September 2000
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Check out http://www.foxnews.com/ for a piece Gareth wrote on the toromiro in Easter Island.
APE MAN - 6 Part BBC2 series
This article was first published in Radio Times, October 1998.
In 70 major filming trips to 45 countries over three long years no one involved in the making of this great series came closer to its subject than the master commentator himself. This is Sir David Attenborough on meeting what may be the world's tamest wild bird. "We were on a tiny South Sea island. I went into the dense forest and called like this," [the inimitable, animated Attenborough demonstration follows, with full sound effects, plus clapping hands] "prrrr....yo yo yo yo yo. Suddenly Providence petrels, huge birds the size of footballs, came thumping down through the canopy and landed at my feet. "I could pick them up. There is a sequence where one sits on my hand then crawls up my kneck. It's a fully wild bird - we see it flying away into the distance. Why does it come so close? We have no idea." Whether this tryst will come to rival the mountain gorilla clinch in Life on Earth in the register of Attenborough close encounters, only time will tell. But it is the sort of sequence children growing up today are likely to remember far into adulthood. That's the power of these films. A new Attenborough series is to documentary film-making what the Olympic Games is to athletics, or the World Cup to football. The same, roughly, four year gap; the same massive preparation and huge anticipation. And, so it seems, the whole world taking part. I'm in David Attenborough's London home for a rapid mind's eye tour to far-off locations from the ten programmes. Soon we are on the beach on Hood Island in the Galapagos as the tropical breakers crash in, and the waved albatrosses lumber out of the surf and take off towards the camera like antique bombers. Then on to the Atlantic rain forest in Brazil as the loudest avian sound of all, the deafening call of the bell bird, echoes through the trees. And, as we listen, humming birds like tiny feathered jewels waltz around our heads. We watch under the permanent drizzle of the Iguacu Falls in Paraguay as dusky swifts zip through the towering curtain of water to their nests. In the Kalahari lanner falcons drop with devastating speed into a flock of Cape pigeons. On the edge of a lake in Upper New York State the returning loons, the great northern divers, call poignantly over water as perfect as platinum. Many of the players in these films are exotic and stupendous and remote, but not all. And this is what sets The Life of Birds apart from every previous Attenborough series. He has amazing stories that are set in his, and your, back garden. "Researchers have only recently discovered how the black bibs on the house sparrow are exactly like insignia on soldiers' uniforms. The size of the bib denotes their rank. So we see the lance corporal sparrows start chatting up a nice female, when the sergeant arrives. He gives a special whistle. `Ok, clear off. She's mine.' And they do. `Sorry, sir'. Suddenly the colonel comes round the corner, and you don't see the sergent for dust. "You say: `Aw, come on, I don't believe it. It's just dusty squabbles. But once you see it demonstrated, you start seeing it all the time." We had travelled from High Andes to Suburbia. It is time for a brief stop over. I ask him if there is any other creature on Earth as accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal[italics] as a bird? And would that not make the bird the most successful creature on Earth? David Attenborough, ever the scientist, is a man so surgically precise with his answers, that he wants to test these assertions to destruction. "Let's see. Is the bird the most widespread kind of creature in the world. Well, hang on. What about insects? But there are no insects at sea. So two thirds of the earth's surface is without insects. Yet there are birds for out on the open sea. "No insects go to the poles, and survive extremely low temperatures. But birds do. And birds are underwater. They have been seen diving to 1000 feet. Birds have colonised the air in a fantastic way. They even fly over the Himalayas. Swifts stay on the wing nearly all their lives, making nests of bits of fluff they catch in the air. They even mate in the air. "Yes, there is no question but that birds are the most widespread and successful kind of organism in the world." If a distant civilisation contacted us to tomorrow and asked what our world was like, Life of Birds would be the series to transmit to them across the ether, along with Sir David's Life trilogy and his recent Private Life of Plants. And the series would be representing Planet Earth, not just Britain. The BBC's Natural History Unit stands alone when it comes to making wildlife documentaries like this. No other filmmaker anywhere commits the money and resources to make programmes of this length and scale. The ten 50 minute films cost #7.25 million and took three years to make. 48 camerapersons used the latest technology - including ultra-slow motion filming, night vision cameras and tiny cameras that film inside nests - allied to plain old-fashioned field craft to bring footage of some of the world's rarest birds, and examples of remarkable avian condust never filmed before. The series is founded on the usual exhaustive year-long, world-wide trawl by researchers to find the best answer to any question presenter and producers could put on birds, to provide the best example to illustrate any avian point they wanted to make. They frequently came up with things Attenborough himself had never heard of. "We wanted to show the best example of a bird living primarily at sea. I thought albatross. I was wrong. It turns out there's a strange little bird called the ancient murrelet. Just 36 hours after hatching the chicks are running down the beach like little clockwork toys, into the breakers and swimming five miles out of land. It spends the least time on land of any bird I've heard about." An intelligent bird? Try the Japanese crow. When they planted decorative walnuts in Japanese cities, the crows found an ingenious way to break into the tough nuts. They drop them in front of cars when they halt at red traffic lights. The advancing cars run over the nuts, cracking them open. When the lights change back to red, the crows walk across with the pedestrians, solemnly picking up bits of nut. The world's best bird mimic? On a fallen trunk in the dense southern beech forest in Australia, Attenborough came face to face with the lyre bird, attracted by a recording of its own voice. The lyre can imitate at at least 12 other birds. It can do the whirring of a camera's motor drive and the click of a shutter. It repeats the engine of a car, and the din of a car alarm. But it can do something more, that perhaps no other creature can - it speaks of its own destruction. It can imitate the screetch of the chainsaw wielded by the loggers coming to cut down its habitat. Some birds, however, can change their tune and survive. On a remote island off New Zealand young saddleback sing, naturally enough, in their parents' language. But when they disperse to different locations where birds sing in a different way, within days they learn these local accents and are able to address females in those accents, so they stand a better chance in courtship. "Think of the research needed to find that out, to study every little twirl and grace note and vibrato, to tell that it's this language and not that language. It provides extraordinary insights to demonstrate that the world of birds is so much more than we thought it was. "After this series I no longer watch, say, a pigeon drop from the sky into my garden in the same way as I used to. I know more about it; I have more empathy with it. I understand its problems and its abilities more than I ever did before. "It's not enough for us to just put a name to a bird and look at because it's pretty. We see only a tiny fraction of a bird's existence. There is a huge amount of its life that we have no knowledge of. I hope this series will enable people to get inside the mind of a bird."
APE MAN - 6 Part BBC2 series January 2000.
A sequence in Ape Man imagines the scarcely imaginable.Homo sapiens (Modern Man), little different from us today in physical shape and intellectual capacity, crossing paths 40,000 years ago with a human being of a separate, parallel species, Neanderthal Man.
We don't know for certain that our distant ancestors
ever did encounter the stereotypical slow-witted cave man
of the cartoons. The world would have seemed a much bigger
place them, and tiny wandering populations could easily
have missed one another. But there are strong
archaeological clues that they did overlap on a site at
Arcy sur Cure in France.
"It's uncanny enough that chimps are so close to us,"
says Professor Leslie Aiello, consultant to this six part
series, which traces human evolution from the earliest
primitive prototypes to the sophisticated cave painters of
25,000 years ago.
"But imagine having another humanoid species - another
type of man, an alternative to yourself - and actually
confronting that species. It's something for which we just
don't have the mental framework."
Wherever they lined up for their evolutionary High Noon,
there could only be one winner. Homo sapiens was smarter:
he had no need to bludgeon Neanderthal Man to extinction
with his better designed axeheads. In the end he may
simply have displaced his rival into hostile, marginal
lands by through superior social organisation.
Pity the poor Neanderthals. Roughly the same brain size
as Homo sapiens, but dull-witted by comparison, with few
creative skills, perhaps even lacking the power of speech.
Whatever happened, they were gone soon after our distant
forebears walked into Europe, just as the native Indians
quickly died out in the USA when the white man arrived.
The Arcy sequence, in the last episode of the series, is
more than just a candidate for the strangest meeting ever.
It underlies the startling truth of human evolution,
largely lost on us today in our human uniqueness. Our
predecessors were not alone.
Demonstation ape-men came rolling off the conveyor belt
for millions of years after the first forward-looking apes
took to two legs between four and six million years ago.
There have been 14 so far, with the near certainty that
the fossil remains of yet more species will be dug up.
They came and they went.
Often there there were several versions of hominid - at
one time as many as six - evolving in parallel, all being
tested to destruction by their environment. Every one went
extinct, except us. We were the winners in the
evolutionary horse race, not the inevitable outcome of
some five million years process of improvement on an
original model. It is even conceivable that some other
kind of man could have slipped past and reached the
winning line ahead of us.
Leslie Aiello, professor of anthropology??? at
University College London and a leading international
authority on ancient man, is in charge of steering the
series. I met this softly-spoken American in her small
office, just opposite Waterstones bookshop. "Yes, it must
be the most exciting subject there can be. We determine
who we are now by looking at who we were at various stages
in the past."
We are not here to talk dusty fossils. This is a lively,
dynamic discipline. "I've taught the same Introduction to
Human Evolution course every year since 1970 and I've
never given the same lecture twice. This field is changing
so rapidly. So much new is coming out of the ground, fresh
lines of analysis, new dating techniques."
In the past the sheer hugeness of the numbers
involved may have put this subject beyond our grsp, and
our interest. Not any more. The series Walking with
Dinosaurs has helped make the time scale of deep history
accessible.
We had dinosaurs for 180 million years, until they went
extinct some 65 milions years ago. Small, unassuming
mammals took over. In about 60 million years they evolved
to take over every vacant habitat niche. The top mammals
were the great apes. Anatomically they were heading our
way.
Arguably the most momentous event in the history of our
planet occured between 6 and 4.5 million years ago, when
those great apes reached a fork in the road. Some carried
on being apes; others turned away and developed into the
form that eventually led to modern man.
The following period of trial and error was
astonishingly short in evolution terms. Homo sapiens
appeared around 100,000 years ago. In just 100 millenia
that raw, final human model developed to the level of
cerebral sophistiocation that gave us Einstein,
Shakespeare and Michaelango.
The series Ape Man is not Meet the Ancestrors, plus a
few million years. Coaxing coherent stories from the
fossil evidence involves the highest level of analytical
and deductive reasoning. "We have picked out six key
pivotal points along the evolutionary journey, areas where
we could tell a good story, where we have enough
information to do more than just speculate," said
Professor Aiello.
"I look on human evolution as a series of stair steps.
The first major step seems to have been 4 to 4.5 million
years ago, when an ape-like creature made that first
crucial change to walking on two legs.
"Them about ????, there was some sort of dietary change,
driven, we think, by environmental shifts in East Africa,
with the spread of grasslands." With less forest food
available, the humanoids of the time switched to meat,
avaialble in small, nuitritous easy to digest packets, and
underground tubors.
"This led to an increase in body size and to the growth
of the brain, in a body form that would result in Homo
erectus. The first man, but still not quite like us."
Homo erectus walked out of Africa - with its equable
climate this was the probable cradle of human life. Man
was now international. For another million years that
early human body form didn't change: like a trusted old
car design, it worked.
So what did finish off Homo Erectus and the later Homo
heidleburgensis, the shadowy precursor of Neanderthal Man,
and us? "Something happened about half a million years
ago, probably the period we know least about. It may have
had something to do with the expansion of brain size."
Recent finds in Spain have added to the mystery. A
completely new species of man from around that time, the
travelling Homo antecessor, an early Columbus, is another
intriguing link in the chain leading to us.
Why did the brain of Homo sapiens suddenly soar away,
to the point where (as we see in episode one) men 25,000
years ago were carving exqisite figurines, and decorating
cave walls with art that still stuns us today? With this
man, who may have mastered abstarct concepts and have been
trying to contact a spirit world througfh his art, the
modern human was complete.
Professor Aiello speculates that rapid brain development
that culminated in cave painting may have been driven by
man's rudumentary verbal communication. "We think of the
positive aspects of language, but there may have been
negative ones too. If somebody did badly by you by
something they were saying, your brain needs to develop to
keep you ahead, so you can pas son your genes to the next
generation. Its a defense mechanism to prevent you from
being taken in."
Recent discoveries so new they have not even been
published in the academic press have been left out of the
series. There is, for example, nothing on an exciting site
in Africa, its findings still being studied, which could
yield yet more clues to our earliest origins. But with a
subject of so many (literally) deep and tenuous threads,
series producer Philip Martin decided to found the
programmes on the firm ground of what most experts agree
upon. "We looked for consensus, not dispute."
"Eacdh programme is about real humanoid precessors of
ours. We tell two stories, how we came to know about this
discovery, and who this person in the past was. So each
film steps backwards and forwards, pulling together what
we know, say, about a body found in a cave in Italy, and
the last few minutes of the life of that person 1.5
million years ago."
He decided against using the sort of computer graphics
which worked so well in Walking with Dinosaurs. "Two
things computer graphics can't do very well are hair and
humans. As our series is all about hairy humans, we
thought we'd better not."
There is much more to be discovered. The answers to
questions not even formulated may lie under our feet.
"There are going to be a large number of other significant
players to be found. And there is new technology, things
like the new stable isotope work, so we can tell a ittle
about the diet of hominid fossils."
How far back? "Oh, all the way back to Ardipithecus
africanus." So just imagine that for a moment - finding
out what our distant ancessors had for lunch, three
million(italics) years ago.