PBS's Nova ‘Dawn of Humanity’

It's 2 hours, but very interesting to watch. I really enjoyed this. Repeated on PBS over the next week.

http://ift.tt/1MdO9pq

Review: PBS’s ‘Dawn of Humanity’ Puts Prehistory in a New Light

Quote:

Documentaries about prehistory and paleoanthropology are usually interesting, sometimes even thought-provoking. But you don’t often encounter one that’s thrilling. Yet that is a fitting adjective for “Dawn of Humanity,” a program being broadcast on Wednesday night that brings an aura of breaking news to a field that can often seem musty. The two-hour episode of “Nova,” which is being shown on PBS and is already on the PBS website, tells the expanded story of the exciting fossil find in South Africa that made headlines last week: the discovery of a wealth of early hominid bones deep in a cave northwest of Johannesburg. The lead paleoanthropologist on the excavation, Lee R. Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, seems to have been thinking “television special” from the get-go, and the result, produced jointly by “Nova” and National Geographic, is bracing. The program takes us through the serendipitous discovery by two cave explorers in 2013 when one stepped into a crevice to get out of the way of the other and realized that he was actually in a narrow passageway. Descending farther and farther, the two came to a chamber of bones, and the photographs they brought back set Dr. Berger in motion. Though that’s true only figuratively; he wasn’t small enough to get into the cave himself. “I put a call out on Facebook saying, ‘I need skinny scientists who are not claustrophobic,’ ” he says. The result was a team of six women. The first in was Marina Elliott of Simon Fraser University in Canada. “First of all, the cave is beautiful, just geologically beautiful,” she says, describing that initial encounter. “And then you look down, and there was just a sea of bone. And it was obviously just not regular bone.” After tantalizing us with the initial discovery, “Dawn of Humanity” pauses to fill in the background of the long quest to document the human family tree, different interpretations of what early hominids were like and the distinction between the genus Homo and the genus Australopithecus. It’s all in service to underscoring just what the cave discovery meant. The documentary is thrilling not just because of what was found, but because we are flies on the wall as the scientists realize they have made a discovery that most people in their field can only dream of. “We in paleoanthropology sit in one of the few fields that probably have more scientists studying objects than there are objects to study,” Dr. Berger says. “In fact, the vast majority of the people who do what I do will never find a single piece of one of these early humans.” Now he and his colleagues have found hundreds, and apparently a new species of human ancestor.