History of the Anthropoid: The Search for the Beginning

Imagine spending an entire year in the African desert sifting screen after screen of sand in hopes of finding, on average, three or four single hominid (primate ancestor) teeth. Of course, there are the occasional scientific breakthrough discoveries like the four million-year-old skeletal remains of Lucy (who may have been a Linus according to one researcher). This video wonderfully details the painstaking efforts made by paleoanthropologists to find human fossils, refine evolutionary theory and, most importantly, get grants. The viewer is taken to an excavation site in Tanzania to meet Darwin doyenne Meave Leakey (her famous fossil-hunter husband Richard, now an opposition party leader, appears for a brief interview under armed guard), and later to the Nairobi Museum where over half of all hominid fossils ever found are kept in a vault-like room (made bombproof by prescient builders). The African plain is resplendently rendered in this top-drawer documentary, which should appeal to science majors as well as the science-challenged. The time-lapse sequences of chimp-to-human skull evolution, and factoids such as "only 5% of our genes differ from the first apes to walk upright," may start some creationists mobilizing, however. Highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (W. Pierce)