Avoid that kind of pieces." "I am looking for transparent." " Would that one be any good?" " Yes." "I think yes." "We can split it." " (Gasps) Really?" " Yes." " And?" " And maybe something is inside." "How many pieces do you look at before you find something?" "Oh, about 20." "20?" "11." " Not good." "Shape is not good." " Why is it the wrong shape?" " 12." " 12." "Next one." "13." " Spit?" " Yes." "It's got a lot of bubbles." " 14." " Wow." "Oh?" "No." "Maybe." "15." "Nothing." "Yes, I think so!" "16." " It's a mosquito." " No mosquito." "Midges." "Oh, but this is beautiful." "The midge looks as though it took off from its twig only yesterday," "But amazingly, it has been frozen in flight for around 40 million years," "So, what about the creatures in my piece?" "What exactly were they?" "I could see them clearly for Elzbieta's microscope had a projection screen," "Oh, well, that's an old friend, because it's quite big and it's near the surface." "I've known it for a long time." "It's a fly but what kind of a fly?" " It's a long-legged fly." " A long-legged fly?" "Yes." "In what part of the forest do they live?" "Low in the forest." "Sometimes sit on the bark." "So the likelihood is, then, that this fly, and therefore this piece of amber, this gum, this resin, was low down on the tree." "OK, what else is there?" "With her powerful microscope, Elzbieta was exploring far deeper into my amber than I had been able to do," "There, she found another fly, a fungus gnat," "It must have died searching for rotten wood, for that is where it lays its eggs," "Then Elzbieta found an aphid," "And right above it, an ant," "Perhaps they'd fallen together from a leaf where they were feeding," "I think that's a fantastic picture." "It's deep in the amber, I know, because I've never seen it like this before." "But the last animal she found was the most surprising." "Ah!" "What a monster!" " What is it?" " That is a mite." " A mite?" " Yes." "Very small monster." "Yes!" " That's tiny, though, isn't it?" " About half a millimetre." "Half a millimetre." "I'd never seen it before." "So we've got a whole community and we know they all lived together because they all died together in my one piece of amber." "And that alone has given us a whole rounded picture of a tiny little ecosystem at the bottom of a tree 40 million years ago." " Exactly." " Amazing." "Thank you very much." "It had taken me more than 60 years to find and identify all the animals inside my amber." "And seeing them together had given me something more." "A glimpse of their world." "By comparing many amber animals to modern forms scientists like Elzbieta are sure that the forest they inhabited was a temperate one." "But how broad a picture can these time travellers give us?" "Could it encompass a whole forest?" "Or even a whole continent?" "Well, in the 1960s on a Caribbean mountainside science discovered a new source of amber which seemed perfectly suited to answer those questions." "I had a chance to visit it 15 years ago." "I hoped that, for the first time, I myself might collect some amber." "Here in the Dominican Republic, amber is mined." "By dating the mud stones that contain it, we can tell it's about 20 million years old, rather younger than Baltic amber." "Está amber allí?" "Sí." "Buena." "Fosíli?" "Picking a piece of amber from the mud stones in which it has lain for so long was hugely exciting." "I brought a small collection back home with me." "So, what kind of forest did this amber come from?" "Well, thanks to some remarkable detective work we can answer that question in amazing detail." "In this piece, there's a leaf from the plants that produced the amber." "And this is what those plants looked like." "They were giant bean trees." "What matters most about them is not what they look like but where they grew." "They were tropical." "(Animals screeching)" "Scientists have long imagined that the ancient tropical forests contained a vast diversity of life." "But very few fossilised traces had ever been found." "Until they discovered these." "Dominican amber preserves such a huge variety of animals and plants with such perfection that it inspired two scientists, George and Roberta Poinar, to try something that had previously been thought impossible." "In the same way that Elzbieta reconstructed the world around a single Baltic tree, they started to use these tiny fossils to bring a whole tropical forest back to life." "I had found a piece which contained a little bee." "She was familiar with many of the plants in that forest." "Indeed, she depended on them." "So, based on the Poinars' findings and with a little bit of amber magic, we can follow her back home." "This tiny flower shows that the amber trees were not the only giants reaching up into the forest canopy." "It belonged to a ceiba, whose great trunk is supported by wide buttress roots." "But the commonest flowers of all came from a different tree." "The nazareno." "It seems likely that these trees dominated the forest canopy." "When one of these giants fell, it would've opened up a light gap, which other faster-growing plants could fill, plants like palms." "And here are their flowers confirming that palms were another key element of that forest." "So, we have built up a picture of what part of the forest was like and even identified some of the flowers which might have tempted my bee." "But I don't think she died collecting nectar." "She was searching the forest for something else." "Remember those bundles on her back legs?" "They are clues to what she was after." "She was collecting resin, and not just any resin, but resin from the amber trees themselves." "And that was a very dangerous thing to do." "She was a stingless bee, very skilled at handling resin." "Even so, there was a real chance that while collecting it, a bee might get stuck." "Stingless bees are among the most common animals trapped in Dominican amber." "Why did they take the risk?" "Resin is very valuable to these bees." "Mixed with plant waxes and fibres, it makes a strong building material for their nests." "But it also brings another benefit." "It contains antibiotics which disinfect the wounds in the bark of the trees from which it oozes." "By bringing it here, into the nests, the bees protect their developing young from infection." "So now we know exactly what this little bee was doing in that forest 20 million years ago." "This piece of amber has not only trapped her body, it's also caught her behaviour." "And we know from other pieces of amber too that she had enemies." "This is an assassin bug." "It hunts stingless bees and their addiction to resin makes it easy for it to find them." "The bug can't move swiftly enough to snatch a bee from mid-air." "But it's strong enough to pull off strands of resin." "With these sticky gloves, it can hold onto any bee which touches them." "It's using resin to set a trap." "Now the assassin stabs its dagger-like mouth parts into a weak point behind the bee's head and injects its saliva, paralysing the bee." "As she dies, she releases a pheromone, a scent calling for help, which normally rallies other bees to defend the nest and that entices them into the assassin's reach." "But one assassin lost its grip and now lies in amber together with its victim." "Once small animals like this were in the resin's grip, they were as doomed as flies on flypaper." "But even so, amber sometimes contains animals that normally would never go near it." "How can George Poinar explain his next discovery?" "It was an amber tadpole." "It couldn't have come into contact with resin underwater yet when he looked further, he found other pond animals." "A young marsh beetle." "Even a diving beetle." "The challenge was to explain how they had found their way into a flow of resin on the trunk of a tree." "This is a poison dart frog." "She's only half the size of your thumb and remarkably, she's carrying a tadpole on her back." "She moves in a very determined and purposeful way and starts to climb a tree." "These are what she's looking for." "Plants that collect water called tank bromeliads." "No one has yet found a piece of a bromeliad in amber but we know they were there because there are amber damselflies a kind which today lays its eggs between the tightly-packed leaves of bromeliads." "She's reached a branch." "Her tadpole will soon have a nursery." "She lowers her rear end into the bromeliad's pond." "Other animals also lived in these tiny ponds." "Up here, they may have been safe from predators, but not, it seems, from resin." "So, bromeliads held tiny, complete worlds high up above the ground." "But even so, they probably didn't contain enough food to sustain a fast-growing tadpole." "What, then, did it eat?" "Amazingly, the piece of amber that held the tadpole also contained the answer." "Poison dart frogs are very attentive parents." "Every few days, the tadpole's mother climbs back up the tree to the bromeliad to care for her youngster." "She's laying an egg." "That's what the other object was in the amber." "These eggs are sterile and don't grow into frogs." "They are food." "But occasionally, these little worlds up in the branches were shattered." "At least one falling tadpole came to a sticky end." "Who would have thought that amber could reveal such intimate details of life in tiny ponds, high up in such trees as these?" "But what about the bigger animals of the forest?" "Amber surely can't tell us anything about the presence or absence of these?" "Or can it?" "Remarkably, amber does contain evidence of one such creature thanks to some very oddly shaped seeds." "These are the seeds of a kind of bamboo." "The hooks on them get stuck in the hairs of animals so that the seeds travel with them and so are dispersed." "But what sort of animals carried these seeds?" "Well, sometimes, such seeds have hairs still attached to them and the only animals with hairs are mammals." "There were certainly a number of mammals around 20 million years ago." "But can these hairs help us to be a little more specific as to which mammals were here?" "They can." "The shape of the scales on the surface of hairs varies and George Poinar used them to narrow down the possibilities." "They came from some kind of carnivore." "It seems there were big cats in the ancient forests." "Perhaps they even hunted the ancestors of modern coatis." "So that's one more animal that I know that lived in that forest." "But what about organisms for which there is not even a hair to serve as evidence?" "Amber really is astonishing." "Because as well as carrying animals' bodies through time, it can bring clues to their relationships." "And that is what makes me certain that the forest contained enormous fig trees like this, although no trace of such a tree has yet been found in amber." "Let me explain." "George Poinar found the crucial evidence." "Exhibit A." "A minute wasp." "This wasp proves that the forest had figs." "But to find out what makes it such a conclusive witness we need to see what goes on today inside the figs themselves." "Although they look like fruit, figs are really containers for the tree's flowers and its developing seeds." "But some also house wasps." "Fig wasps spend almost all their lives inside figs, which are sealed." "So nothing but a fig wasp can collect their pollen." "And that is how the wasps repay the fig trees for providing their nursery." "By distributing their pollen." "These two organisms have come to rely on each other so closely that it's impossible for one to exist without the other." "That is why a single wasp can guarantee that the forest contained fig trees." "The partnership between figs and wasps is one of the most intimate in the whole of nature." "But that piece of amber had something else to reveal." "Something that was rather more sinister." "The rear end of the wasp is surrounded by minute nematode worms." "As the wasps emerge inside a fig, so do these nematodes." "Each has just a few minutes to find a wasp and burrow into its body before it leaves the fig." "But these are not conventional parasites." "The only thing they will take from the wasps is a free ride to the next fig." "Only amber could have preserved such minute details and with them revealed an extraordinary fact." "The relationship between the forest fig trees, their wasps and worms, that we know today, clearly existed 20 million years ago." "Amber again and again demonstrates this constancy." "Take this, for example." "It looks like a death scene." "A scale insect in the jaws of a predatory ant." "But the truth is very different." "Scale insects drink the sap of plants." "But this takes time." "Predators would soon pick them off if it wasn't for the teams of ant bodyguards that protect them." "And in exchange, the ants receive a share of the sap." "By providing ants with food that they can't otherwise reach, the scale insects have made themselves indispensable." "This relationship was so important that far from eating her captive, this queen ant was gently carrying it away so it would set up a new colony beside her own." "And for 20 million years, neither partner has had any reason to change." "What does this astonishing absence of change imply?" "If conditions had altered radically, many of these complex relationships would have disappeared." "So their presence tells us that tropical forests must have existed largely unchanged, for at least 20 million years." "But now George Poinar has travelled back even further in time." "One of his latest finds in Dominican amber takes us back not just 20 million years but 150 million for it has implications about the Earth's geological history." "And this startling new evidence comes from a single ant." "I've come across its modern relatives myself." "Their behaviour can tell us something unexpected about the Dominican amber forest." "They're honeypot ants, whose workers have become jars in which the colony stores honey to help it through times when liquid and nectar are scarce." "In the dry season." "So this amber honeypot ant suggests that the ancient forest also had a dry season." "And if the modern ants are anything to go by, then it lasted around three to four months." "So now amber can tell us how often it rained 20 million years ago." "But it's also evidence of an event that occurred even farther back in time." "Because the living honeypot ants I found don't occur in the Dominican Republic, or even in South America." "They live in Australia." "So these little ants are evidence not only of climate, but the fact that once Australia and South America were joined together in one supercontinent." "Who would have thought that a single ant could tell us so much?" "The amber time machine could hardly illuminate a more global event than the drift of continents." "But it can also take us to the opposite extreme." "What surprises might we find inside an amber animal?" "Dr David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History is especially interested in lizards." "These anolis lizards are very territorial." "The males take great risks to secure a patch of bark for themselves." "They spend a lot of time displaying aggressively to one another, doing press-ups, and erecting their throat flaps." "And sometimes they fall." "A few have achieved fame and immortality in amber." "But such specimens are very rare." "And not surprisingly, a lizard should be strong enough to unstick itself from a flow of resin." "But some did not." "And that puzzled David Grimaldi." "He wondered whether they could be as well preserved inside as they were outside." "Could he actually look inside an amber lizard?" "He turned to the latest high-tech scanners." "These are scans that use very high-intensity X-rays that are too high for medical purposes." "And we have incredible detail in any view that we want." "This scan of a gecko's head shows the finest details of its skull and even its teeth." "Amber's preservation is clearly more than skin-deep." "But nothing in this scan could explain why this gecko was trapped." "So David Grimaldi turned to another gecko and looked at its whole body, this time with conventional X-rays." "(Grimaldi) The bones are beautifully preserved," "The bones of the skull delicate little toe bones, bones of the legs, and even individual vertebrae are revealed," "(Attenborough) But from the jumble of bones, it's clear that the gecko's back was broken." "It had probably been picked up and dropped, perhaps by a bird of prey." "It didn't escape from the resin because when it hit it, it was already dead." "As researchers found even smaller internal details preserved by amber, they began to ask themselves something almost unthinkable." "Could amber have preserved molecular structures inside an animal perhaps even its DNA?" "Some people even imagined that such DNA could bring monsters back to life." "And look where that got us." "But there are no remains of dinosaurs in amber." "Surely their DNA is beyond our reach." "The Poinars dared to wonder if that was so." "The story begins 20 years ago when Roberta first focused an electron microscope on an amber animal." "Inside a fungus gnat, like the one in my piece of Baltic amber, she discovered something quite amazing." "It's like a miracle." "Every once in a while in your life, you witness something that's just... too spectacular for words." "This was one of the times." "The Poinars had found 14-million-year-old cells." "More than that, even the minute structures inside the cells were clear to see." "We were flabbergasted that it was possible to have such a degree of preservation after such a long time." "And so I zoomed on up to a higher magnification and just was amazed to see that there were nuclei with bits of chromatin in the nucleus." "That is the step that led us to believe that DNA was there in the cell and could perhaps be pulled out and looked at." "It was an astonishing discovery." "The prospect of finding such ancient DNA electrified the scientific community." "And Hollywood wasn't far behind." "The storyline of Jurassic Park is very ingenious." "My brother, who played the scientist, didn't actually need to find bits of dinosaur in amber." "Nature had already extracted their DNA in blood cells and preserved it inside an amber mosquito." "But that's pure fiction, isn't it?" "Surely it's impossible to recover DNA from any animal which lived in the distant past?" "Well, two teams set out to attempt exactly that." "One of them included David Grimaldi." "The other was set up by the Poinars." "Both knew that their only chance of finding DNA was in the best-preserved animals." "So the Poinars chose to use my favourites - some stingless bees." "While the other team decided to work on an amber termite." "We had no expectations, at least I didn't, when we did the study." "We did the extractions." "We tried it." "Several of the extractions were unsuccessful." "(Attenborough) But then both teams struck gold." "Tissue extracted from the Poinars' bees tested positive for DNA." "And David Grimaldi got the same result from the termite." "Our first reaction, particularly mine, was really disbelief." "I was astounded at the possibility of DNA being preserved." "It really was astounding." "They were claiming to have recovered DNA from animals which had died 20 million years before." "Not yet as old as the dinosaurs but that's what a new team, including the Poinars, turned to next." "When they said what they had found, they caught the attention of the world." "They had DNA from an insect older than T rex." "So could Hollywood possibly have got it right?" "(Roars)" "We felt that bringing back an entire dinosaur was not in the realm of being a possibility at this time." "Barraged with the common question," ""When are you going to clone extinct organisms?", we constantly had to repeat ourselves, "We're not going to do that."" " But why not?" " If DNA is indeed preserved in amber, it is so chopped up, so fragmentary, that it's impossible to reconstruct the entire genome, and then insert it into some surrogate organism, and then have a complete, resurrected extinct species." "That's absolutely impossible." "As the blaze of publicity surrounding the film faded, so other scientists tried to extract DNA from amber insects." "Their results, when they were published, were bad news for the Poinars and David Grimaldi." "None of them had found even a trace of ancient DNA." "But what went wrong?" "What some of them found, in fact were contaminate DNA sequences!" "And I have to admit, by that point," "I was pretty much convinced that the original reports of DNA sequences in amber were of contaminate DNA." "And some of the scientists that did make an attempt got all kinds of strange things." "They would get fish DNA." "Well, perhaps they had a tuna fish sandwich that day and were careless." "(Attenborough) Like most other researchers" "David Grimaldi has changed his mind." "But George Poinar is still confident that a few rare pieces of amber do contain DNA." "And some insects certainly could have drunk the blood of dinosaurs." "These sandflies have been preserved in amber for 100 million years." "Who knows what might be inside them?" "And that is why amber fascinates me so much." "It has brought us so many surprises." "The prospect of it preserving DNA brought dinosaurs back, at least in our imaginations." "And the creatures that travelled in it through time bring us vivid snapshots of the Caribbean forest as it was 20 million years ago." "And my piece of Baltic amber, the first I ever owned has preserved creatures with such perfection that they are still startlingly beautiful." "What a journey amber has taken me on." "And it all came from a gift from a small girl over 60 years ago." "I imagine Marianne and her father found my piece of amber by walking along a Baltic shore, just as thousands of people had done before them." "Its magic may not extend to recreating a dinosaur." "But for me, amber remains a substance of wonder." "A time machine that can show us exactly how some things looked tens of millions of years ago."