L'aventure des premiers hommes

Brilliant series. I devour all the BBC history and science programs.

The incredible human journey covers the successful exodus from Africa of modern humans and their colonisation of the world. Each episode concentrates on a different continent. How, when and what changes and challenges we faced.

Alice also did a Horizon episode The Lost Tribes of Humanity covering some of the same ground and offering a update to this information.

Any downside? It feels petty but I thought camping on the savana was a stunt too far and tiny parts of the narration is out-of-date on the DVD compared to the recent broadcasts. E.g. in 2009 they hadn't yet learned that modern and more ancient humans had interbred. The DVD commentary says we didn't while in the recent TV broadcasts she correctly says that we did.

My reference for BBC TV-docu is Simon Schama's a history of Britain that is so packed with information that you need to view it trice to fill all the holes left by former small lapses of concentration. The same can happen here but I'm afraid the lapses of concentration constitute dozing off from lack of input. For example 15 minutes I am looking at someone taking a walk in the heated rough to some sandpit were the oldest human remains were once found. Since the terrain may have altered 100% since then the net info is hardly above 0. I love the involvement of the in the footsteps effect from Michael Wood but this does nothing for me. The next 10 minutes I see a lady spending a night in the wild and seeing how scared she is. And what is the target age for this exactly? I hope the BBC prime interest for docu making is not going to be to please as many people as possible. Entertainment and infotainment are all around. I hope they keep making programs that offer a lot of information too. My minority vote perhaps.

It's modern, it's fresh, it doesn't have boring moments, but... it's too much assertive and does not take into account fresh and relevant possibilities.

This documentary was made in 2009, new data was available in 2010. Neanderthals interbred after all with homo sapiens (conclusion by Neanderthal genome Project), and even so if the Chinese Homo Erectus indeed is not a direct ancestor of Chinese people, indeed as modern humans have in their genome traces of Neanderthal's, Asian people have also Denisovans' ancestry who share some similarities (teeth) with Homo Erectus.

It's too focused and emphasized only on available data (at the time the documentary was made) and does not focus on other reasonable hypothesis. Not to say is self-centered on Alice Roberts's point of view. It abuses on a linear logic when the result of that logic excludes possibilities outside its own realm. The result could not be scientific, like it wasn't when Neanderthal-Sapiens interbreed hypothesis was excluded just because the majority didn't thought so.

Although it's a fresh light palaeoanthropology documentary it has a biased point of view.