“I can't help it,” says Ella Al-Shamahi. “It reminds me of The Lord of the Rings!” It’s not easy to make prehistory accessible, but a comparison with Tolkien works for the time before Homo sapiens dominated. Al-Shamahi’s five-part documentary traces the rise of humanity, beginning with the era when Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, and Homo erectus each claimed their own territory.
Before written history, when our story was “written in our bones and DNA,” some early humans lived in Europe and Asia and had adapted to the cold. Some were learning to harness the power of fire. Some were only 1 meter tall. Others wore helmets and polo shirts. Wait, no, that’s one of the archaeologists excavating in Morocco, where a skull called Jebel Irhoud 1 holds many secrets about our earliest ancestors. It's the beginning of a journey that, in a revelatory first episode, will take Al-Shamahi to spectacular locations in Africa and the Middle East.
Stars: Ella Al-Shamahi, Melissa Massyn, Angelo Chen
At the risk of repeating what some critics said seven years ago, when Al-Shamahi presented Neanderthals – Meet Your Ancestors on BBC Two (she's since appeared in a few films), it feels like a presenting star is being born. An explorer, paleoanthropologist, and stand-up comedian, she passes every challenge involved in directing a major science or history series.
Her appearances on camera mimic Kevin McCloud's old trick: pretending to come up with great ideas on the fly and loving them: she breaks eye contact, looks away to capture something fascinating, and then looks back at us to emphasize the key point. It's theater, but it helps achieve her main objective: to convey to us, the enthusiastic but ignorant people at home, the wonder she experiences as an expert. The urgent whisper she employs in her voiceover—where a less skilled presenter would reveal any weakness in her intonation—has the same effect.
So we're in the company of the best teacher most of us have never had, someone who joyfully shares knowledge that's too interesting to be intimidating, and who trusts us to keep up? Al-Shamahi isn't afraid to use arcane paleoanthropological terms if the viewer can glean meanings from the context—"gracile" and "prognathic" are about to enter her vocabulary—or converse with Moroccan scientists in Arabic. Her best work here shows her holding the Jebel Irhoud skull and using her own head to illustrate how this ancient creature is different from us, yet almost the same. Someone like Homo sapiens, the upright, tool- and weapon-using primate that evolved into us, existed 350,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
From there, we trace the small advances that, over many millennia, constitute our evolution. Al-Shamahi visits the Great Rift Valley in East Africa to explain how, 200,000 years ago, climatic shocks (it was humid in the east and arid in the west, and then vice versa) forced communities to... move and socialize, sharing new discoveries and their best genes. In Israel, however, we find evidence of one of countless false starts, when Homo sapiens tried to live in the cave next door to the Neanderthals: a nightmare situation so terrible that this branch of Homo sapiens did not survive.
But we persevered. Al-Shamahi highlights the surprising details of how we achieved hegemony. In the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, there are stone tools that, 100,000 years ago, their owners broke. Why? Because they were offerings to a god, made by primates who were beginning to "see beyond the tangible" and developing ceremonies and rituals fueled by abstract thought. In the words of Al-Shamahi, who can find a lyrical phrase when necessary, we were "venturing into the unknown and the invisible." This brain expansion provided practical benefits when, only some 30 millennia later, curiosity about "the power within wood and in Rope" compelled us to move from axes and spears to the bow and arrow.
The show's landscape shots are often breathtaking. On a perfectly pristine African beach flanked by dunes, even the tiniest shells hold a story: some 70,000 years ago, we began fashioning them into necklaces decorated with red ochre, a sign that cultural exchanges were taking place. Al-Shamahi's delight at this revelation is irresistibly contagious. In "Human," the leap of imagination required to understand our distant past is no distance at all.
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