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00:00.
00:30Why are you going that way?
00:42You and I belong to the most
01:12widespread and dominant species of animal on Earth.
01:17We live on the ice caps at the pole
01:19and in the tropical jungles at the equator.
01:22We've climbed the highest mountain
01:23and dived deep into the seas.
01:25We've even left the Earth and set foot on the moon.
01:30And we're certainly the most numerous large animal.
01:33There are something like 4,000 million of us today.
01:37And we've reached this position with meteoric speed.
01:41It's all happened within the last 2,000 years or so.
01:45We seem to have broken loose from the restrictions
01:49that have governed the activities and numbers of other animals.
01:53Why should this be?
01:55Well, the story starts back in Africa.
01:58Ten million years ago,
02:05much of East and Central Africa
02:06was covered by wide open plains,
02:09just as it is today.
02:11And living there were herds of grazing animals.
02:16The ancestors of the antelope
02:18had originally lived in the forest.
02:21Other kinds of animals from there
02:22had also ventured out into the open in search of food.
02:26Apes had come down from the trees.
02:31Like the vervet monkeys of today,
02:34those ancient apes probably stayed close
02:37to the fringes of the forest at first,
02:39but regularly wandered out into the open
02:41to collect insects, seeds, and other edible morsels.
02:47The earliest of these ground-living apes
02:49were not much bigger than vervets,
02:52but slowly, as they colonized the grasslands,
02:55they became better adapted to life out in the open,
02:57and they grew somewhat in size.
03:01About 3 million years ago,
03:03there were several species of them roaming the African plains,
03:06and this is the reconstructed skull of one of them.
03:09It has several characters
03:11which are an inheritance
03:12from the tree-living ape-like ancestors of this creature.
03:16We can guess that its sense of smell, for example,
03:19wasn't very good,
03:20because the nasal cleft is quite small.
03:23On the other hand, its vision was very good indeed.
03:25It had two large, forward-facing eyes.
03:29Its brain, on the other hand, while it was quite large,
03:32is only about half the size of that of modern man.
03:36Although the teeth are missing in this particular specimen,
03:39we know from other specimens
03:41that they were remarkably even,
03:43and lacked the two long, downward-pointing fangs
03:48which are sometimes present,
03:49and which lock the lower jaw in position.
03:52So, we can guess that this animal
03:54was able to move its lower jaw from side to side,
03:57and thus was able to chew roots and nuts,
04:00as well as eating flesh and maybe fruit.
04:02as well as eating flesh.
04:05Their fossilized bones are very rare,
04:07so that we still don't really know exactly
04:09how many kinds there were, or how they were related.
04:13But on one thing, nearly all who've studied their remains
04:16are agreed.
04:17Those ancient apes included among them
04:19the ancestors of mankind.
04:22They can be called, in fact, ape-men.
04:25And grasslands, like these, must have been the cradle of humanity.
04:36Out on the grasslands,
04:38the talents that the ape-men's ancestors had developed
04:40to cope with life in the trees
04:42were put to other purposes.
04:44Hands, once used for gripping branches,
04:47were not much use for burrowing or tearing flesh.
04:50But as time passed, they became more precise and dexterous
04:53in their grip than any other primates,
04:56and very like our own.
04:58And these enabled the ape-men to pluck not only leaves and fruit,
05:02but also to gather relatively fiddly morsels,
05:05nuts, seeds, and insects.
05:08The ape-men were still quite small, and largely defenceless.
05:20And this was a serious handicap,
05:22for life on the open plain was dangerous.
05:25As well as the harmless herds, there were hunters around.
05:38The only way of escaping such enemies
05:48was either to run fast, which the ape-men weren't very good at,
05:51or to climb a tree, of which there were not very many.
05:55So it obviously was of the greatest importance
05:58for the ape-men to get the earliest possible warning of danger.
06:02Their ancestors' life up in the trees
06:04had led to a reduction in their sense of smell,
06:07but extremely good vision.
06:09So the ape-men must have reared up
06:12in order to get a good view of their surroundings.
06:19And the vervets, faced with a similar problem,
06:21adopt just the same solution.
06:35It's unlikely that the ape-men stood erect
06:37as a way of increasing their speed,
06:39for running on four feet is a much swifter way
06:41of getting around than on two,
06:43and a vervets can outpace any two-legged primate.
06:49But if you habitually rear on your hind legs,
06:51then you can use your hands for other things.
06:54And one modern ape, the chimpanzee, does just that.
06:57The chimps are the only animals which defend themselves
07:05with weapons when they're angry, like this.
07:08following water, the chimpanzee's, такое- име
07:10that would be firmware in the Westminster
07:11level preparing to escape to kill their коробль.
07:13Or a lik apae had with a beard before cock,
07:13foods like he'd be a kid with a bitch.
07:18σottened by myself,
07:18Ouva, Auva!
07:19We want to trek in the Richmond
07:19odu.
07:22Aенegast.
07:22AENGIST.
07:23Those hyphs,
07:23There's every reason to suppose that those early ape men were able to throw sticks and stones just as modern chimpanzees can.
07:41And indeed they would be in need of every form of defense they could get
07:45because their teeth were very small and they had no claws on their hands.
07:49So if they were threatened by a predator, no doubt they would pick up a stick to try and defend themselves out on these African plains, as indeed I would.
07:58And what's more, with this in their hands, they would stand some chance of driving off one of those predators from its kill in order to claim the meat for themselves.
08:13And eating meat has a lot to be said for it.
08:16Getting all your sustenance from leaves is a laborious and time-consuming business.
08:22They have comparatively little nourishment in proportion to their bulk.
08:26So zebras are compelled to spend nearly half of their days grazing in order to get all the food that they require.
08:35The flesh-eaters, on the other hand, have a much lazier life.
08:39Meat is so nourishing that lions only need to eat every two days or so, and then only for about half an hour.
08:56Doubtless, leisure had its appeal to the ape men too, whereas lions simply sleep.
09:01Maybe the inquisitive ape-men use their spare time to socialize, to play, to create.
09:08A kill on the plains, no matter who makes it, attracts all kinds of flesh-eaters.
09:14A whole pride of lions may find more than they need in a single zebra carcass.
09:19One way or another, everything is consumed, even the tail.
09:48And when the biggest and the most powerful have taken all they want,
10:00there are plenty of scavengers to clear up the remains.
10:03Well, I only had vultures to deal with that time, and I didn't even need a stick.
10:25If there'd been hyenas, well, I guess I would have needed it, but I think I could have got rid of them.
10:31And maybe if I'd had a few companions, I'd have even been able to shift a pride of lions.
10:37But, having got here, how could an ape-man with small teeth manage to get into a carcass like this?
10:45Well, he could take a stone, and it's already cutting.
10:57And this is really a quite ordinary stone, but one that has just been chipped here on either side to produce a cutting edge.
11:06And just such stones as this have been found with the skeletons of the earliest ape-men of about two million years ago.
11:15So, with a chipped stone, a stick, and a pair of manipulative hands,
11:22the ape-men could have survived out on the plains as hunters.
11:25This state of affairs lasted for several million years.
11:30Slowly, the ape-man became better at walking.
11:32His legs lengthened to increase his stride, and he grew to a height of about five and a half feet.
11:39And to mark his new stance, science has given him a new name.
11:43Homo erectus, upright man.
11:47The sole of his foot acquired an arch to give a spring to his stride,
11:50and his first toe grew to take the thrust of the foot.
11:55The name man here has no sexist implications.
11:59It's merely the scientific name for the genus to which these women, children, and men belonged.
12:04And a million years ago, they spread widely over the African plain.
12:09Their fossilized remains are very rare.
12:12For bodies lying out in the open are eaten by scavengers, and bones weather into dust.
12:18But stone is much more durable.
12:20And in some places, the tools made by upright man still litter the ground in huge numbers.
12:27From them, we can see that he was now using his dexterous hands with increasing skill.
12:33Almost every one of these stones around me, which have washed out from that bank over there,
12:39have been worked by man in one way or another.
12:42And some of them are far more elaborate than anything produced by the early ape men.
12:47Like this one, for example.
12:49Beautifully chipped.
12:51And this was probably a hand axe, which was used for digging up roots.
12:57And then there are cleavers, like this, with a flat cutting edge to them here,
13:02which may have been used in butchering animals,
13:05both cutting the flesh and stripping off the skin.
13:10And these aren't the only tools.
13:15This rounded stone has not been rounded by a stream,
13:19which would produce smooth surfaces, but carefully chipped.
13:23And it's probable that these rounded cobblestones,
13:27of which huge numbers have been found on this site,
13:29were used either for pounding vegetables of some kind,
13:34or as weapons.
13:36And the reason we suppose they may have been used as weapons
13:39is because also on this site have been found great numbers of animal bones.
13:45This, and most of the bones found on this site,
13:49belonged to an extinct baboon
13:51that was even bigger than the living baboon.
13:54And most of these bones,
13:58like this fragment from the lower jaw,
14:00there the teeth,
14:02have actually been split open
14:04in order to get out the marrow.
14:09This remarkable site provides a lot of evidence
14:13about the nature of upright man.
14:15For one thing, the stone from which all these tools are made,
14:18and there's something like a ton of them,
14:21doesn't occur naturally within 30 kilometers of here.
14:24So all these stones must have been brought here deliberately by the people.
14:29And that suggests foresight and planning.
14:32For another thing,
14:34the baboon that they hunted must have been a very ferocious animal.
14:38I don't imagine there are many men
14:39who would fancy the idea of going out today
14:42and trying to hunt a baboon by themselves,
14:44armed only with a few cobblestones.
14:47And yet the extinct baboon was even bigger
14:49and presumably more ferocious.
14:51So it seems very likely
14:53that the early people hunted in teams.
14:57Teamwork, foresight, planning.
15:00That argues that they had some considerable skill
15:04in communicating among themselves.
15:06Letting others know how you feel is a
15:36basic part of communication. No creature in the world does so more eloquently
15:41than man and no organ is more visually expressive than his face.
16:06Even in repose, the human face sends a message, and one that we tend to take for granted.
16:15Each face proclaims individual identity. In teams, recognition of other members is of
16:21great importance. A hunting dog in a pack proclaims its identity by its own personal
16:26smell. Primates, with their reduced sense of smell, but their very acute vision, do it
16:32by the infinite variety of their faces. We have more separate muscles in our faces
16:40than any other animal, so we can move it in a variety of ways that no other animal can equal,
16:46and not only convey mood, but send precise signals. By the expression on our face, we can call
16:52people and send them away, ask questions and return answers without a word being spoken.
16:58Eyebrows are particularly eloquent. We can use them as question marks and as greetings.
17:15But are our gestures merely recent conventions that we've learned from one another?
17:19Or are some inherited from our remote ancestors? Did upright man formulate his hunting plans by
17:27pointing and nodding, and express his delight with a smile? If we could meet modern men who have never
17:34been in contact with our world, and discover whether we both had signals in common, then we might find
17:39clues to the answer. Ten years ago, I had the chance to do just that. A patrol led by an Australian
17:47government officer was setting out to cross one of the last patches of unexplored country in central New Guinea,
17:52Bayami, and I went lead. The tribesmen living on the river who came with
18:00us said that there were people living in these dense forests, that they saw them only rarely,
18:05and knew only one word of their language, their name, Bayami. But no European had ever seen them.
18:12Bayami!
18:15We walked for about a week without meeting anyone, and then one morning, the Bayami
18:19Bayami quietly appeared.
18:28with gestures they seem to be explaining that we were in the middle of their territory
18:52they nodded in agreement they smiled to give reassurance
18:58the
19:01the
19:03the
19:04the
19:07the
19:09the
19:11the
19:17We wanted them to bring down other members of their group and tried to convey this somewhat
19:41complicated message with gestures.
20:11Although our two societies were so different and had never come into contact before this moment, it seemed that many of our gestures did have the same meaning.
20:21These nods and smiles, frowns and head shakes were surely not mere conventions but deep in us.
20:28It seemed that they used the same name for their rivers as the tribesmen who were with us and their leader counted them for us.
20:36To do that he used a quite different category of gesture, not a deep-seated one like a nod or a smile, but a conventional one that has been learned.
20:45And here our cultural backgrounds divided us.
20:49He used the fingers of one hand for numbers up to five.
20:53Above five, the biyami clearly have their own individual code.
21:06It's easy enough to follow it in sequence like this, but the biyami also use these gestures individually, in bargaining for example.
21:14And then how would we know that this gesture meant eight?
21:21Or this one, nine.
21:31But before he got to eleven, he used two of those facial expressions that were immediately understandable to us both.
21:38Bafflement, because we got the name slightly wrong, and amusement at our stupidity.
21:49Although we belonged to such different societies, and the only words we had in common were a few proper nouns,
21:55we had exchanged quite complicated messages using just gestures inherited from our common past.
22:02Gestures that may well have been used before even the emergence of our own species, by our distant ancestors, upright men.
22:09For a long time, upright man lived only in Africa, as far as we can tell from the evidence that's been found so far.
22:18But slowly his numbers increased, and he began to extend his territories.
22:23About a million years ago, he moved north into the valley of the Nile, and up into the Middle East.
22:29His bones have been found in Asia, dating from about the same time, in a hill near Pekin.
22:34Others have been dug up farther south in Java.
22:38And about 800,000 years ago, judging from his fossil remains, upright man was in Europe in some numbers.
22:49Now the climate of Europe changed.
22:51It got so cold that the ice caps on the mountains and in the north expanded, locking up so much water that the level of the sea dropped, exposing bridges of land across the Mediterranean, and making it still easier for man to spread.
23:06Then the weather warmed again.
23:09Four times this happened.
23:11The ice, even at its worst, never got as far south as these valleys in central France.
23:15But at the peak of a glaciation, this land, now so verdant and fruitful, must have been bitterly cold.
23:25And in response to that changing climate, men took to caves.
23:32Like this one.
23:34There are literally hundreds of caves along the side of this valley, and there's scarcely one that doesn't have some sign of human habitation.
23:41And because of lots of excavations in them, we now have a very clear picture of the sort of lives that these people led.
23:50They wore clothes made out of skins, which they sewed with bone needles like these.
23:58They went down and fished in the river with bone harpoons, and they also hunted with spears and harpoons in the woods.
24:06Their skill in working stone now reached new heights, and they had a marvelous material to work on, flint.
24:18Instead of making three or four blows, some four to five hundred precise actions were required to get the best out of a piece of flint.
24:26He must have taken a lot of learning.
24:28To chip an edge accurately, it has to be made even.
24:44A razor-sharp knife made in about ten minutes, and a deadly weapon in the hands of these people.
25:00They were brave and skillful hunters.
25:02And we know from blackened stones that they had control of fire, which must have been their most precious possession.
25:09Not just to keep warm, but in order to cook their meat.
25:13This is the skull of a man that was excavated from just near here.
25:19And you can see his teeth for chewing that meat are now relatively small, so cooking was a very valuable technique.
25:28But it's not just the teeth that have changed, so is the cranium.
25:32And the parts of the brain that control speech are now fully developed, so this man had probably a fluent and complex language.
25:40In fact, there are virtually no significant differences between this man's skeleton and skull and mine.
25:50And so anthropologists have called him, somewhat immodestly, Homo sapiens, wise man.
26:00The huge difference that separates this man leaving such a cave as this and going down to fish in the river,
26:05and a smartly dressed modern executive in Tokyo or London or New York,
26:12stepping into his car and driving off to his office to consult the latest computer printout,
26:18is not due to any change in the brain or the anatomy.
26:22It's due to the emergence of a completely new evolutionary factor.
26:27And the first dazzling signs of it are miraculously preserved right here.
26:35From the back of many of these caves tunnels lead down into the depths of the earth.
26:49And into this frightening blackness, finding their way by lamps with a rush for a wick and animal fat for fuel, went early man.
27:05They made these long and, surely for them, most important journeys in order to do this.
27:24To paint.
27:25This, for me, is one of the most moving of their paintings.
27:29It represents a stylized horse.
27:31Here, its small black head with a long black mane.
27:35And these spots on it, which appear to be dapples, probably have some other meaning,
27:40because they extend beyond the outline of the horse.
27:43And here, perhaps most intimate and vivid of all, a handprint of one of those people.
27:50Made probably by taking a mouthful of black paint and blowing it over the hand like a stencil.
27:57These early people were superlative artists and drew the animals of their world with a marvelous sensitivity
28:09and such accuracy that often we can identify the particular species they had in mind.
28:15These are bison, no longer to be found in France, but still surviving farther east in Europe.
28:21Aurochs, a kind of giant cattle, now totally extinct.
28:30This gallery contains a procession of animals, among them mammoths, shaggy with long hair.
28:51The oldest of these paintings is thought to be about 30,000 years old.
29:11The youngest, maybe 10,000.
29:13That's an immense span of time, about five times the length of the entire history of Western civilization.
29:21So, it's unreasonable to suppose that they all, throughout this time, served exactly the same purpose.
29:28Some, however, may well have been connected with a hunting magic.
29:32By painting the images of the animals they sought, the hunters tried to gain control of them.
29:37Certainly, most of the images represent animals that were hunted for food.
29:44It's tempting, too, to interpret these signs as arrows or spears.
29:49Perhaps they were drawn during a ritual when the men mimed the successful hunt that they hoped the gods would bring to them.
29:56And among these sensitive and accurate drawings of animals, there are much more mysterious designs.
30:08This has been interpreted as a human figure, perhaps even a human sacrifice, with spears in its franks.
30:15And as well as these, and this is very significant for what is to come, there are geometrical symbols, like these paired dots.
30:30There are other odd shapes that occur again and again.
30:34What these abstract symbols signify, we have no idea.
30:45But the fact that they occur at all is of great significance for what is to come.
30:49Even though we don't know exactly what they mean.
30:51In one place in the world, however, we can still discover why a nomadic hunting people paint on rock in caves.
31:04Because here, in Northern Australia, the Aborigines still do so.
31:09They, too, portray the animals they hunt for food.
31:13Some are drawn as part of rituals to maintain the fertility of the animals.
31:16Others are made during ceremonies when the people recount stories of their creation by the gods.
31:22For this cave is a sacred place for them.
31:26And on the back of it, they've painted the image of one of their great creator spirits, a wangener.
31:33It lies on its side, its head to the left, its legs stretching out to the right.
31:38And Aborigines also draw abstract symbols.
31:46These lines and dots are not aimless doodles.
31:50They represent particular things.
31:52Homo sapiens, wise man, has made a huge step forward in his ability to communicate.
31:58He's discovered how to represent objects not by their likeness, but by symbols.
32:03In this great freeze, the educated eye of a man of the tribe can read a sacred legend telling how the great creator spirit moved across the land back in the beginning of time and showed men how to make spears for themselves and go hunting.
32:23The ability to distinguish the edible from the poisonous, to track and kill animals, to discover food in all but the most sterile of lands enabled wise man to spread throughout the world.
32:40And many different groups of people today still live entirely by these ancient skills.
32:47In Australia, the Aborigines, by understanding their land with an intimacy that baffles outsiders, can manage to survive in desert country where strangers would die of starvation and thirst within days.
32:59In the Kalahari desert, the Bushmen too live in a similar way, with the help of similar skills.
33:09They are the most expert of hunters. They know how to prepare poison with which to tip their arrows and with them bring down the biggest of game like a giraffe.
33:23Though the hunt may take many days and demand the greatest bravery and endurance.
33:40Bushmen women can recognize the tiny characters of a leaf that tells the knowledgeable that this particular spindly stem leads to a tuber deep in the ground that is loaded with water even in the most severe of droughts.
34:05As wise man spread through the world, so his body responded to his surroundings.
34:14The rays of the sun in excess can be very harmful and many dwellers in the tropics quite independently acquired black pigment in their skins which protected them from it.
34:23But too little sunshine can also be bad for you. The body needs it to manufacture vitamins. So in northern lands, in Lapland for instance, races possess fair skins.
34:39In Asia, they developed a race with olive skins and slanting eyes. Some of them migrated eastwards across the Bering Strait into the New World and down to the great rain forests of South America where they still live.
34:57They too are skilled hunters and some groups still find all they need from the wild animals and plants of their forests.
35:17This was the way that all human beings throughout the world existed until comparatively recently. Nowhere were they numerous. Their expectation of life was short. Their birth rate and the survival of their children kept in check by the scarcity of food and the rigors and hazards of their lives.
35:42But then came a revolution and one that was to start that explosion of man's population. And the trigger was this. A wild form of wheat or barley that grew then as now on the fertile deltas of the Middle East.
36:07It's got a lot of seeds easily separated from the husks and full of nourishment. And about 10,000 years ago, man realized that he no longer need go searching for the wild plant. He could take these seeds and plant them. And then he would no longer be compelled to follow the wandering life. He could settle down.
36:30Some animals too could be domesticated and kept permanently around his settlements to be slaughtered when he wanted meat.
36:46So human beings were able to build their permanent homes in groups close by one another. And around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and India, small villages appeared.
37:04The villages grew into towns and by 5000 years ago, there were great cities like this one, Uruk, whose ruins have been excavated from the sands of Iraq. It held several thousand people. Its citizens built walls around it for protection, ordered their streets, dug canals to protect floods.
37:23And in the center of their city, they built their temple, the ziggurat, an artificial mountain made out of brick, bonded together with layers of reeds.
37:32Clearly, to build such a carefully designed monument as this, and on such a scale, the people had to have some real organization.
37:45They all must have led very complicated lives too, for not only were they skilled architects, but they were farmers. They made pottery, fragments of it are all over this site.
37:55They were traders, and they probably also paid taxes. At all events, they found it necessary to have some way of recording their affairs and transactions.
38:05Because in this very site has been found this, the earliest known piece of writing.
38:15It's thought to be some sort of tally, recording the issue of rations over a five-day period.
38:25Each column represents one day, and incidentally it reads vertically.
38:37The symbols are a mixture of pictorial representations and abstract designs.
38:44This triangular one is purely abstract, and is believed to mean ninda, or bread.
38:49Whereas this sign looks like, and may mean, a wheat sheaf.
38:53The different shaped dots in front of the signs refer to the quantities of each commodity.
38:58This tablet was baked over 5,000 years ago.
39:03But that, in the time scale that we've been thinking on, is comparatively recently, a mere hundred or so generations.
39:10But when he marked and baked this, a man turned the surge of evolution into a new course.
39:17Because now, for the first time, it was possible for an individual to transmit information quite independent of his own existence or presence.
39:26And so, an individual man was able to pass on information about his failures and successes, his insights, his strokes of genius, his accumulation of humdrum facts, from one individual to the whole community, from a community to a generation, and for generations beyond.
39:45The discovery of writing was made independently by many people throughout the world.
40:07So, the question inevitably arises, are we fundamentally and crucially aware of the world?
40:08So, the question inevitably arises, are we fundamentally and crucially aware of the world?
40:12So, the question inevitably arises, are we fundamentally and crucially different from all other living organisms?
40:30Or is there an overall pattern into which we, and all other animals, naturally fit?
40:51All living things are continually influenced by information from the past.
40:57And the more information they get, the better they are able to solve their problems.
41:02Every animal receives that information inherited from its parents and coded, not in letters, but in special chemicals, DNA.
41:11These are models of just one section of that giant molecule of DNA, vastly enlarged.
41:18Many molecules go to make genes, and genes together can be regarded as a library of instructions to an animal on how to solve the problems of survival.
41:29Clusters of genes in the primordial seas began to reproduce some 3,500 million years ago.
41:47Bacteria.
41:48If we represent the immense period of time between then and now by a single year, and this stage is its first moment,
41:55then more complex microorganisms like these didn't develop until about the middle of August, over a thousand million years later.
42:03As time passed, organisms accumulated more genes that could carry the instructions necessary for building bigger and more complex bodies,
42:22which in turn could solve more difficult problems of survival.
42:25And so animals found new ways of living in the seas.
42:32At the beginning of November, the first backbone creatures appeared.
42:40And towards the end of that month, the first animals left the water and colonized the land.
42:45And now the pace quickened.
43:08The backbone animals also invaded the land.
43:11By the beginning of December, some had acquired waterproof skins and broken their dependence on water.
43:22During the middle of December, one group could generate heat in their bodies and had elaborated their scales into feathers.
43:28The first furry, warm-blooded creatures appeared around the same time, but it wasn't until the 25th of December that the dinosaurs disappeared and the mammals came into their own.
43:45And now the information and instructions carried by the DNA and the sex cells were supplemented.
43:52The young mammal, dependent on its mother for milk and protected by her, begins to learn from her how to deal with the world around it.
43:59So animal communities developed traditions, cultures, and were able to transmit them from one generation to another.
44:19Now the experiences and skills acquired during an individual's lifetime need no longer die with it.
44:26Some, at least, could be handed on, supplementing the inborn genetically programmed skills.
44:32In the early morning of December the 31st, apes and ape men appeared.
44:45And we arrived about two minutes before the end of that last day.
44:59No creature is so dependent upon its mother for such a large proportion of its life as is the human baby.
45:06And through language, none learns so much from her or so quickly.
45:15Our spoken language is enormously more subtle and informative than any other system of communication in the animal world.
45:23It's almost impossible to prevent a baby from acquiring it.
45:27You can open that.
45:29By the age of five, every child will have mastered the meaning of 6,000 words and is able to operate a thousand rules of grammar.
45:42That's an astonishing feat of learning.
45:49As their world expands, they learn not only from their parents but other children and adults,
45:54so that the whole accumulated experience of the community can become theirs.
46:04By means of words, skills can be rapidly taught and problems quickly explained and solved.
46:11Making sure it's nice and strong and helps the part.
46:16And they learn, too, to comprehend abstract symbols that not only represent spoken words but completely new concepts.
46:30Two nitrogen, one oxygen, di-nitrogen, oxide.
46:34Now, as in our previous experiment, we're going to heat lead nitrate in this tube.
46:37We're getting a nice flow of colourless gas in the gas jar.
46:42And I'd like you to notice that the residue being left behind in the jar.
46:46To get this orientation, it is achieved by this here, this control here.
46:51Over the past thousand years, different cultures have devised ways of duplicating those symbols
46:57so that one individual could communicate directly with thousands.
47:01Printing.
47:07A great library can be seen as an extension of the human brain.
47:33But it contains far, far more information than any single individual human memory could do.
47:41Here are stored the insight, the experience, the wisdom of past generations,
47:47so that we can consult it, benefit from it, and in turn contribute to it.
47:53So we're no longer dependent on the infinitely slow processes of physical evolution.
47:58If we need to fly, we don't have to wait for millions of years while our arms turn into wings.
48:05Over a few generations, we can study the problems of physics and metallurgy and mathematics and aerodynamics,
48:12and build ourselves aeroplanes.
48:15And as this information increases with growing speed,
48:18growing speed.
48:19So we've developed radically new methods of storing and retrieving it all.
48:24The computer, the transistor, the microprocessor, and the silicon chip,
48:38all developed within the last decade or so,
48:41now give us even greater power to sort our knowledge, to link fact to fact,
48:44so that our understanding of the nature of the world we inhabit becomes ever more detailed, ever more subtle.
48:51With the help of electronics, we have the ability to recall information from data banks,
48:59no matter where they're situated.
49:01And we can communicate directly and instantaneously with one another right round the globe.
49:05We can predict the behaviour of our machines, and can make mathematical calculations which were once quite beyond the human brain to compute.
49:19And with the existence of worldwide communications, and the use of powerful computers,
49:32we're beginning to forecast with greater precision that most unpredictable of events in our planet,
49:38its daily weather.
49:3920,000 years ago, man drew messages for the gods in caves.
49:51Now he sends them to extraterrestrial beings in the sky.
49:58In his rockets, he puts images to meet other beings in other galaxies, in case they exist.
50:03Images of himself in the gesture of welcome.
50:15Details of his discoveries.
50:24And photographs that he hopes may give other intelligences elsewhere some impression of what life is like on Earth.
50:33docking him.
50:36They were a weekly traveler.
50:38It's a very familiar view of the planet.
50:41The next song appears on Earth.
50:43Weshgaston, you can see the noise of your eyes.
50:46Education is the sun.
50:48Then he dresses on Earth.
50:50He sets the sun.
50:52He accomplishes the sun.
50:54He sells the sun.
50:56He's the sun.
50:58He thinks the sun is the sun.
50:59This is the last program in this natural history and it's very different from all
51:24the others because it's been devoted to just one animal, ourselves. And that may have been a very
51:30misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate
51:35triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose
51:42other than to put man on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief.
51:48No reason to suppose indeed that man's stay on earth should be any longer than that of the
51:54dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one
52:00generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here
52:05on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world. And if man were to disappear for
52:11whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small unobtrusive creature that would seize
52:17the opportunity and with a spurt of evolution take man's place. But although denying a special place
52:26in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over
52:34the world and everything in it. And so whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him.
53:11¶¶
53:41¶¶
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