DS (David Suzuki): Hello, I'm David Suzuki. This is the first of a special series of eight programs that examines our attitudes to nature, and asks questions about the impact of our science and technology on both ourselves and the world we live in.

DS: We share this planet, with creatures of the water, of the land, and up the air. We share a common origin and a common living space.

DS: But one species has overwhelmed the Earth, the human species. How have we come to see everything on earth as a potential means to our own ends? What makes us want to tame nature? Or turn it into a circus?

DS: Why do we feel the need to keep testing our mastery? Or to ritualize our fear of one of the few things still beyond our control, our mortality. Each of the world's religions tries to extend human life beyond the earthly, life after death.

DS: And every culture has its own way of wishing long life to each new arrival. But a technological culture does more than wish. It monitors and manipulates, creates special environments, reshapes everything, assuming a manmade world will answer all our needs. But what if it won't? 

DS: This is the world we dominate, a world increasingly of our own making. When our species first appeared some 50,000 years ago, we lived together in small bands of hunters and gatherers, and our impact on the environment was insignificant. Now, we number 5 billion. And with our powerful science and technology, we are dramatically changing the face of the planet. And along with it, we're changing ourselves. And that's what this series is about. It's about changing directions, asking questions about ourselves and our place and nature, how our perceptions were shaped, how they are changing, and how they will have to change if we in the rest of life on Earth are to survive.

DS: The more science reveals about how nature works, the more we use science to create technologies, harnessing nature, rebuilding the world to suit our own purposes. Before we come to rely entirely on manmade environments, we need to take another look at the natural world that gave us birth.

DS: These are the San, an African people, who have survived for generations in the hot and arid Kalahari Desert. What they fear is anything more powerful than they are. And how they see the world is tied to their lives as hunters and gatherers. This is a tale of late nights, of hunters asleep in their camp and of the big tusker that wandered in.

DS: From these stories, the children of the San learn how they fit into their world, how to deal with it.

DS: The San culture is based on strategies that once supported all of mankind, strategies that take into careful account what nature offers, the dangers and the resources. This is one worldview. One way of perceiving reality. The attitudes of the San, suit the world they experience and bring them into harmony with the rest of nature.

DS: Throughout most of our time on Earth, our whole species lived close to nature, until new attitudes were developed. Attitudes of domination, a gift from God to man. 

DS: "Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands, thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yay, all the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea."

DS: In Christian mythology, mankind is at the center, with nature merely the backdrop to the human drama of good and evil. And the supporting cast, though numerous, is of lesser account.

DS: Nature may be savage, untamed, but it is capable of being gentle, of being brought under control. In this view, there's a touch of romance. The lion lying down with the lamb. But on the practical side, nature is created for human use with man holding Dominion overall. One way to use nature is to scrutinize it, to try to understand it to make everything the object of scientific study. By an early understanding, everything on Earth was created at the same time, with each species fixed, unchangeable. But then came the watershed moment. 

DS: Charles Darwin, exploding the myth of simultaneous creation. The purpose of his five year voyage on the Beagle was to catalog the 1000s of species he encountered, fitting them all into the acceptance scheme of things.

DS: But then, he reached the Galapagos Islands off the Pacific coast of South America, and he found something that caused him to wonder. It seemed as if a few familiar forms had once colonized these remote islands, and then, over time, had changed, adapted to local conditions and become unique to the Galapagos.

DS: Were these the unchanging products of a single act of creation?

DS: In the years that followed, Darwin, against his will, found himself questioning the current ideas about the creation of species. What he observed in the Galapagos suggested another way of explaining the tremendous diversity in nature, all of life in a state of flux, being slowly, gradually transformed over incredibly long stretches of time, evolving, one form emerging from another, as naturally occurring changes were tested by time and a changing environment.

DS: And what did this mean for our own species? After finding so many anatomical similarities, Darwin eventually wrote, "unless we will fully close our eyes, we may with our present knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage, nor need we feel ashamed of it." 

DS: Thus came the logical but unthinkable suggestion that we share a common ancestor with the very animals whose names had been the height of ridicule and derision. It was hard enough for Darwin to force himself to his inescapable conclusions, but for everyone else, it was an insult to man and to God. 

DS: The church fought the idea in every way it could, causing Huxley to remark he'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop who was careless with the truth. One eminent lady remarked, "descended from the apes? Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us hope it does not become widely known." Today it is widely known, but not fully understood. Richard Leakey of Kenya's National Museum.

Richard Leakey: "The perennial question is, When did man and the apes separate? It bothered Darwin 150 years ago, it's bothered many people ever since it's one of the greatest difficulties with putting across evolution, this ancestor the apes, in my view, it hasn't yet happened. We are apes, the similarities are so great that we're probably looking for something that doesn't exist."

DS: In the primate family tree, members of the early line moved by means of agile four footed acrobatics. These include lemurs and monkeys. It was a splitting off from this line that gave rise to apes and people whose way of getting around was quite different from that of monkeys. Anthropologist Ben Savage.

Ben Savage: "The differentiation of our lineage from monkeys began on the order of 15 million years ago or so. And it involves a funny kind of adaptation of the trees. And we retain a lot of that adaptation in modern human beings. For example, we have broad chests. Across and rather shallow from front to back, we're able to do this kind of thing. We're able to take... immobilize your upper arm and do a full 180 degree, pronation supination. In the forearm, our wrist goes almost 90 degrees, like this. All of these are things that monkeys can't do. And all of these almost certainly developed as a sort of arm swinging adaptation underneath the limbs of trees, so that instead of wandering around on all fours, our ancestors were swinging underneath, we don't have a tail. Again, that's a hangover from this upper body under the tree limb, arm swinging adaptation."

DS: We can be as acrobatic as any other ape, but the human ape has traveled far beyond the trees.

DS: We can go to the moon and back, and splashdown in safety. We can build spaceships, and in a sense time machines, devices that help us look back along the course of evolutionary history, much farther back than Darwin would have believed possible. Now, with all the sophistication of space age science and technology, and the weight of everything that's been learned since Darwin's time, we are pursuing the mysteries of life, down through the microscopic and beyond. Constantly expanding our knowledge of how life is organized.

DS: One of the most puzzling questions has been, How did life begin in the first place? Was it simply a random coming together of the right components? Just what properties in matter what forces in the universe interacted to create the most complex level of organization we know and to create it out of the relative disorder of a lifeless planet. 

DS: Some possible answers are coming from a new branch of physics, one that's begun to examine the patterns created when energy and matter come together, from the world of spiral galaxies, to the unexpected patterns that can be generated in a chemical reaction. 

DS: In this experiment, the chemical energy of a reaction induces the appearance of a living organism. The molecules behave in a coherent fashion, as if they were sensitive to their neighbors, as if they had a memory and some means of communication. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine sees a universal miracle in these unexpected properties, with inanimate matter, apparently imitating life

Ilta Prigogine: "It was sensitivity, coherence, memory, they are all properties which are currently ascribed to life. And now we discover a gnosis to matter that is not as the gnoleculity [?] of life, but that we see, that life is not, as many people believed, as struggle against the laws, a kind of miracle, which has been produced and life has tend to struggle to maintain itself against all enemies. But on the contrary, life is expressing in a very deep way, the structure of the universe.

DS: Darwin taught us that we are embedded in biological evolution, modern physics puts us in an evolving universe. When energy flows through matter, chaos gives way to organization, whether in the spirals of the galaxies, or in the molecular patterns of a chemical reaction. It's not so hard from this, to imagine the beginnings of the most important molecule on Earth, the double helix of DNA, the living blueprint for every form of life we know. Now we can see all matter, living or not as part of a single system of being and evolution as a process involving everything that exists. Darwin's idea followed back in time, down into the atom out into space, a single idea [that of a system], helping to unify the sum total of our experience.

DS: Biological evolution is a complex system of interlocking changes, changes in DNA, means changing organisms, new creatures to be tested by a changing environment, a circular process of infinite complexity.

DS: Each creature must fit into the intricate relationships that have evolved between species and so to becomes an active agent in shaping its environment.

DS: Not only is the whole process of evolution, more complex and comprehensive than the 19th century could possibly perceive. It is more subtle. Until recently, it was thought by most that evolution proceeded solely on the basis of fierce competition.

DS: Survival of the fittest, where fittest was taken to mean strongest, fastest, most aggressive. But now, new ideas are emerging and being expressed by scientists like Harvard paleontologist Steven Gould, the species' struggled to survive, doesn't mean it's at war with other species.

Steven Gould: The metaphor of battle is really 19th century social preconceptions foisted upon nature. The only thing Darwinism says is that organisms struggle to pass more of their genes along to future generations, that is to have more surviving offspring. Now anyway, that you can have more surviving offspring works, it is true that one way to have more surviving offspring is to be big and strong and to battled and to win. And so that happens in nature, but other ways that to be cooperative, to be altruistic, to be symbiotic. That is to live with organisms of other species to the mutual benefit of both. There are many classic cases that everyone knows about corals can't live on reefs unless they have algae within them. And the algae provide oxygen to the corals at the same time winning a home within the corals to grow and reproduce themselves. Now that, in a sense, is at least metaphorically cooperation, but it benefits both creatures. So Darwinism isn't only about whatever it is that benefits your own survival, and that's as likely to be cooperative as aggressive behavior.

DS: A coral reef for example, is still a hunting ground, but it's also a haven.

DS: The crannies and canyons of living coral provide shelter to other species, protection from predators, a home base for huge numbers.

DS: Some quite extraordinary partnerships have formed. A shrimp immune to the sting of the sea anemone whose food it shares. One fish, feeding on the parasites, it cleans from another. Success without aggression.  Balance in a time tested system.

DS: Modern scientists discovered that evolution is far more complex than Darwin ever imagined, an intricate flux of changing but balanced relationships developing over immense periods of time. The deeper we probe, the more we find that survival is not just a fierce battle for resources. Survival depends on fitting in to the overall system. But where do we fit in? Because of our unique power to grasp how nature works, and to some extent, to make it do what we want, we tend to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature. But that same science that gives us the power of understanding and control also reveals that we are absolutely linked to all life on Earth through our common thread of DNA.

DS: A small change in DNA can produce a major change in shape. A modified genetic instruction can take a basic plan and simply play a variation. This shell evolved from a simple flat coil. A slight shift in building instructions, and the coil becomes a pointed spiral.

DS: But it's still the same basic plan. More complex creatures to share certain basic blueprints. A change in structure may persist, if for example, it helps achieve success in exploiting new habitats. This is the mudskipper a fish that can navigate for short distances on land. Its method of locomotion suggests an obvious relationship between a fin for swimming and a leg for walking. Watching a mudskipper move is almost like seeing one of the early air breathing fish that was the first vertebrate to venture onto land.

DS: Frog DNA puts together a structure that's been repeated in many vertebrates. And the growth of all their embryonic bones is dependent on DNA on events at the molecular level. The vertebrate limb is based on a standard sequence of bones, one joint to two, and on to five, and this pattern persists throughout the whole group. So, evolution tends to move through many steps, but only tinkering with what already exists. remodeling the same structures that can be adapted to life on the land, in the air, and in the water. The basic design of the original reptile limb was modified by millions of years of evolutionary change to become the lions paw.

DS: To take to the air, the same basic design is still apparent, even as the bones of the limb by stages are transformed into supports for a wing.

DS: When mammals returned to the oceans, they took with them the same land base limb, which in evolutionary stages became modified for swimming.

DS: Darwin got some idea of species relationships by comparing anatomical structures. Today, scientists work out relationships between species by comparing the molecular structure of their DNA, anthropologist Vin Singh,

Vin Singh: Probably the single most surprising result come out of the molecular work was that if you put humans, chimps and gorillas in an evolutionary framework, you find out that they come from a single source, and that gorillas and chimpanzees and humans share the same common ancestor. Now, that tells us a tremendous amount, because it tells us that what modern chimps and modern gorillas have in common. For example, knuckle walling, was almost certainly present in the ancestor as well and that that ancestor was our ancestor.

DS: DNA's rate of change suggest that about 5 million years ago, this common ancestor gave rise to gorillas and chimps, and to a line of similar beings that began on all fours, but that were soon walking upright. This new mode of locomotion was to bring dramatic changes.

DS: Thanks to a volcanic eruption nearly 4 million years ago, we now have evidence of our early bipedal ancestors and of the world they inhabited.

DS: The volcano covered the ground with ash, rain formed the kind of cement through which many creatures walked in. This happened near Olduvai in Africa, near where the Leakeys have spent decades uncovering the fossil record of our ancestry in these weathered layers of human history. A few years ago, there was a picnic not far away at Laetoli, where some extraordinary tracks were found in the ancient volcanic cement. Mary Leakey explains how their discovery came about.

Mary Leakey: "It was rather young and light hearted members of the museum staff, Nairobi, who were playing with dried elephant turds hurling them around like footballs. One was knocked down, sprawled on the ground and said, Good heavens that are footprints here. We uncovered 25 meters of trail length, and where three people walked along, as far as we can see, walked along together. One single individual going on the left and two individuals walking on the right. And each of those right hand prints is double. The second individual who followed the first put his or her feet in the footprints of the one in front, so you get double prints. And the important thing about these Laetoli footprints, is they prove beyond any question whatsoever, that three and a half million years ago, our ancestors were fully bipedal and had feet not at all, unlike are."

DS: Those bipedal creatures, we're not the only ones to leave a lasting record of their existence. Scores of tracks have been found some of animals that differed very little from what can be seen in the area today. But the tracks also show a far greater variety than now exists. All sharing the world of that small upright creature called Australopithecus, Southern ape.

Ben Savage: Now, the big thing about Australopithecus is that it was a biped. In other words, it had gotten up on a time legs. And why, in other words, a major piece of anatomical change like this had to have a very good reason to happen. There must have been some very significant advantages to being bipedal. And anthropologists have been worried about this for a long time. Because in all honesty, it's hard to see what the advantages are. It certainly wasn't for locomotion. I mean, any self-respecting quadrate can outrun us even today and presumably could have done a lot better with Australopithecus. I mean, an elephant cannot run the fastest human being. So we didn't become bipeds to be able to run away. And interestingly enough, at the same time, that we became bipedal, we also lost the big canine teeth in the male.

DS: Sharp canines are displayed prominently within a social group. So they may help regulate the group size and structure. For the hunting apes, they help in capturing and eating the prey, and they are the major means of defense.

Ben Savage: So in addition to being slow, we were in effect defenseless to and one kind of wonders why we're here as descendants of Australopithecus.

DS: Apparently defenseless in a world of large predators are small ancestors with chimp sized brains must have found survival, a touch and go business. So much for the preordained dominance of mankind. With so many hazards to face, the line that produced humanity might well have died out early, along with so many other forms. But it survived.

Ben Savage: "And we have to believe them, that whatever their precursors were doing with the big face and the big canine teeth Australopithecus was doing with the hand and whatever it might have been carrying in its hands."

DS: It's been found that chimpanzees living in forested areas retreat to the trees when threatened. But those in more open country with more time on the ground will make use of whatever they can pick up and hold in their hands to threatened back to ward off danger. But unless a species is fully upright, its hands aren't free enough to make a significant use of tools.

DS: Australopithecus survived over 2 million years, as far as we know without much change. But then came what may be the single most important step in our evolutionary history. A step away from every other species, the ability to make tools. This is part of the Rift Valley that cleaves the African continent from north to south. Because of great upheavals in the Earth's crust along this fault, fossilized bones that have been buried under successive layers of sediment over millions of years are now exposed. A fossil record of the past, laid bare by time and geologic forces, letting us know what kind of world our ancestors inhabited.

DS: The most telling fossils reveal the emergence of new capabilities in a series of primate skulls found in these deposits in Koobi Fora in northern Kenya. They tell the story of increasing brain size, increasing ability to exploit the environment through the use of stone tools. The new species has been called Homo erectus, the next step would be modern human beings. Here on the former hunting grounds of Homo erectus, fossilized bones of hunted animals bear unmistakable traces of stone tools. Only a sharp edge of stone could have made a cut such as this tools extended the grasp of Homo erectus, and enabled him to exploit new resources.

DS: These stones and bones that are found together suggest that our ancestors at that time could not only make stone tools, but more importantly, they were bringing the spoils of the hunt to a central place to share them with others. They were developing a new social sense, and probably a rudimentary language, of course, just how and when, as a matter of speculation, but it seems certain that alongside this stone tool technology, which lasted over a million and a half years, we can see the first tenuous signs of a social and cultural animal, a creature that is becoming distinctly human. And so, humankind was born. We can trace our arrival by growth in brain size. Monkeys and chimps have brains that differ according to their body size. But about 2 million years ago, brain capacity began to grow out of proportion to body size, until finally, Homo sapiens sapiens arrived.

DS: For most of our history, the human species survived by hunting and gathering. And there still are a very few societies today that rely on the complex knowledge and techniques of hunters and gatherers. These people call themselves the San, they're also known as the  ǃKung. Here at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, conditions are demanding, hot dry summers, frigid winter nights, and unpredictable rainy seasons. Yet life has evolved to exploit this environment exquisitely. Any disruption in this delicate balance of plants and animals could mean the destruction of the entire ecosystem. 

DS: The San people have developed a way of life that has enabled them to survive in equilibrium with this fragile environment for 10s of 1000s of years. Theirs is a testament to the resourcefulness and adaptability of the human species, and the cause for reflection, for those of us in technologically advanced nations. 

DS: The San or like most cultures that have flourished without domesticated plants and animals, the men do the hunting [the women let them], and part of their technique depends on an insect grub. The insect feeds on one species of shrub, and then in the dry season, it burrows into the ground for its dormant stage within a protective case. Now, the men collect as many larval capsules as they need. 

DS: Nobody knows just how or when it was discovered that this particular grub is highly toxic, that its body fluids in the bloodstream of a mammal, kill. This is the source of the poison the San hunters use to make their arrows lethal. 

DS: It must be applied with extreme care, no cuts in the fingers to give the poison entry. The tip of the arrow is separate from the shaft and will break free on impact. The poison dart will then not be pulled out by an animal's dash through the scrub 

DS: While men learn about hunting, women become experts in finding and gathering edible plants, which provide up to 80% of the food. protein rich wild nuts, beans and tubers ensure a sufficient and balanced diet.

DS: Experience gives these people an uncanny ability to zero in on exactly where to search for food.

DS: Ours is the only species to dig in the ground with this stick in search of edible tubers. It's possible that a digging stick was the first human tool and that access to food in the ground gave our earliest ancestors enough advantage to survive without stone tools. There's no need to stockpile food. It's collected as it's required. The work may take only 12 hours a week, rarely more than 30. Hunters spend about three days a week tracking down their quarry. They show remarkable expertise in gleaning vital information from the trail.

DS: These men are following a kudu and what the trail tells them comes from accumulated lore passed through the generations and from individual observation. It's part of their culture to be keen observers of wildlife.

DS: Here's where the kudu lay, and from the way the shadows fall, the rest was at mid day when animals often stop in the shade.

DS: The impression of the body suggests a female, when she got up, she browsed a bit before moving off the twigs or freshly nibbled she was here just a short while ago. But the San are opportunists, the kudu trail is abandoned once a small springbok is sighted.

DS: The arrow hits and the poison tip stays in. So there's no hurry. Experience tells that an animal that size will be dead in half an hour.

DS: Any expert wants to check the results of his work. The hunter is interested in how much poison went in to refine estimates of how much to use. He reads the dosage by the depth of the arrowheads penetration.

DS: With small animals hunting success is fairly assured. But no San hunter expects to bring down a larger source of meat more often than every two months or so. Now the meat will be taken back to camp and shared according to tradition.

DS: At camp, another aspect of San technology, the first kind of energy apart from human muscle power that mankind ever put to use, the energy of fire

DS: Till 10,000 years ago, when agriculture first appeared, hunting and gathering were the human mainstay. They supported the growth of most of what makes us unique, spoken language arts, technologies, and especially the systems of shared ideas and beliefs that determine how we see the world.

DS: With the earth is their provider and storehouse, these small nomadic bands were so widely dispersed over the land, they could remain in balance with the world they lived in. They moved with the seasons, carrying their few possessions with them. Most often, food was plentiful. Within the group, there was security and time for leisure.

DS: Individual needs were looked after, but individual accomplishments were consciously downplayed. The hunter who supplied a meal received no more meat and no more attention than anyone else.

DS: Heroes were avoided. The family and the tribe were all. This way of life has almost gone even in the Kalahari. But there are still attitudes here to nature and to other people that surely lead us to question the values in our own technological society.

DS: All of humanity joins in the celebration of life. But our ways of celebrating differ widely. Our species has been subdivided by the evolution of many cultures, the accumulation of different sets of ideas and techniques passed from generation to generation, not in our genes, but in our learning. And every culture has its own framework of beliefs, its own perceptions of reality. Biologically, we are all the same. But we are worlds apart in our capacity to manipulate nature, in our ambition, to be in control. If we have troubled dreams by the campfire, they are of our own making.

DS: There is no doubt that through science and technology, what we have accomplished is astonishing, expanding our view of the cosmos, improving our material well being. But in the worldview of a technological society, we have lost sight of our place in nature, our sense of belonging. Can we find a way to shift our perceptions to find the view that will encompass both our technical achievements and our ties with our planetary home?

DS: So here we are, not at the top of some evolutionary ladder as we once imagined it but one of many surviving branches of a vast evolutionary tree and out on a limb nearest us, the chimpanzee. Only a few million years ago, our common ancestor was still alive. This is the conservative side of the family, basically, with one kind of society, and one strategy for survival. But look at human history within a single species, an explosion of cultures, from a single brain, a veritable cascade of beliefs about ourselves and the rest of nature. Tonight, we saw how the human species was born, as science sees it, next week, other views on who we are and what we're doing.

DS: In the Mythmakers, we'll see how different cultures have tried to understand and influence human destiny, from the stories and rituals of myth to the birth of science and technology.