It can seem of late that the experiment in evolution we call Homo sapiens has gone horribly wrong, notwithstanding my ability to touch type letters that make words that make sentences, and perform all the little operations that feed them into this thing we call a newspaper. Humanity is a word we use to describe what is supposed to be our essential nature — caring, compassionate, self-sacrificing. But you don’t have to look far to see its inverse — people being irrational, superstitious, fearful, cruel. That sapiens is Latin for “wise” can just seem like an ironic joke.
How did we get here — for better and worse? The early millennia of our species’ history — hundreds of thousands of years — is the subject of “Human,” an exhilarating five-part BBC series premiering Wednesday as part of the PBS series “Nova.” (Support your local station.) Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi presents in the British style, narrating in person as she travels the world, anywhere traces of our prehistoric ancestors may be found, exploring caves, pressing through jungles, scampering up mountains, sailing on the Nile, crossing deserts and snowy wastes — often seen from far above with apparently no one else around for miles. (How did she get there, you may ask yourself.)
Of Yemeni and Syrian heritage, Al-Shamahi grew up in Birmingham, England; earned degrees in evolutionary biology and taxonomy and biodiversity from Imperial College London and was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2015. Her previous television work includes “Neanderthals — Meet Your Ancestors” (2017), “Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon” (2020) and “Tutankhamun: Secrets of the Tomb” (2022). (She also does stand-up comedy.) Onscreen, she has the charismatic presence of a movie adventurer, like a chill Lara Croft, while her measured voice-over narration sounds something like Cate Blanchett setting the scene at the beginning of a “Lord of the Rings” movie. The series, which visits ancient sites and ongoing digs, where healthy-looking young people slowly brush away the dust of millennia, does make paleoanthropology look kind of sexy.
As science, “Human” acknowledges that what we know is not all that we will know; fossils and artifacts tell us a lot — and suggest a lot more — but it’s not like anyone left a journal. Recent discoveries remake earlier discoveries and reset the timelines as new pieces of the puzzle are found and better tools to analyze them are invented. These are not your grandfathers’ cavemen (though many actually did live in caves).
The thrust of the tale is that we are the only surviving human species among several that once roamed the Earth, a line that has been around more than 300,000 years. (“Time and time again,” Al-Shamahi observes, our survival led “to the demise of everyone else.”) There were also Homo erectus, the first to leave Africa; Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “Hobbits,” a tiny race that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores; the Denisovans, who ranged across Asia; and the Neanderthals, who had “a vibrant, thriving culture” in spite of the picture in your head, headed north into Europe and, having hooked up with our gang, left almost everyone now alive — apart from those with strictly sub-Saharan roots — a pinch of their DNA. “It’s just the loveliest thought, isn’t it, that they live on and exist within us,” says Al-Shamahi.
Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi alongside a fossilized human footprint in White Sands National Park, N.M., in the documentary series “Human.”
(Tom Hayward / BBC / BBC Studios)
It’s a story of progress, obviously (for the Neanderthals, not so much, though they had a good run). As you may recall from school, hunter-gatherers followed the food; agriculture turned nomads into settlers, who turned wolves into dogs and sheep into wool. Settlers became city dwellers as populations increased and coalesced; large populations created specialized trades and encouraged cooperation, even as tribalism was “[scaled] to the size of a city,” and “tribal skirmishes” became “state warfare.” People!
Recreations of prehistoric life are happily kept to a minimum, and made suitably blurry and distant. The fun of the show is in the present world — it is fun, and quite beautifully filmed — following Al-Shamahi, as she traces fossilized footprints in White Sands, N.M.; visits Göbeklitepe, in southwest Turkey, “the oldest temple unearthed anywhere on the planet,” 6,000 years older than Stonehenge; picks leeches off her arm (“They’re actually quite irritating”); and exults over historically significant skulls, ancient tools and arrowheads and beads. Her excitement is not so much contagious as it is seductive.
Al-Shamahi takes her story up to the invention of writing, where prehistory may be said to end. (The alphabet, in which symbols represented sounds and eventually turned into the one I’m using here, was, in her telling, created by “lowly migrant workers,” mining turquoise for Egyptian jewelry. Income inequality: another human invention.)
“None of this was a foregone conclusion,” Al-Shamahi says, standing on London’s Millennium Footbridge, before the jagged glass peaks of modern British architecture. That it might have turned out very different for “the very last species of humans to have walked this Earth,” that Homo sapiens were not destined to win out, merely the best adapted to … adaptation, is a point she returns to through the series. Even as she celebrates “our cultural drive to come together, to learn from and inspire each other, to go further than what has gone before,” sounding a little like Captain Kirk, she knows too much of the past to predict the future.
“Is this basically the whole of our story?” Al-Shamahi asks. “Or are we on the first act or even prologue with a long future ahead of us? We have no idea … You never could have predicted how we got here, but where we go next is up to all of us.”
Good luck with that.