"Where do we come from?" "For centuries, the greatest question in the history of man had no scientific answer" "Then, the first evidence of a human ancestor started a scientific revolution" "This is the story of the quest to find the origins of the human race" "It spanned a century and a half of obsessive searching and would make or break the careers of some of the greatest scientists in the field" "For the lucky few, chance discoveries opened a window on the hidden world of our ancestors" "from the tiniest fragments of the past, the full story was slowly pieced together" "Spanning 300,000 generations, over 3 million years¡­" "it is the story of our progress from ape to man" "The search for the origins of humanity is a story of bones and the tales they tell" "The first chapter began here, 40,000 years in the future at the entrance to this cave" "With the discovery of this man" "The year was 1856, and the cave lies in what is now the Neander Valley, in Germany" "Workmen were digging for limestone a vital ingredient in the local chemical industry, it lay under a layer of rock and soil" "The men were paid a few pence a day to remove the surface layer, and everything was thrown away" "But then, a spade hit something that didn't sound like a rock" "The shape looked like the top of a skull, and thinking it might be a murder victim, they stopped work to show the foreman" "It was interesting but he'd seen this kind of thing before, and was happy to send it the way of all the other bits of bone they found to be smashed up with the rocks" "Then something made him change his mind" "He knew a local school teacher who might be interested to see it and the skull got a reprieve" "What he could never have imagined was that the skull was seeing the light of day for the first time in more than 40,000 years" "In western Europe, 400 centuries before Christ, the original owner of the skull was a living, breathing being a hunter, a tribal leader, a father of children, and a member of the most successful species" "on the European continent at the time" "Neanderthal man" "40,000 years later, a school teacher Johan Fuhlrott got the chance to see the skull for the first time" "A keen amateur geologist and former anatomy student," "Fuhlrott had no idea if he'd come on a wild goose chase" "The moment he saw the skull, he knew instinctively that this was something extraordinary" "It looked fossilised, which would make it thousands of years old, and it was clearly not an animal" "But neither was it from a normal, modern human being" "This particular skull is the skull of Neanderthal, and it, it's big" "There, there, the, this individual lived around 50,000 years ago, and by that time, Neanderthals had developed a brain that was as large and in some cases larger than the modern human brain" "You notice that it's rather long and low and it's almost as if you grab the front of a human face and pull it out" "You also have this big protruding nose, and in fact look how large that nose is" "So they would have looked different for, from modern humans, if you actually saw one with the flesh on it" "Over 300 Neanderthal remains have been found from Europe to the Middle East they all tell the same story of a short, powerful physique, perfectly evolved for the world they lived in" "a tough place" "Europe was in the early stages of the last great Ice Age" "Within a few centuries, this land was under a glacier half a mile thick" "At this time, the climate was fluctuating quite extremely, and we do know that they survived some of the major cold snaps, the major glacial advances" "The only way to support advanced life here was with a high-protein meat diet, and that meant learning to be a good hunter - or starve" "What we do know from the skeletons, that Neanderthals were very robust, they were very strong, but they also had this huge brain" "The tools found with Neanderthal suggest they developed sophisticated stone technology" "Their weapons were the tools of their survival, and needed to be maintained" "If a spear failed at the critical moment, the hunt would fail" "Neanderthal males seemed to have supported loose family groups of up to a dozen this hunting trip had already taken 3 days, and covered ten miles, with no sign of any prey" "Then, they found animal droppings" "Neanderthal nasal cavities are unique among hominids, suggesting a highly evolved sense of smell, and they recognise the scent of red deer" "Rubbing the droppings on their skin helped to disguise their approach if they could catch up with the deer" "They'd had to range further in recent months to find a kill" "Red deer numbers had fallen rapidly, and they had no idea why" "what they didn't know was that they had competition, competition that would one day drive them to extinction" "Victorian scientist Johan Fuhlrott held the evidence of an unknown ancient species" "It's hard even to guess what the creature was without more evidence" "And they hadn't got much" "Fulhrott gave the bones to more qualified scientists" "But even when more pieces emerged from the same cave, they completely failed to identify them" "Opinions varied widely, from a barbarian who'd fought the Roman legions, to a lost Russian Cossack" "Even the victim of some unknown congenital deformity" "But a new idea began to take centre stage" "Fulrod himself suggested" "Neanderthal might be an early ancestor of modern man" "To many Victorians, this seemed the most absurd notion of all" "Then, in 1859, just three years after the bones were found, the notion suddenly caught on" "Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work," "The Origin of Species" "He suggested that all living things had descended from earlier, simpler forms, by the process of evolution" "And if it was true for every living thing on earth, then that had to include us" "1859, Darwin publishes the Origin of Species, and a lot of people think that this book was paid attention to, but it wasn't." "Most people couldn't care a job about whether a fish evolved into an amphibian no-one cared" "The big question, the question that everybody wanted to know was, where did we come from?" "And it's in the 1850s and 60s that science steps to the plate and says," "I'm going to give you the answer" "And boy did they give us an answer" "If humans had evolved from a simpler form, the implication to the scientific mind was obvious and disturbing" "Humans could only have descended from apes" "The impact on the Victorian psyche was profound" "Many believed the theory of evolution made them little more than animals" "Darwin stayed away from that question" "He knew he was going to get into trouble" "He writes to friends and says uh-uh, I'm not going to talk about that far too controversial, and it's up to other people, new scientists, a younger generation of scientists coming on in the 1850s and 60s, seeing an opening," "seeing that they could make a career if they were to answer this question, where do humans come from" "Inspired by the Neanderthal bones, evolution became the hottest topic of the age" "But it would stay little more than a theory without more evidence scientific attention turned to an ancestor that would link us to the apes an ape man, a missing link and they would go to the ends of the earth to find it" "In the late 1800s, the world of science had become obsessed with the idea of a missing link between apes and man, and German scientist Johann Fuhlrott believed Neanderthal man was that link" "Neanderthal seems so promising when it's first presented, it seems like it's going to be the answer, but on closer inspection, it starts to fall apart" "Most importantly, the key fossils just seem to be too much like humans" "Neanderthal at best is a man with some ape qualities" "Travelling back in time, our Neanderthal stood just 3,000 generations behind us, at around 40,000 years ago" "To find a true missing link, meant going further back in time, to something more apelike" "The question was, how much ape, and how much man, would it be?" "I think the idea of a missing link came from a, a very simple view of evolution, and it's not surprising it was simple, because of course these ideas were in their infancy, but people had this idea of fixed types" "There were humans, and there were apes, and an evolutionary transition between those two types would somehow combine the features of both types" "There was no real conception that evolution could operate over vast periods of time, and there could be complex mixtures of characteristics, so people were looking for something essentially that would be halfway between a living human and a living ape" "But where would the evidence be found?" "By the 1880s, it was believed this had to be where apes and primitive people lived side by side" "And so the search moved from Europe to South East Asia, and the Dutch island colony of Sumatra, home to both man and ape" "In October 1889, the monsoon season was beginning, and no-one tried to negotiate the dense rain forest unless they had to" "Two years ago," "Eugene Dubois had a promising career as a doctor in Amsterdam, but his obsession with human origins had led him to take up the challenge to find the missing link after abandoning his career and his civilised European home," "the great dream had turned into a nightmare" "He's invested everything that he had into finding this missing link" "Dubois was the worst kind of person to go out to the field, because he had no experience" "He doesn't know how to teach his crew" "He doesn't know how to take care of them" "They're out in the field It's raining" "It's a complete shambles" "He'd found caves, which he hoped would produce the fossils he was looking for" "They hadn't" "His engineer had given up digging, and all but a few of his convict labourers had run away, or were sick" "To make matters worse, Dubois had malaria" "The same deadly disease had already claimed the life of his first engineer, and he was about to lose all patience with the second" "His engineer had just lost his workmate and he hadn't been paid for a month" "But this meant nothing to Dubois" "Poor Eugene, he desperately wants to find something, desperately wants to make a name for himself, comes up with absolutely nothing" "After months in the jungle," "Dubois had just a few animal fossils to show for the time and money he'd spent" "Dubois had many trials and tribulations, and someone who was not as driven, not as determined, not as obsessed," "I'm sure would have given up and gone home" "Dubois realised his attempt to find the missing link here had failed, and he fired his engineer" "They leave Sumatra and he goes elsewhere, and he frankly doesn't know where to look, other than somewhere in the East Indies" "Two years later, and Dubois had started his search again, this time on the island of Java" "Finally his luck had started to turn" "He'd fully recovered from malaria, and at last had something to look at" "Some fossil teeth, which he believed were extremely old, and looked vaguely apelike" "Dubois had a new dig site, with a bigger team, overseen by the Dutch army" "Every so often they brought him material they thought might be of interest, and one day, in October 1891, he got another batch" "It contained a fossilised skull" "Just like Neanderthal 40 years earlier, it was only a skullcap, but like Neanderthal, it sent its discoverer into a frenzy of speculation" "The surrounding forests were home to a variety of apes but he knows that this was not from any known ape" "It was too fine" "The brain cavity was clearly large;" "yet obviously not a human skull" "So, could it be an early human ancestor, closer to our apelike origins?" "The only thing he could compare it with in his mind was Neanderthal" "The first Neanderthal found was 40,000 years old" "Unknown to Dubois, his find was roughly 20 times older, between half a million and a million years old much more primitive than Neanderthal" "But was it any closer to being the missing link?" "The key, Dubois believed, was the size of the brain" "He had a precise mathematical model to determine the missing link" "Its brain cavity should be precisely half the size of a human, and twice the size of a chimpanzee" "But when he calculated the brain cavity of this skull, it was the wrong size too big for the halfway point, therefore too big to be the apelike creature he had imagined" "And more evidence emerged from the site which simply added to the confusion for Dubois" "A complete fossilised leg bone" "Its shape suggests that its owner stood upright and walked on two legs, like a man" "Dubois couldn't change his evidence, so he changed his model" "He decided that the missing link had to have a brain almost as large as our own;" "and he was so convinced by his meagre evidence that he wrote to the Dutch colonial government, announcing that he'd found the missing link" "He called it pithecanthropus erectus upright-walking ape man" "One of the most successful hominid species ever to walk the earth" "In Africa, 800,000 years ago, and 10,000 miles from where Dubois found his upright-walking ape" "This is the same species, today called homo erectus upright-walking man" "They've been able to colonise Africa, Asia and beyond, thanks to a unique combination of physical and mental qualities" "Standing at around six feet, their bodies were similar in shape to our own, and their brains were about two thirds the size of ours" "Homo erectus was on the verge of becoming human" "One of the main reasons for this was diet" "Because for the first time in our evolution, we had access to the concentrated protein of meat" "Yet there is no evidence that homo erectus was a true hunter" "This antelope was most likely scavenged from a leopard kill the spears used to drive away the predator" "It's believed that our bodies had also been going through some radical changes" "For the first time in our evolution, body hair was disappearing, partly because homo erectus' skin had developed complex sweat glands" "This also removed the need to pant in the heat, allowing voices to develop, and paving the way for human speech" "But it's their stone tools that showed how advanced homo erectus had become" "We find the appearance of a thing called the hand axe, which has been called the Swiss army knife of the Palaeolithic" "This is a multi-purpose tool" "It's shaped very consistently, worked on both sides, worked very skilfully, and erectus developed that certainly close to 1.5 million years ago, so this was a big advance in technology" "These people were part of a larger group, the beginnings of a tribe" "But they stayed together as a tight-knit family, and there is evidence that they had learned to care for each other through sickness and injury" "The leg bone which Dubois found in Java had an unusual scar, showing clear traces of damage and repair" "It's incredible" "It seems to have broken at one point, and healed, so whoever it was that owned this leg, not only was severely injured, but repaired it in their own lifetime, and that's important, because if you broke your leg out in the wild," "you'd be dead" "You'd have no chance of survival, except if you were with a family, if you were with a village, if you were in a society" "There is a family system around that individual" "There was safety within the family, but the family itself was never far from danger" "Leopards used the same rock shelters" "As darkness approached, they would become vulnerable, spears or no spears" "And a storm was brewing in the hot afternoon that could bring an unwelcome predator in search of shelter" "But this storm might also bring something else a new weapon that shifted the balance of power between our ancestors and their competitors" "One of the most important pieces in the human evolutionary puzzle a gift from nature" "Every animal on earth that ever encountered fire had run away from it" "Homo erectus was at a crossroads of human evolution" "If they could do the unimaginable, and conquer their instinctive fear, they would harness a new power" "They just needed the nerve to reach into the blaze" "When humans tamed fire, this was obviously a huge step forward, and it must have been a remarkable event for people to face up to fire and learn how to control it, rather than running away from it," "which is the natural instinct, and once they could do that, once they could capture fire and eventually even make it at will, this was a huge advance" "The impact of fire was enormous on human evolution" "The technology of fire gave homo erectus heat, light and protection on their travels, helping them to migrate across the world from Africa to Asia and beyond" "This is how Eugene Dubois came across their fossil remains in Java" "But this nearly human species was very different from Dubois' idea of an upright-walking ape man" "In his mind, he'd found the perfect mix of ape and human characteristics for a missing link" "All he had to do was convince the rest of the world" "And it wasn't going to be easy" "I think he must have thought that the world was ready for this, and when he announced it, the world of science would be at his feet, for making this great discovery that the world had been waiting for," "and of course it didn't work out like that because when Dubois actually tried to publish the material and show people the material, their view was that it was too apelike to be a missing link" "Dubois was convinced to the end that his fossils represented a missing link, but the scientific world did not agree, and rejected his claim" "Because he never attended his own dig, he couldn't even prove his pieces belonged to the same creature" "The verdict of most experts was that the leg was human, but the skull looked like an unknown species of ape" "He leaves the Dutch East Indies, he goes back home, and no-one's paying any attention to his work, no-one's paying attention to his fossils, and it must have just broken his heart" "He ended up basically assembling his fossils, and said right, if you're not going to pay any attention to me, you're not going to get access to my material" "Must have been one of the greatest sulks in scientific history" "If you don't believe me, you can't look at my stuff" "The scientific world ultimately recognise the true value of Dubois' discovery, but not for several decades" "In the meantime, the search for the missing link continued" "And at the start of the 20th century, the focus turned from Asia back to Europe." "because in Britain, a discovery was made that amazed the world" "And created one of the biggest scandals in scientific history" "Arthur" "Look, look!" "Teeth." "What?" "Suddenly, a new contender that fitted the idea of a missing link perfectly" "In fact, it was almost too perfect" "Well, Dr Watson?" "What do you think?" "But then, forgeries often are" "In December of 1912, in London" "A new fossil contender for the title of missing link was about to be unveiled at the very centre of the scientific establishment" "This time, the experts were ready to be convinced, because this was the perfect ape man" "And it was British" "There was this tremendous rivalry between Britain and Germany building up to the First World War, both nationalistic, artistic and, and certainly scientific, and the fact that Britain had nothing to match the Neanderthal find" "I think was a factor in the success that Piltdown had once it was delivered, here was evidence that we could match anything the Germans had" "There was a sense of expectation among the eminent guests of the Royal Geographical Society, and Charles Dawson was about to become the most celebrated fossil-finder in the British Empire" "Gentlemen" "May I introduce you to..." "Piltdown Man" "The reconstructed skull showed the exact combination of features everyone had expected to find in the missing link" "What they felt at that time, that the essence of humanity, the essence of being human, was the large brain size, and their concept of the missing link was a large brain mixed up with some apelike characteristics," "and this is of course what Piltdown Man was" "So, is Piltdown Man just another early man, on the lines of Neanderthal?" "I think not" "Why?" "The jaw" "What Piltdown delivered was what many British experts were hoping for something that seemed to have a large brain in a modern-shaped brain case, although rather thick and primitive, and in the jaw bone we have evidence of a much more apelike jaw and teeth," "and this weird combination was what actually some British experts had predicted that the brain had grown large early on in human evolution, but the teeth and jaws lagged behind, and Piltdown seemed to show that, and what was more, it was British" "Three years earlier, the first piece of Piltdown Man had emerged seemingly by chance" "Workmen digging a road had found what they thought was a coconut, and casually smashed it" "It was Piltdown Man's skull" "Charles Dawson was an amateur fossil-hunter with a burning ambition to find something truly earth-shattering" "He'd walked past this site regularly, in the hope that something significant might emerge" "Anything today?" "His perseverance was finally rewarded" "We've got this" "When he examined the first piece, he instantly recognised it at a skull fragment" "Where's the rest of it?" "And there could be more" "In there somewhere" "Do you think you could find it for me?" "I'll try" "Agreed?" "Alright?" "Good" "Dawson knew he was onto something at last" "But to get maximum exposure for his find, he knew he'd need to involve an expert" "A year later, he'd persuaded Sir Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum to join in the search for more evidence" "The skull fragments looked vaguely human, but they hoped to find evidence that its own could be older and more primitive" "Evidence of something more apelike" "And in a surprisingly short time, they'd found it" "This is definitely not a stone" "Arthur" "Look, look!" "Teeth" "What?" "We've got teeth" "Goodness me" "The evidence seemed conclusive, and with Smith Woodward's support," "Dawson felt able to make his boldest claim" "It is my conjecture that what I have termed the anthropus awsonii, Dawson's Dawn Man, is nothing less than the missing link we have searched for so long" "Thank you" "For the British scientific establishment, here at least was what they had long wished for the perfect missing link" "A big-brained British ape man" "The fossils are perfect for a missing link" "Some of it seems to be human, some of it seems to be ape;" "it just fits perfectly right in between" "In your search for an ancestor, that's what you want" "You know what, it was almost too good to be true, but because everyone was, was looking for something, because everyone wanted to find that first Briton, nobody dug deeper" "Gentlemen, please." "Gather round" "It seemed the missing link had been found" "Yet while Dawson savoured his moment of glory, his audience was unaware that they'd all been taken in by the greatest hoax in scientific history" "And it would take decades for the truth to be revealed" "While the experts in England contented themselves with fakes, a real scientific treasure waited to be discovered" "But it was in a part of the world that no-one at this time even cared to look" "Southern Africa" "Charles Darwin believed Africa might be the cradle of humanity, because it was the home of the great apes" "If our closest ape relatives were still there, then the ancestral link between us might lie there too" "If so, evidence was bound to turn up sooner or later" "It just needed someone to recognise it when it did" "31-year-old Australian Doctor Raymond Dart had recently arrived in South Africa to begin his teaching career" "Soon after, his friend was getting married, and Dart was the best man" "Keep still" "He and wife Dora had half an hour to finish getting ready" "Now wait there." "I'll have to put it back on" "But Dart's mind was elsewhere" "He'd been collecting fossils for the last few months, sent to him by students and colleagues" "A week ago, he got news of a spectacular fossil, found in a nearby lime quarry, and it had just arrived by train" "Thank you, gentlemen, just leave it inside the door there." "Thanks" "Dart's wedding duties were just minutes away but he couldn't wait" "The promise of a spectacular find was too much to ignore" "Where are you going?" "I'll be one moment" "I'll be quick, I just want to make sure it is what I think it is" "You can't go burrowing in boxes of rubble now, Raymond, you really, really can't" "I won't take long" "Raymond." "Please, just leave them alone until tomorrow" "I'll be quick" "The first thing he saw was material he'd seen a dozen times before" "But then, something he could never have dreamed of" "A brain" "To be precise, the space once occupied by a brain, now filled with fossilised sand" "I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary ape brain" "Here was the replica of a brain 3 times the size of any baboon, and considerably bigger than an adult chimpanzee" "Yet it was not big enough for a primitive man" "But whose brain was it?" "Dart looked to see if there was more of the same creature" "He found a piece of rock with the outline of an upper jaw" "Behind it, a hollow space" "when he matched the brain to the hollow¡­" "it was a perfect fit" "He realised he had both the brain and skull of an unknown ape man" "But the face was buried in solid rock" "Raymond, Christo is here" "Yeah, yeah, sorry." "Please, this is getting silly" "Powerless to reveal its identity immediately, but Dart knew just a few inches of rock separated him from a momentous revelation" "Raymond Dart had been sent the head of a fossilised ape-man, which he hoped might be the missing link" "But it was buried in a lump of solid rock" "It took him 7 weeks of painstaking work to reveal its identity" "It was the first human ancestor found in Africa, and the earliest ancestor yet discovered" "The moment of truth came on Christmas Eve, 1924" "What emerged first were its teeth, small and fine like the teeth of a child" "But then, the outlines of its skull, more apelike than human" "When it was finally revealed," "Dart realised he'd uncovered something extraordinary" "A combination of human and ape features that'd never been seen before in the face of a child" "It's a baby." "It's a baby" "The fossil had been found in a limestone quarry at a site called Taung" "So, Dart called it Taung Child" "Its scientific name is Australopithecus Africanus the southern ape of Africa" "She stood further back in time than Neanderthal, at 40,000 years" "Or homo erectus, at over half a million" "Piltdown was assumed to be around a million years" "But Taung went even further back, to more than two million years if she was the missing link, then that link was more apelike than anyone'd ever imagined" "It also placed our ancestral home firmly in Africa for the first time" "In South Africa, two million years ago, the world of Taung Child just like the Savannah today, was a place of food scarcity" "There were no easy pickings" "Taung's mother, at a little over 3 feet tall and just over 5 stone was no hunter, but supplemented her diet by scavenging from the scraps left by predators" "Like a modern chimp, she used rocks as a basic implement to break open bones for their rich marrow protein" "But the predators she owed her free lunch to were never far away" "You've got sabre-tooth cats, you've got giant hyenas, you've got hunting hyenas, a whole plethora of carnivores, very dangerous carnivores that we don't have any more, and they would have all been eating" "or going after things like the Taung Child or even Taung's mother" "Absorbed by the remains of a carcass, the mother had placed her child a short distance away in the shade of a tree" "Her 3-year-old was the size of an 18-month human infant, and had no protection apart from its mother" "She knew there were threats, but she'd keep one eye out for the child, like any parent" "They definitely would have cared for their children," "I mean you see chimpanzees as the most caring of parents" "There's no reason to say that Taung wasn't careful" "The problem with the Taung child was it was probably just old enough and rambunctious enough that it was leaving its mother for stretches at a time" "The mother was unaware that the baby had wandered away" "Until it was too late" "There was no sight or smell of a predator in the undergrowth, but predators don't just exist on the ground" "You've also got a threat from eagles" "They've been documented to take human children up in Kenya, to the age of six years of age" "I mean an eagle has a, these incredibly strong talons, greater, and it's a lovely quote, greater lift to weight ratio than an F15 fighter jet" "The child was unaware of the danger from above" "The mother saw the eagle and the child in the same moment but couldn't get to her baby quick enough" "Taung's skull was found with eggshells and other broken skulls typical of deposits found in eagles' nests" "A lot of the skulls, interestingly, had these v-shaped impressions from this eagle's beak going through, because preferentially they eat out the brain, a very rich, nutritious source of protein" "This small, defenceless creature was Raymond Dart's missing link" "Valentine's Day, 1925, just two months after Taung Child had first emerged from the rock" "A week earlier, Dart had published a scientific paper claiming Taung as the missing link, and unleashing a storm of controversy" "Dart thinks he's got the missing link" "But there's also this Piltdown specimen that matches what the scientific establishment thinks" "Brain growth was thought to have driven human evolution, and Piltdown had a large brain, and apelike teeth" "But Taung had the opposite a small brain, and human-looking teeth" "The whole mix of different features that you find with the Taung Child really is quite interesting, it's a whole reversal, it's more like an, a man ape than an ape man, and it's a complete different mixture of features" "that the world hadn't seen and the world actually wasn't ready for" "Have you seen Professor Dart?" "The biggest experts in this field all backed Piltdown" "Any sort of voices of doubt were generally just overridden by the authority of these people" "Dart's publication directly contradicted the scientific establishment" "Could anybody tell me where I can find Professor Dart?" "He sent it to London to be reviewed by the world experts the same experts whose views he contradicts" "And these so-called experts dismiss it, because they've got their money on the other horse" "He had one ally in his struggle for recognition" "Dr Robert Broom, like Dart, an anatomist and fossil collector" "Broom had the reviews from London" "Raymond" "Raymond, I, I thought you'd be interested in these" "Some responses to your short paper in Nature" "There's one there by Sir Arthur Keith" "What does he have to say?" "Not very encouraging, I'm afraid" "He places Taung in the same sub family as gorillas" "What?" "How?" "Well he says here, the brain is clearly too small to be a human ancestor" "The experts lined up to condemn Dart's description of a fossil they'd never even seen" "How can he know what's too small?" "Or too big?" "How can he possibly claim that a human ancestor's brain had to be a particular size?" "What's his yardstick, a standard-size bowler hat?" "It's - what's the matter with them, Robert?" "Do they think I'm making it up?" "So what went wrong for Raymond Dart?" "Wrong man, wrong place, wrong thing" "He's the wrong man - he's an Australian, he's not part of the establishment" "It's the wrong place" " Southern Africa?" "Everyone's expecting another place, either Europe or Asia" "It's the wrong thing - he calls it an ape, everyone thinks it's an ape" "Well if it's an ape, where is, where does it fit in the story?" "Taung is showing so many points of affinity with the gorilla and the chimpanzee that there cannot be a moment's hesitation in placing the fossil in this living group" "How can he say that?" "I don't know" "Smith Woodward dismisses the whole thing out of hand" "He says that Taung certainly has¡­" "Sorry, old man" "Dart has made probably one of the most remarkable discoveries of the 20th century, and the scientific establishment completely discounts it, discredits his find, and literally puts it in a box or a suspense account for 25 years" "In the 1920s and 30s, the most widely-read textbook on human origins did not even mention Dart's find" "His work was not taught in universities" "Dart had suffered an incredible amount," "I mean Dart was really put in kind of scientific obscurity" "And it really is not until the late 40s that he starts again, once that tide of opinion starts to turn and shows that he was actually correct" "It took a quarter of a century of digging in South Africa's limestone caves to produce the evidence Dart needed" "By the late 1940s, a dozen fossils similar to Taung Child finally proved he was right" "So, what had become of Charles Dawson and his Piltdown Man?" "40 years after it emerged as the prime contender for the missing link, the Piltdown fossils were examined scientifically for the first time, and finally revealed for what they always were an elaborate hoax" "There was embarrassment and puzzlement, astonishment, disbelief in some cases, that this thing was not genuine, but I think for the greater world of science, there was relief, particularly outside of Britain, because so many people by then had decided" "there was something peculiar about Piltdown, even if they couldn't put their finger on it" "At the Natural History Museum in London, scientists decided to apply some newly-available chemical tests" "But as soon as a sample was drilled from the jawbone, they noticed something strange" "The distinct smell of burnt flesh" "This could only come from organic bone, not fossil" "So the jaw couldn't be more than a few thousand years old, and clear marks could be seen on the surface of the teeth" "Scratch marks" "Originally from a modern ape, they've been filed down to look human" "The entire assemblage, stained to look old, was a forgery" "It has never been proved who the fraudster was" "But with the demise of Piltdown, an old idea died with it that a big brain was the defining factor in the missing link" "Something else had to come before the evolution of a big brain, a new theory replaced the old" "What defined the beginning of humanity was not brain growth" "It was using tools" "In 1915, a young boy named Louis Leakey was looking for stone tools near his missionary home the beginning of a lifelong obsession that led Leakey to revolutionise the story of human origins" "44 years later, Leakey was looking for the missing link, and the search had taken him to what is now Tanzania" "Leakey had persuaded the scientific world that what defined the first human ancestor was tools" "Now, all he had to do was find one" "He was supported by his second wife, Mary, and her son Jonathan, just out of school" "Ah, you got something, boy" "They'd found plenty of stone tools, but no sign of Leakey's toolmaker he'd been looking here for 22 years" "His luck had to change soon" "July 17th, 1959, Louis Leakey was laid low with the flu" "Major work at the dig site had slowed while he recovered, but it was a day that would make his career" "In the cool of the early morning," "Mary took the opportunity to walk her dogs, and headed away from the camp" "She wasn't expecting to find much in the way of fossils, but this year's rains had done them an unexpected favour" "As she casually scaned the broken surface, her mind suddenly registered an unmistakable shape exposed in the dirt" "the top of a skull" "Mary was convinced it must be the toolmaker they had been searching for" "Louis." "Louis, darling, please wake up" "I've found something very important" "Darling, please, I know you're not feeling well, but try and wake up" "What have you, what have you found?" "I don't know, that's why I want you to come and have a look" "So you're going to, you're going to have to help me" "Louis Leakey had waited 20 years to find this tool-making human ancestor" "Well done, my dear" "You've got better eyes than me" "But this was not what he expected to find" "The skull was more apelike than he ever imagined" "Well." "Certainly not a homo, my dear, I'm afraid" "Have a look at this" "But darling, just look at where he was found" "It can't just be a coincidence" "Yet it was in the same geological layer as the tools" "The logic was inescapable" "This must be the toolmaker, and therefore the beginning of humanity" "Leakey named it zinganthropus boyesii, after his financial sponsor, Charles Boysey" "It had a small brain but massive teeth and jaws, whose muscles were so large they had to be anchored to a ridge at the top of the skull" "But if zinge was using tools, why did it need such powerful jaws?" "Leakey overlooked the question, and announced zinge as the toolmaker" "For a year, the scientific world accepted zinge as the tool-making missing link" "Then, in 1960, Leakey completely changed his mind" "Mary was on her way from the camp into town one day when a can was dislodged in the back of her Land Rover" "When she stopped to fix it, she noticed a familiar shape in the earth another piece of skull, of an entirely new, more humanlike species" "Leakey decided that this, finally, was his long lost toolmaker" "He named it homo habilis - literally, handy man" "Habilis had a larger brain, and much more human teeth which made sense if he was getting meat using stone tools" "Though the tools habilis made were little more than broken rocks, they marked the very start of human stone technology" "But if habilis is the toolmaker, why was zinge also found with the tools?" "Leakey has stumbled across an incredible discovery, and that discovery is humans and humanlike organisms coexisting in Africa at the same time" "By the early 1960s, the whole model of human evolution was called into question, and with it, the very idea of a single missing link" "For over a century, the model of human evolution had been a simple straight line" "It began with a lower evolutionary form an ancestral ape and ended with the most advanced creature on earth" "the modern human being" "And somewhere in the middle, there had to be a missing link between the two" "So, when Leakey found zinge, it took pride of place until a new candidate arrived" "All of a sudden you have habilis, this more human-looking animal" "Both these fossils date to the exact same age, about 1.8 million years of age, so what do you do?" "You have to remove zinge from the human line, and you have to place them in different lines" "And what is most amazing thing, in the same valley, within metres of each other, you have two species living side by side" "And that changes, or makes a whole paradigm shift in how we view human evolution, and so this line is all of a sudden broken apart" "Suddenly what had been a single line of descent had been replaced by a series of lines that connected to form a giant family tree" "In the years between 1925 and 1965, over 100 hominid fossils were found and categorised in South Africa alone" "And they can all be placed in relation to each other by accurate dating" "Some species are evolutionary dead ends, while others appear to be part of a line that leads to humans" "But a number of humanlike competitors occupy the earth at the same time, with several routes to humanity" "The only way to cut through the confusion is to go further back in time, to the root of the human family tree" "Before we had a big brain" "Long before we used fire and language" "Before we even made tools" "The creature everyone was looking for marked the very beginning of humanity" "November 30th, 1974" "An American-led team was searching for the oldest human ancestor on earth" "And the search had a new focus" "The Northern end of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia" "It was then possible to date rocks very accurately, so it was possible to be more precise than ever before about where to dig" "Using new radiometric technology, they'd dated the volcanic layers here to around 3.5 million years old" "Team leader Donald Johanson was a rising star in the world of anthropology" "He knew Dart's Australopithecus Africanus lived over 2 million years ago" "And Leakey's homo habilis at about 1.45 million" "But they were on separate ancestral lines" "He believed there was a common ancestor, over 3 million years old" "The same age as the surrounding rocks" "Johanson had been kept away from any digging by essential paperwork, a chore he was determined to finish" "But his colleague, Tom Gray, returned from the site with other ideas" "How's it going?" "Well, actually very boring" "There were areas they hadn't surveyed for a while, away from the main dig" "Do you need a break?" "I was thinking of taking a hike out to bed three" "You want to come?" "I don't know, I've got to finish this, I mean these are pretty urgent" "I've got to do something" "The urge to do what he came here to do finally got the better of Johanson" "Let's go" "He made a decision that changed his life" "They headed away from the site, to explore a couple of isolated gullies" "They had no idea they were just a few hundred feet from the greatest fossil find in history" "But as the afternoon wore on, they had little to show for their efforts" "They surveyed for a couple of hours" "By mid afternoon, the temperature was approaching 40 degrees, and all they had found were a few teeth from an extinct horse, and part of the skull of a pig" "They decided to head back to camp" "But Johanson had a hunch to look again in an old gully on their way back" "Hey, Tom" "This way" "It had been thoroughly checked before, and produced nothing" "Hey man, what's up?" "But today, something caught Johanson's eye" "Come here, Tom" "A shape in the dirt that just seemed too regular to be a stone" "You see that?" "It was a fossilised arm bone" "It's an arm" "It's a hominid arm" "And there was more" "And a leg, oh my God" "Parts of a small skull" "Jaw" "Pelvis" "Arm" "My God, this is..." "In all, nearly 50 pieces of fossilised skeleton watch your, watch your feet" "What do we have here, huh?" "What's going on, I don't know where to stand, man!" "I know, Tom!" "This is it!" "This is what we've been looking for, I can't believe it!" "One unbelievable thought went through his mind" "What if all the pieces fitted together?" "Could they be parts of a single, extremely primitive skeleton?" "Hey guys" "Come on!" "If Don Johanson was right, he was looking at the most complete skeletal remains of the earliest human ancestor yet discovered" "What makes this individual an absolutely spectacular find is that she's so complete" "For the first time we had more than the odd broken bone for one specimen" "We had virtually an entire skeleton" "What's missing on one side is present on the other side" "I mean, it's so rare because these hominids didn't bury their dead, and in normal circumstances if an individual died, the scavengers would come in, the bones would be dispersed the mere probability that something is fossilised is extremely small" "But to actually go in and find such a beautiful fossil of a complete human ancestor, is really a once in a lifetime occurrence" "In the first few hours following the discovery, the scale of the find was hard for the team to grasp" "But that night, in the wind-blown desert, outside of Hadar in Ethiopia, the realisation of what they had found began to sink in" "Inspired by a tape of the Beatles song," "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, the new fossil picked up a name" " Lucy" "To Lucy!" "Alright" "To Lucy." "To Lucy" "In Ethiopia. 3.2 million years ago lived Australopithecus Afarensis" " Lucy" "She put together the pieces of what one of our ancestors at this point in time really looked like, and it was a huge shock, because what she looked like was basically a chimpanzee" "Lucy would have been a tree-dweller in a changing land" "For 50 million years, her ancestors had inhabited the trees of Africa" "But the land once covered with unbroken forest gave way to grass and scattered woodland" "Her diet was mostly the fruit of trees like this fig" "But one tree would not support her for long, and unlike her ancestors, she could no longer swing to the next tree" "She had to find another route" "Lucy did something no ape had ever done" "She stood up and walked on two legs" "In her body and behaviour, Lucy is in most respects an ape, from her diet to her small brain and habitat" "The big difference is the way she walked" "Walking upright is the first piece in our evolutionary puzzle" "The first step on the road to humanity" "The initial ancestral change that we see in human evolution is not brain expansion" "Interestingly, it's not even stone tools" "The first major innovative change that you see in evolution is none of what you would expect to find with humans or humanity, but it's the ability to walk on two legs bipedally" "And it made the difference between Lucy surviving or not" "She was on the constant search for food, and that meant finding new trees to feed in" "She spent as little time on the ground as she could, because she knew she was vulnerable" "Lucy had no defence against leopards and sabre-toothed cats, except the refuge of the trees" "But standing upright, she could see further than any of her ancestors" "Sensing movement in the grass, she runs" "Whatever it was, predator or not, it had gone" "But the balance of power between the predator and its prey had started to shift" "The simple act of walking upright has started an evolutionary chain reaction" "It freed the hand to become the makers and users of tools" "And it was tool use that would one day power the brain's growth, with protein from scavenging and hunting" "But it all began here, with Lucy" "So, is Lucy finally the missing link?" "In a sense, Lucy is a missing link" "But they all are missing links, because without each step in the record, without each missing link, we wouldn't have ourselves today" "They're all links of how we've gone from a Lucy to a Taung Child, to a habilis, to a homo erectus all of these are links leading towards homo sapiens" "Having travelled back in time over 3 million years, we'd found a creature that seemed to begin the human line" "Yet Lucy was a long way from being human" "We've found the common ancestor of all the things that are human but at the end of the day it's, it's a bit empty" "What we don't, look what we don't find with Lucy" "We, we, we don't find culture" "We don't find the things that make us human" "We don't find our humanity" "Science began to look again at our most recent ancestors 40,000 years ago a successful, intelligent hominid species occupied Europe" "Neanderthal man" "Could he hold the key to how we finally became human?" "40,000 years ago," "Neanderthal hunters, on the scent of red deer in the forests of Western Europe" "They've been tracking the same herd for three days" "But they were opportunist hunters, and a wild pig was too tempting to resist" "But they missed their first attempt, and the pig disappeared into the undergrowth" "The Neanderthals worked out a plan to corner their prey" "The ability to organise and communicate, to exercise a plan, were all advanced human skills" "The question was, did they originate here with Neanderthal?" "Exactly how human were they?" "June of 1996, The vaults of the Rhineland Museum in Germany" "Genetic scientist Matthias Krings from Munich University was about to attempt to answer that question" "Museum curator Heike Kainitske allowed Krings to examine the original Neanderthal bones found in 1856 the evidence that began the quest for our origins" "They wore full body protection to avoid genetic contamination," "Krings isn't interested in looking at the bones" "He was going to look inside - at their DNA" "It has been thought impossible to extract DNA from any sample older than 10,000 years they were attempting to go 4 times further back in time to the age of Neanderthal" "Scientists had long thought that Neanderthal was our most recent ancestor, that he became human in one last, crucial evolutionary leap" "If so, he should have almost identical DNA to us" "In Munich, Matthias Krings finally had the two sets of DNA results" "Neanderthal and modern man" "Between any two people, there should be an average of 8 differences in the same piece of DNA" "But between the human and Neanderthal samples," "Krings counted nearly four times as many differences" "Neanderthal, it seemed, were not our ancestors after all" "Evolution had produced 2 separate humanlike species at the same time" "Sooner or later, they were bound to come face to face" "While the Neanderthal tried to flush out their pig, into the same area came a new hunting party" "Another human species were after the same pig" "At the time Neanderthals went to extinction, we know anatomically modern humans people like us - had also moved into Europe, and were competing with them perhaps for those areas where it was slightly easier to catch the game" "Modern humans that have larger group sizes, more efficient tools, maybe" "They might be just that better at hunting" "The Neanderthals' plan to corner the pig had failed" "They'd lost sight of it in the undergrowth" "then it seemed to break cover, further down the hill" "In fact, the modern humans had got there first" "The first encounter between 2 almost identical humanlike species must have been a profound shock in this tough Ice Age world, there was only room for one of them" "500,000 years ago, they shared a remote common ancestor, a descendant of homo erectus" "From their African homeland, their ancestors migrated across half the world, spreading as far as South East Asia and into Northern Europe" "Here, they would emerge as Neanderthal man" "But the ones who stayed behind in Africa evolved too, and just under 200,000 years ago, a new species first appeared homo sapiens, modern man" "They too were hunters, but some scientists have suggested they supplemented their diet with fish spurring their brain development" "The evidence suggests their culture developed faster;" "that their social groups became bigger and more complex;" "and driven by population pressure and climate change, they too migrated" "It took 150,000 years to spread from Africa to Europe, and as they moved further and further north, their appearance changed" "eventually they caught up with their long-lost cousins, the Neanderthals" "The European continent was losing one of its oldest, most successful species" "Within a few dozen generations, the last Neanderthal was gone and the world overrun by a species with better weapons, better organisation, and greater numbers" "Modern man" "For the first time in our evolutionary history, we were totally alone" "The last surviving hominid species on earth" "Within 40,000 years, homo sapiens had colonised the whole world, free of any competition" "This is finally us" "Physically, are the result of 3 million years of change, since Lucy" "But we are also fully human in our mind, and it's that which has given us the critical edge" "The one thing that Neanderthals didn't do that we know that early modern humans did, was express themselves artistically" "The social systems that humans have, the richness of communication between humans, not just speaking but symbolically, must be part of the success of modern humans, and it may well have given us the edge over Neanderthals," "and the other species that were here, 50,000 years ago" "That same mind that gave us victory over our rivals, one day ask the obvious question where did I come from?" "For over 150 years we have been searching for the answer to that question, and each piece of evidence has brought us a clearer and clearer picture of our past but the search hasn't stopped" "Many people say the more you find, the more there is to find, but I've been in the field long enough to know that almost every year, an important discovery is made" "I keep telling my students, I never give the same lectures twice," "I mean it's a hugely dynamic field" "Uncovering our evolution so far has been a remarkable adventure but it's one that is still not over" "It leads us to, to wonder, what else is out there?" "What else are we going to find?" "In the next 10, 20 years, as palaeontologists explore parts of the world that we haven't gotten to yet, who knows what we're going to find"