Walking with Cavemen [DVD] [2003]

Too much each episode is spent in a series of dramatic visual and audio build-ups to the next momentous point about our ancestors relationship to us: this style of dramatised revelation gets very repetitive and grates quite quickly. This does lessen in the last two episodes, but, too me it looks it comes off looking like padding, or worse, an attempt to beguile the watcher with effects rather than informing them.

Again, in the earlier episodes I feel that the narrator, Robert Winston, is spending too much time addressing the camera rather than trying to convey information. Having an unseen narrator had the advantage that he could just read from a script (a.k.a. Branagh in Walking with Dinosaurs and Beasts).

I would say that the series doesn’t hit its stride until the third episode, but by then we’re dealing with Homo Ergaster and our ancestors are looking much like us by this point. I believe that pre-Ergaster, the series does not do a good or terribly enlightening job.

In summary though, this series is too short, too light weight and falls a long way short of what it could have been. The series only captures a small fraction of the grandeur that is human history, and I don’t believe gives it due weight. I can’t really recommend that you buy this title unless, like me, you have a deep fascination with human prehistory, but even then, I suspect you’re likely to be disappointed. The BBC has allowed too much of the content potential of this series to be unrealised, and I never once during this series thought “wow, that was well done.”

This series was an utter disgrace and devoid of almost any accurate information, and so the DVD is the same. The reviews giving this 5 stars have to be by people who had no prior knowledge of the subject matter, and this programme has 'educated' them with totally inaccurate and sensationalist theories. Robert Winston is totally out of his field in tackling the issue of human evolution, and as a result, he looks like a fool. I watched every episode of this series purely to gasp at the false theories it proposed. Aside from the terrible accuracy of the programmes, the presentation and representation of the extinct species it covers is terrible. Avoid at all costs

General review:

The DVD series covers human evolution from the Australopithecines (3 million years ago) up to anatomically modern humans. The coverage of australopithecus is poor, with the species' posture and behaviour being false or incredibly speculative. This species was relatively small and its entire behaviour practically unknown, any concept of a family unit as is seen in western europe today is surely incorrect and simply applying modern living to our view of the past. It gets worse as the DVD progresses to cover Homo habilis and Homo erectus, with them appear sometimes without genitals and looking like scruffy savages. When was the last time you saw a healthy chimp or human look as dirty or cliched as is presented in this series? Never. Their behaviour is again total speculation, false speculation at that, which has been totally discredited by modern studies. Their tool use and technology is vaguely accurate, but it portrays most of them as hunters when they in fact likely scavenged from carcasses around waterholes, initially simply smashing bones open to get marrow and much later competing for meet from the carcass. Overall, our ancestors are portrayed in a glorious way in an attempt to lead up to the 'wonder' that the programme tries to make out we are....this emotive stance totally betrays the present view of our evolution

The series also proposes reasons why humans became bipedal (walking on 2 legs like we do) which are absolutely laughable and sensationalised for the television audience. Let me asure you that humans didn't become bipedal because of 'sex' like the programme insists, with the argument that walking on 2 legs saves enough energy so our ancestors could have even more sex being absolutely false, hence why almost every other savannah animal (including primates like the baboon) is still quadrupedal. Truth is that many reasons are thought to have lead to bipedalism, with noone really knowing which were more influential. They include minimising the area expose to the sun (head and shoulders instead of entire back), to free up hands for tool use, change in foraging, for infant carrying (since we lost body hair for them to cling to)...and a few others.

So to sum up, if you buy this DVD you will be buying a work of fiction (except for the time scale and species names), with every 30 minutes of footage perhaps containing 1 or 2 points that evolutionary scientists would agree with. Believing the contents of this programme will be to have learnt things that are not true, and will be a waste of your money. David Attenborough's programmes on mammals and primates are infinitely more entertaining, accurate and worth your time