The big mystery of human evolution began ten million years ago ... Back then one kind of creature reigned supreme: the apes. They were everywhere. The Earth really was the planet of the apes. ibid.
Over a hundred years ago the Big Brain Theory of human evolution was born. ibid.
It was not the skull of an antelope but of an ape-like creature. And it seemed to have an unusually large brain. The question was, Did it cross the magical cerebral Rubicon of six-hundred cubic centimetres? ibid.
Lucy ... Just older than #1470 ... This ape-like creature had one clear human characteristic. And it wasn’t a big brain ... She walked on two legs, not four ... They found Lucy’s footprints ... Lucy’s brain was just too small. ibid.
Two-legged Lucy was just over three million years old. ibid.
#1470 could be descended from Lucy ... The big brain theory was now in the bin ... We had walked on two legs ... Lucy now became the great iconic fossil. ibid.
Why intelligence should have evolved from moving on two legs doesn’t seem obvious. ibid.
Between six and eight million years ago ... In place of the tree-dwellers were new fossils, fossils of a completely different type of animal. Animals that lived on open plains. ibid.
For some unknown reason at the end of the planet of the apes there had been an environmental revolution of the planet. ibid.
There had been a mass extinction. ibid.
Kenya ... A possible human ancestor. Was it the same species as Lucy? ... The difference between the new skull and Lucy was fundamental. They had to be different species ... The new skull was 3.5 billion years old, almost exactly the same age as Lucy. It meant they had found a possible different ancestor … Lucy was not unique. Here was clear evidence of adaptive radiation in humans. And so in February this year they announced that they had discovered flat-faced man. ibid.
We did not defy the laws of nature. We are simply the ape that got lucky. ibid.
For many biologists there seemed to be only one possible solution: there may have been a severe ice-age but not a fully fledged snowball that covered all the oceans because life-forms that should have died out are still with us. Horizon: Snowball Earth, BBC 2001
The ice becomes clean and transparent. Because of this transparency life-giving sunlight would have been reaching down into the snowball seas. McKay realised that even at its height there would have been havens around the snowball’s equator where the ice is thin enough for photo-synthetic life to cling on below. ibid.
It may just be that the snowball saga was the biggest force for the development of life the world has ever seen. ibid.
At the end of the Permian era 95% of all life died. It was the biggest traverse in the forward march of evolution ever recorded. Yet up to recently relatively nothing was known about this extraordinary event ... 250,000 million years ago hundreds of thousands of square miles of Siberia caught fire ... It started with the Siberian Traps. Horizon: The Day the Earth Nearly Died, BBC 2002
Could it be we somehow evolved religious belief as a survival mechanism? But if religious faith is somehow a by-product of evolution, does that mean belief in a God can be dismissed as a quirk of Nature? Horizon: God on the Brain, BBC 2003
Hidden on the wild coast of South Africa where the Indian Ocean joins the Atlantic there is a cave. Today it is abandoned but once it teemed with life. For here tens of thousands of years ago some of our earliest ancestors lived. Horizon: The Day We Learned to Think, BBC 2003
When did our ancestors cease being brute animals and first become truly human? When did we learn to think? ibid.
For archaeologists this realisation that art, language and thought was all the same thing was a huge breakthrough. Suddenly what they had to look for was clear. Discover the earliest forms of human art and you would have found the day we learned to think. ibid.
And they found more: intricately worked statuettes. Thousands of pieces of jewellery. Here at last in Europe was the evidence archaeologists had been looked for ... And it all dated from the same period: about thirty-five thousand years ago. ibid.
Modern human behaviour had not started in Europe 40,000 years ago but in Africa at least 30,000 years earlier. The human revolution theory had to be wrong ... Like everything else in Nature thought and language had emerged gradually just as the laws of evolution said they should. ibid.
One of science’s greatest theories – evolution – is under attack. The threat is emerging from the only scientific super-power on Earth, provoking some of the biggest names in science to hit back. Horizon: A War on Science, BBC 2006
This is the story of a battle between faith and knowledge. A defining moment in the scientific landscape of the twentieth century. ibid.
Irreducible complexity was a simple but provocative idea. It was based on the observation of natural machines whose parts are so inter-dependant that they could not have evolved. ibid.
An ancient life-form with ancient viruses – this discovery convinced Professor Young that viruses are much older than we’ve previously thought. Viruses have been infecting life from the moment it first emerged. And they’re a huge driving evolutionary force. They have helped determine what has lived and what has died. Horizon: Why Do Viruses Kill? BBC 2010
Cooked food lights up all our senses. The smell, the sight, the touch and of course the taste are amongst the great pleasures of existence. Horizon: Did Cooking Make Us Human? BBC 2010
We all have our favourite food. It’s a feast for the eyes, a temptation for the nose, and pure pleasure for the mouth. But it might be that what we eat has done much more to make us what we are than anyone could possibly imagine. What is on our plate is the most direct link we have to our ancestors. ibid.
Could eating meat really have caused us to evolve? ibid.
Could cooking really have caused us to evolve? ibid.
The human ability to cook gives us a massive advantage over all other animals. ibid.
At every generation the selection process was repeated with only the tamest foxes being allowed to breed. Within just three generations the aggressive behaviour began to disappear. Half a century on the fiftieth generation of foxes are tamer than ever. It’s an accelerated model of how dogs might have been domesticated from wolves ... But it’s not just the fox’s behaviour that’s changed. Just a few generations into the experiment scientists began to notice a curious phenomenon: the normal pattern and silver colour of the coats changed dramatically. Horizon: The Secret Life of a Dog, BBC 2010
The Natural History Museum in Oxford was packed with nearly a thousand spectators. Making the case for Evolution was a young biologist called Thomas Huxley known as Darwin’s Bulldog. He was one of a new generation who thought Religion should play no part in the business of Science. Standing against the Theory of Evolution was the Bishop of Oxford, Thomas Wilberforce. Horizon: The End of God? A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion, BBC 2010
Behind Galileo’s downfall were two questions that are central to the whole story of Science and Religion: Who owns knowledge and what makes one source of knowledge more reliable than another? ibid.
Are we still evolving? ... I want to know if we are still changing. Dr Alice Roberts, Horizon: Are We Still Evolving? BBC 2011
What’s surprising is that it only took the worms [new species formed in arsenic soil] a hundred and seventy years to change so much. ibid.
In the past we were all dark-skinned. ibid.
With two-hundred and fifty areas of genomes that have undergone recent natural selection, it’s clear that we have evolved away from our ancestors more than anyone anticipated. ibid.
There are few more pivotal moments in our past than when we started farming some ten thousand years ago. It was to be a defining point in our history. It would transform our diet, our cultures, and provide the foundations of our civilisations. But did its impact run even deeper than that? ibid.
This really could be as far as we go ... We’d need to keep in control of disease for ever. ibid.
Viruses and bacteria don’t stay the same: they evolve too. ibid.
It turns out our evolution is impossible to stop. ibid.
We are on the verge of being able to genetically engineer our own future. ibid.
We might be evolving faster than ever. Who knows where it will take us. ibid.
Our species is just a tiny twig on this massive tree of life. ibid.