Image: BBC Press
By Jon Donnis
For most of human history, there were no books, no archives, no written clues. Just bones, teeth, fire pits and questions. But the new BBC series Human, fronted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, takes those fragments and turns them into a sweeping, vivid story of who we are and how we got here. Over five episodes, this documentary digs through 300,000 years of history, shifting how we understand what it means to be human.
The first episode, The First of Us, begins where we did. Morocco. Not the place most people associate with human origins, but the Jebel Irhoud site there rewrote the timeline, pushing the age of Homo sapiens back 100,000 years earlier than we thought. From there, the series jumps continents and species, piecing together new discoveries from ancient DNA, fossil records and even the microscopic rings in tooth enamel. It's a story not just of survival, but of imagination. Rituals in Botswana caves, extinct species like Homo erectus and Denisovans, the strange truth that for most of our past we weren't the only humans walking the Earth.
Ella Al-Shamahi brings humour, clarity and sharp insight to material that could easily become abstract. She doesn't just explain what we've found, but why it matters. Why our flat faces are so unusual, why we outlived other humans, and what it says about the choices we made. Whether it's ten-foot prehistoric bears or the slow realisation that Homo sapiens weren't made in one single place but formed through a long interwoven network across Africa, this series promises to make ancient history feel alive again.
Human looks set to be one of the most surprising and wide-reaching documentary series of the year. It doesn't just trace where we came from, it questions what kind of species we became, and what might have been lost along the way.
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