Good evening.
Now, I have a question for you.
What looks marvellous on a coffee table,
terrifying at children's birthday parties
and holds the secrets to human evolution?
That answer and more in this week's:
That's us - the modern humans.
Homo sapiens is our fancy scientific name.
We date back more than 300,000 years or so.
We can walk. We can talk. We can juggle.
Some of us.
And we have critical thought.
We are, in my opinion,
the most important species on the planet.
I may be a little biased.
Homo sapiens originated in Africa, and there are fossils to prove it.
For a long time now, scientists have believed
that our species evolved over millions and millions of years.
Our earliest ancestors probably looked far more like this.
Over time, through the process of natural selection,
their descendants started to walk and talk and light fires
and do all kinds of humany things,
like eventually becoming scientists who dig up skulls -
skulls which have given us clues as to how we've changed over time.
Take my distant cousin here, Homo habilis.
We look kind of similar - same dead eyes -
but he has a much smaller brain.
And look at those chompers.
Homo habilis lived about 2 million years ago,
but we can go back even further.
Meet Australopithecus afarensis.
This handsome devil is quite different to me.
Same dead eyes, but look at those cheekbones.
Australopithecus afarensis lived about 3 to 4 million years ago,
was about the size of a chimpanzee and had a brain size to match,
but unlike chimps, walked upright.
The most famous Australopithecus afarensis is Lucy.
She was discovered by scientists in Ethiopia in 1974,
but we can go back, once again, even further.
This 3.8 million-year-old skull
was discovered recently by a goat herder in Ethiopia.
It's a male from a species known as Australopithecus anamensis.
It's not the first anamensis discovery,
but it is really important,
not just because it's the most complete ever found,
but because of how old it is.
Scientists think it lived around the same time as Lucy's species,
even though Lucy's was a little smarter.
This is really a game-changer in a lot of ways
and answers old questions
that we've had lingering around for decades.
It means the evolution of humans
is much more complicated than once thought,
and just like there are different species of ape,
there were probably different species of human ancestors
walking around on two legs at the same time.
Well, that's all for this week's:
But tune in next week
when one lucky viewer gets an unexpected surprise.
ALL: # Happy birthday to you. #
(SCREAMS)