It's 3.5 million years ago and in East Africa a remarkable species of ape roams the land. Australopithecus afarensis has taken the first tentative steps towards humanity by standing and walking on two legs. Just a few million years previously, Africa was covered, almost edge-to-edge, with dense rain forest. Our ancestors almost certainly used all four limbs to move and live and hunt in their tree-top homes. But massive geological turmoil changed their destiny
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Walking With Cavemen - 03 - Savage Family
The Africa of two million years ago is a crossroads in human evolution. Half a dozen or more different species of ape-men exist alongside one another. Each of them has exploited the environment in a different way and has developed their own survival strategy . One and a half million years ago, a new breed of ape-man walks the land. In southern Africa, Homo ergaster has taken the next step to becoming human. They have long, modern looking noses, which cool air as they breathe.
cavemen 2
While dinosaurs dominated the land, huge marine reptiles ruled the water. Ichthyosaurs looked very like dolphins - but they weren't the top predators of the Jurassic seas.
Argentinosaurus was the largest dinosaur ever - 35 metres long, and up to a hundred tonnes in weight.
Why the dinosaurs died out is one of the most frequently asked questions of dinosaur experts. Will we ever know the answer?
In the Early Jurassic, dinosaurs started getting larger. Diplodocus was over 30 metres long - but even he wasn't safe from predators
The largest animals ever to fly were pterosaurs. But during their reign, birds as we know them were also beginning to appear.
There's considerable evidence that dinosaurs once lived at polar latitudes. How did they survive the cold?
When dinosaurs first appeared the world was very different. There were no mammals, no birds and no lizards. But there were some lizard-like reptiles.
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