Sur la terre de nos ancêtres

Like a lot of people I was impressed with the previous "walking with" achievements. This one mostly uses real people and has a whole different feel to it. The acting is superb and you'll forget you're watching people in makeup and hairy suits. That said, there seems to be a constant problem with productions that portray early human ancestors. I guess there's a tendency to think ancient means crude and sloppy, and that's the way these beings are shown. Think brutish as in "Quest for Fire". Somehow I think smashing an egg in your hand and getting only a bit of it, stumbling around and wasting energy or wearing furs in the cold that look like they''ll fall off in a slight breeze isn't the way these guys survived to become you and me. Probably it's meant to show how different thay were from us, but I hope future attempts might use a little more imagination. Worth a look though.

The good is easy to describe. There's some great content here. Winston is a decent narrator. The episodes are well paced and there's plenty of educational content.

However, of the "walking with..." series, this is the one I enjoy the least. The reasons are (1) the acting of the primates is frequently weak and the makeup (eg. The ears) are always wrong. This is quite distracting and the illusion is frequently broken. (2) The facts are often speculative, eg. Primates started to walk upright for "sex"? Maybe, we walked upright to climb steep terrain + navigating through deep water with children + an increased ability to reach more food in the tree tops? Also, we have buried our dead for probably 500,000 years or more.

Overall, it's a good series. There are some interesting moments and some great theories. It's definitely worth the watch.

This show could have been great, since human evolution is a very interesting topic. This series should have followed the style and storytelling of the other Walking with... series, like the title promised (though I know it wasn't made by the original team, but it surely follows some elements of those series - the same CG models for example). Every other entry in the series shows the ecosystem around the "protagonist" of the episode. With this narrative, we can dive into the prehistoric world in more detail. This series could have featured great moments with our ancestors and other creatures interacting. Fighting off sabre-tooth cats, coming face-to face with Deinotheriums, cave bears etc. Without the ecosystem, the series feels dry. Instead, we got a ridiculous Gigantopithecus and a few shots of Megaloceros and mammonths. I almost hate this series, it's just feels so uncanny and unpleasant to watch.

Walking with Cavemen is a spin-off of shorts of the Walking With series and its central story is the evolution of homo sapiens, the humans or more simply us. I was amazed when I first saw it ,because I lucked any idea how we came in to being apart of what it is written in the bible. To add, the producers here made a very clever choice: unlike the previous Walking the main creatures are made by actors in suits ,which makes perfect sense considering that they are either our ancestor or close relatives. This documentary has quit engaging stories and you are going to feel that in the end, we are them and Humans have practically zero differences with the rest of the animal kingdom. One other great think is that ,though a spin-off it does not try to copy the rest Walkings, but be a being in its own right, unlike what is usually the case. The only reason why I have not give it a 10/10 is that the science is a bit inaccurate when it comes to who we start to walking up right and the first of its four episodes it is bit slow ,but apart from this nit picks it is perfect. In the end not hear those who say that it is awful or that we are the chosen ones of God, because that is rubbish and we are as part of this planet as we are the creature that create civilization. Go watch and if your liked the previous Walking ,you are going to like this one also.

I wanted to enjoy the "Walking With Cavemen" series and there were moments that were informative and sufficiently awe inspiring. The atmosphere of a serious look at human evolution was severely compromised, however, by the completely ridiculous insertion of the presenter, Robert Winston, into the action, as if he was traveling back in time to witness our ancestors first hand. Not only does Robert Winston have a silly looking mustache and an annoying manner, but we have to watch him racing about the prehistoric world in a variety of vehicles, as if he was the star of an action movie. In several hilarious moments, we even see Winston exchanging "meaningful" glances with our ape-like ancestors. By the time I saw Winston hovering above Africa, observing our ancestors from a hot air balloon, I was about ready to chuck the DVD out of the window in despair.

Even if you take Winston out of the equation, this documentary is sketchy and implausible at best. The "script-writers" can't seem to resist building narratives out of the lives of our ancestors, for example, in the whole situation with "Lucy" and her baby, which is presented as if it was an actual scenario that took place. Every point that is made is essentially presented as "fact", and while I am no expert on the subject, I found myself immediately questioning how they could possibly know these things. For example, Winston seemed quite insistent that the Neanderthals had "no imagination". Philosophical speculation about imagination being an essential component of consciousness aside, the discoveries of what appear to be burial grounds, complete with residues of garlanded flowers about the skulls of dead Neanderthals, was completely ignored, and would suggest that the Neanderthals did indeed have sufficient imagination to at least have some sort of concept of an afterlife. The documentary went on and on, presenting little in the way of evidence for any of the assertions it put forward or the scenarios that were constructed, which were often embarrassingly cheesy and played for comic effect.

As a work of fiction and imagination, perhaps, the "documentary" did succeed on some level, and the overwhelmingly interesting nature of the subject matter could not be completely sabotaged by the manner of presentation. But even the make-up, acting and special effects employed in the depiction of our ancestors had not progressed to any significant degree from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film made more than thirty years beforehand. Particularly laughable was a moment when several of our ancestors were confronted by a giant and angry gorilla in the prehistoric jungles of Asia, which played out like something from a fifties B-movie about Cavemen vs. the Monsters.

"Walking With Cavemen" is still a mildly entertaining and informative program, if not to be taken entirely seriously as a genuine presentation of science. The less heralded (and unfortunately still unavailable on DVD) Channel 4 presentation "Neanderthal", was a much better effort.