Mankind: the Story of All of Us
Season 1
TV Series | Mankind: the Story of All of Us | Contents page
Mankind: the Story of All of Us S01E01
Part 1
March 12, 2021, 2:34 p.m.
We are born to survive
In a world full of danger.
Hardship makes us stronger.
We dream impossible dreams and make them real.
But we are not one.
Mankind's struggles shape our destiny.
And in those struggles,
New worlds and new futures are born.
Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet,
Most species will fail.
But for one, all the pieces will fall into place,
And a set of keys will unlock a path
For mankind to triumph.
This is our story,
The story of all of us.
At the dawn of time...
...the universe explodes into being.
With it, every atom in our bodies.
Countless galaxies, innumerable stars.
And around one of them, a blue planet,
Our earth.
No other known planet has both an atmosphere and liquid water.
The conditions needed for life.
13 billion years after the universe begins,
A unique species is born.
Mankind.
Now, in the grasslands of East Africa,
We begin our struggle against the odds.
A band of brothers.
Their leader, the genetic ancestor of all mankind.
Every man alive today shares a portion of his DNA.
Two inches taller than a modern american,
A natural athlete, a born hunter.
This is his home.
The Rift Valley of East Africa.
A fertile laboratory for life.
In his sights, a thousand pounds of meat.
Enough to feed his family of six for a month.
Soon there will be seven,
The woman he shares his life with
Is expecting their first child.
Stereoscopic vision to accurately judge distance.
Dexterous hands.
Speed on two legs.
But he has none of the natural weapons
of Africa's other predators.
He can't outrun a cheetah.
Nowhere near the strength of a lion.
Or the bone-crushing jaws of a hyena.
So he invents.
Tools make me better.
Weapons make me more powerful.
You have to be on two feet.
You have to free up your hands.
And freeing up your hands to work with tools
changes the game.
And there's no other species on this planet
that committed to weapon use and tool use like us.
Man's ability to project power,
The key to controlling our world.
We'll spend the next 100 millennia
Perfecting weapons that kill at a distance.
There's a window that's closing.
You've got a half a second
and that's the kind of moment where,
if you can explode and do the right thing,
you will eat, you'll survive.
And if you blow it, you're dead.
To prepare the kill,
The greatest key to our survival:
At 300 degrees, a spark.
Fire.
Our planet is the only known place in the universe
With the right conditions for fire to burn.
It's the element that makes us who we are.
Cooking our food gives us a second stomach,
outside of our body.
Now we begin to digest the fats,
the carbohydrates, the proteins
before we chew the food,
making it easier for us to digest it,
which means we get a smaller stomach,
and therefore, a bigger brain.
Better nutrition boosts the human brain.
Over 2 million years, it more than doubles in size,
With trillions of connections.
The most complex structure in the universe,
Letting us think,
Communicate
And love.
It could be argued that society,
any kind of society,
began with the cooking of meat over flame.
But man is not always the hunter.
Fire protects them from other predators,
But this couple will be lucky to live to 30.
Their unborn child has only a 50% chance
Of surviving to adulthood.
There are, perhaps, only 10,000 humans on the planet,
Fewer people than are born in a single hour today.
Scattered in small, isolated groups,
Always on the brink of extinction.
But around 70,000 years ago,
A few hundred pioneers wander out of Africa.
The beginning of an extraordinary adventure.
Everyone is related
to those first pioneers
who dared to venture away
out of their homeland and look beyond.
We are a restless bunch, we humans.
We're always looking over there,
and over there may mean oceans
or mountains or continents away.
This is our hardwiring, our DNA.
Over 50,000 years,
Mankind settles the Middle East, Asia, Australia and Europe.
As we spread out, a slight shift of the earth's axis
Away from the sun cools the planet.
Average temperatures drop up to 14 degrees.
A third of the planet under ice.
Mile-high glaciers advance
across Northern Asia and Europe.
And now hardship makes us who we are.
Just a few hundred miles from the glacier wall,
In what will become modern-day France...
...A family survives in the harshest climate
Mankind has known.
Extreme cold is like a living thing,
it sort of sneaks around and finds you where you're weakest.
Mankind: the Story of All of Us
Season 1
TV Series | Mankind: the Story of All of Us | Contents page