Ape to Man

Synopsis

The documentary traces a timeline of discoveries from 1856 to 2005, examining how each find influenced theories of human evolution. It begins with German schoolteacher Johann Fuhlrott in 1856, who recognised that a skull and legbone from a cave differed enough from modern humans to possibly be a missing link. The bones, 40,000 years old, belonged to a Neanderthal who used stone tools, harnessed fire, lived in caves, and had a stocky build with a large brain and skull.

In 1889, Eugène Dubois in Java, Indonesia, obtained a fossilised skull with a brain cavity too large for an ape, later called Java Man (Pithicantharus erectus), dated to 800,000 years ago; the scientific community rejected it as too ape-like. In 1912, Charles Dawson presented a fake fossil with a large skull and ape-like jaws, which fit the prevailing view of the missing link; the forgery took 40 years to uncover. In 1974, scientists in Ethiopia discovered Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis skeleton from 3.2 million years ago.

Lucy's ancestors had lived in forests for 50 million years, but she developed bipedal walking across grassland due to deforestation, which also freed her hands for later tool use. In 1996, Matthias Krings from LMU Munich extracted 40,000-year-old DNA from a Neanderthal bone; DNA tests showed only 8 differences among modern humans but 30 in Neanderthal DNA, proving they were a different species.