Clip description
In June 1997, an inspired piece of scientific investigation by paleoanthropologist Dr Ron Clarke and his team resulted in a remarkable discovery in a cave in South Africa.
Curator’s notes
This program offers a well-written script and great narration from Hugo Weaving, one of Australia’s finest actors, to explain what ought to be impossible to visualise: the planet and its life forms millions of years ago. With stunning re-creations of a wild and untamed planet of ice ages, massive land and sea movements and intense temperature fluctuations, we follow the fortunes and the migratory journeys of various groupings of hominids, as they make their way out of the trees, across the plains of Africa and eventually further north.
A lot of the dramatised filming for The Human Journey took place in Tasmania because director Roger Scholes knew he would be able to find there every kind of landscape they required. The Tasmanian actors he worked with were people who live on and work the land and are adept at using their hands.
The discoveries of paleoanthropologists like Dr Ron Clarke help piece together this investigative puzzle, rather like detectives solving the crimes in some of the popular contemporary television drama programs like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2008).