BBC's latest documentary series, 'Evolution', explores the history of life on Earth through the eyes of five creatures, including the single-cell forebear LUCA. The series delves into the evolution of elephant relatives, including a shy, big-eyed fur bundle called a tree hyrax, as well as a collection of prehistoric proboscideans (or big-nosed beasts).
Evolution ary scientists who devised the acronym LUCA for our single-cell forebear must have been quite pleased with themselves. Like the song, it's catchy. DNA analysis proves that all of us are descended from that one speck of organic matter, nearly four billion years ago: our Last Universal Common Ancestor.
In the first episode of his ambitious, five-part series explaining the history of Evolution, Chris Packham did his best to make us care about Luca. He called it 'plucky and lucky', and 'the little cell who could,' as though Luca were a character in a Thomas The Tank Engine story. The truth is, Luca didn't have a very interesting backstory or narrative arc. It simply split in half.
And then those halves split into two more halves, and so on... for thousands of millennia. It wasn't until three billion years later, we were told, that these cells started to clump together.
Chris Packham dons prehistoric prosthetics for his epic new BBC series Evolution, tracing four billion years of life on Earth through five creatures There are no fossils of Luca and its descendants, and Chris didn't say how we can be sure it took three billion years, so we'll just have to take his word for it. That's the problem with science. When it doesn't know something, it leaves a gap and hopes we won't notice.
As a distraction, scientists come up with catchy names. They called the first cluster of cells a 'Death Star', which tells us nothing except that researchers in laboratories are usually Star Wars obsessives. Chris injected plenty of dry humour to keep the tone from becoming too didactic. Explaining how some elephancestors had gills, he noted, 'Elephants aren't famed for their deep-sea diving capabilities.
' All this, though the show aired after the watershed, made it entirely suitable for all ages. If there are inquisitive children in your family asking difficult questions about how life on Earth began, the whole series is available on BBC iPlayer. The series also explores the evolution of elephant relatives, including a shy, big-eyed fur bundle called a tree hyrax, as well as a collection of prehistoric proboscideans (or big-nosed beasts).
In the 1970s, buying a house was just something you did,' sneered presenter Oobah Butler, in How To Trick Your Way Onto The Property Ladder (Ch4). And there I was thinking my mum and dad slaved their whole lives to manage it. Silly me. Thanks to spectacular graphics, the story was absorbingly beautiful to watch even if it did gloss over the details.
We traced the evolution of elephant relatives, including a shy, big-eyed fur bundle called a tree hyrax, as well as a collection of prehistoric proboscideans (or big-nosed beasts)
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