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National Geographic Documentaries - Last Man Standing: The Human Race

Seizoen: 2005 - Aflevering: 10 / 645 - Eerst uitgezonden: 28 maart 2005 - Episode ID: 801962

It's the world's most intriguing mystery. The mystery of us. How did we get here? And what happened on the journey from ape to man? The trail begins somewhere in Africa. Here apes first descended from trees and started walking on two legs. Then, astonishing things began to happen. Over the eons, these creatures morphed into a variety of weird human forms. Many lived in the same place at the same time. Some walking apes - including our own species, modern humans - undertook epic migrations out of Africa. On these journeys, they left evidence of their perilous lives. Super-predators like sabre-toothed cats and giant crocs hunted them. Drought, volcanoes and maybe even other ape-men killed them. To survive, we modern humans became more adaptable, cooperative, and clever. But then something went wrong. Investigators have reached a startling conclusion: around 70 thousand years ago, we almost became extinct. What happened? How did we survive these threats to become the last walking ape standing, the one species who left the other contenders in the dust, seized the planet, and declared it our own? In Last Man Standing: The Human Race we'll explore this captivating mystery and search for the ultimate survivor. This new programme touches upon two astounding discoveries. The first just came to light on the remote Indonesian island of Flores. Here, investigators find an entirely new kind of human half our height - nicknamed the 'Hobbit'. It's one of the biggest finds in the last fifty years. This new species may force a rewrite of the human story. At the bottom of Africa, another bone detective finds some very different fossils. These are not the bones of a dwarf. They are the bones of an ancient giant - nicknamed 'Goliath'. For decades, the best minds in science studied fossils and concluded that human evolution was a straightforward story: millions of years ago somewhere in Africa, one of our ape ancestors came down from the trees. He picked up the genetic baton that would eventually be passed to us. It was the prevailing scientific theory, supported by the best scientific minds for most of the twentieth century. And it was wrong. Nature experimented wildly with the human form. And many of these experiments confronted each other face to face. A new generation of young investigators is unravelling the mystery of us, showing how we developed earlier than was once thought and explaining why we emerged alone from the crowded field of walking apes as the last man standing.