Too much each episode is spent in a series of dramatic visual and audio build-ups to the next momentous point about our ancestors relationship to us: this style of dramatised revelation gets very repetitive and grates quite quickly. This does lessen in the last two episodes, but, too me it looks it comes off looking like padding, or worse, an attempt to beguile the watcher with effects rather than informing them.

Again, in the earlier episodes I feel that the narrator, Robert Winston, is spending too much time addressing the camera rather than trying to convey information. Having an unseen narrator had the advantage that he could just read from a script (a.k.a. Branagh in Walking with Dinosaurs and Beasts).

I would say that the series doesn’t hit its stride until the third episode, but by then we’re dealing with Homo Ergaster and our ancestors are looking much like us by this point. I believe that pre-Ergaster, the series does not do a good or terribly enlightening job.

In summary though, this series is too short, too light weight and falls a long way short of what it could have been. The series only captures a small fraction of the grandeur that is human history, and I don’t believe gives it due weight. I can’t really recommend that you buy this title unless, like me, you have a deep fascination with human prehistory, but even then, I suspect you’re likely to be disappointed. The BBC has allowed too much of the content potential of this series to be unrealised, and I never once during this series thought “wow, that was well done.”


Prerelease review   March 28, 2003
 2 out of 4 found this review helpful

Excellent follow up to Walking with Dinosaurs giving an enlightening and entertaining natural history of man. Well thought out and researched and no expense spared visual effects all contribute to make this a must for lovers of natural history and essential viewing for homework assignments.