He wants to find out what happened to our ancestors when violent climate change turned their world upside down – and what they can teach us as we face our own crisis.
Using CGI effects and dramatic imagery, this series attempts to illustrate how climate has shaped human history from the beginning. In his quest, Robinson travels to some of the world’s most important archaeological sites looking for evidence. While some civilisations flourished, others were destroyed.
Vicious and sudden changes to the climate killed millions but benign change has enabled humans to multiply and develop at an extraordinary pace.
In tonight’s first programme, helped by a leading archaeologist and climate change modeller, Robinson explores how a small group of our earliest African ancestors were rescued from extinction by the last great global warming 130,000 years ago. The barren landscape surrounding the oases in which they lived was transformed to lush savannah,
enabling them to traverse the continent and make it to Europe.
On the Russia steppes, he discovers how European homo sapiens adapted to survive the last great Ice Age.
But, scarily, not all humans coped so well. In Gibraltar, Robinson finds the last resting place of our Neanderthal cousins.
Lacking our “social brains”, which enabled us to trade and get help from outsiders, the Neanderthals starved, dying out in lonely communities and even resorting to cannibalism.
Whether there is anything we can learn from the past that might change our own futures remains to be seen.
Man on Earth, Channel 4, 9pm
ON A MISSION: Tony Robinson examines climate change.
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