PBS.Human Spark (2009).1of3.WS.PDTV.XviD.Ekolb

Human Spark (2009)

premiering on PBS, January 6th, 2010

A three-part public TV series about you. And me, and all of us. “We’ll be trying to get to the bottom of what makes us human. Trying to find that thing we’re calling the ‘human spark’.” One way to examine us is by looking at what’s almost us. “We’ll be checking in with our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, to find out how the tiny difference in our genes, just 1 percent, makes such a huge difference to who we are and what we can do. Chimps are smart as a whip, but they’re not us. Why aren’t they?”

The Human Spark debuts on PBS Wednesday, January 6th, with episodes two and three on the following Wednesdays, the 13th and 20th. “We can’t promise we’ll find the human spark, but we can promise that looking for it will be fascinating. And it may change the way you think about who you are.”

Becoming Us

In the caves and rock shelters of the Dordogne region of France, Alan Alda witnesses the spectacular paintings and carvings that date back some 30,000 years, artwork that archeologists once thought to be the first record of people with minds like our own. When this art was created, Europe had already been peopled for hundreds of thousands of years - and thousands of lifetimes - by humans we call Neanderthals. Alan discovers, from visits to sites where Neanderthals once lived, that Neanderthals were tenacious and resourceful. But they appear to have lived in and of the moment; certainly they produced no art, and employed a stone tool technology that changed little over millennia. The people who painted the caves, our ancestors, were strikingly different, possessed of what we are calling the Human Spark, capable not only of art but of innovative technology and symbolic communication.

The questions Alan explores: Where and when did the Human Spark first ignite? In these caves, as archeologists have long believed? Or at a much earlier time - and on another continent?Finding the answer involves scanning Neanderthal teeth in a giant particle accelerator to learn about their childhood; reading Neanderthal's genetic code in DNA extracted from 50,000 year-old bones; and discovering and reconstructing the weaponry that made possible - and relatively safe - the hunting of large animals in East Africa. We will also unearth the beads that are the first evidence of our species' fascination with social status - and a powerful new means of long-distance communication; recover from the teeth and bones of both Neanderthals and our ancestors evidence of what they ate; and explore the Great Rift Valley in East Africa with archeologists who believe that it was there that the Human Spark first began to glimmer, tens of thousands of years before it burst into flame in Europe.

Format : AVI

Length : 465 MiB for 56mn 39s 866ms

Codec : XviD

Source : PDTV

Language : English US

Subtitles : None

Genre : Nature/Science

Video #0 : MPEG-4 Visual at 998 Kbps

Aspect : 608 x 336 (1.810) at 29.970 fps

Audio #0 : MPEG Audio at 136 Kbps

Infos : 2 channels, 48.0 KHz

Enjoy!

Ekolb