There are seven billion humans on Earth, spread across the whole planet. Scientific evidence suggests that most of us can trace our origins to one tiny group of people who left Africa around 70,000 years ago. In this five-part series, Dr Alice Roberts follows the archaeological and genetic footprints of our ancient ancestors to find out how their journeys transformed our species into the humans we are today, and how Homo Sapiens came to dominate the planet.
Alice looks at our ancestors’ seemingly impossible journey to Australia. Miraculously preserved footprints and very old human fossils buried in the outback suggest a mystery: that humans reached Australia almost before anywhere else. How could they have travelled so far from Africa, crossing the open sea on the way, and do it thousands of years before they made it to Europe?
The evidence trail is faint and difficult to pick up, but Alice takes on the challenge. In India, new discoveries among the debris of a super volcano hint that our species started the journey much earlier than previously thought, while in Malaysia, genetics points to an ancient trail still detectable in the DNA of tribes today.
Alice travels deep into the Asian rainforests in search of the first cavemen of Borneo and tests out a Stone Age raft to see whether sea travel would have been possible thousands of years ago, before coming to a powerful conclusion.

Sunday 24 May
9.30-10.30pm BBC TWO

Dr Alice Roberts takes on Europe and determines how our ancestors managed to survive the dual challenges of the ice age and the Neanderthals, as she continues her Incredible Human Journey.

When our dark-skinned ancestors arrived in Europe they found the Neanderthals had got there first. They had equally sharp weapons, bigger brains and were better adapted to the cold. But, over thousands of years, somehow, Homo Sapiens spread, while the Neanderthals slowly died out.

Alice challenges current assumptions about how humans overcame the Neanderthals and explores what an ivory flute has to say about how our ancestors out-competed their rivals.

In a TV first, the face of the earliest known European – a person with distinctly African features is revealed. Alice then investigates an intriguing question: what happened on the Incredible Human Journey that made Europeans change colour?

Dr Alice Roberts continues

her Incredible Human Journey

Dr Alice Roberts visits the frozen wastelands of Asia and continues in her quest to discover how a small band of humans came to eventually populate the globe.

Alice travels to Siberia, one of the coldest places on Earth, to film the Evenki nomads, a remote tribe which has much to teach the world about how to survive extreme climates. She discovers how one of the world’s oldest sewing needles could be the key to understanding how early humans conquered their environment.

Next, Alice looks at an intriguing anthropological puzzle. If every single non-African in the world is descended from one group of people that left Africa around 70,000 years ago, why does the world’s population look so different?

Alice explores what may have occurred during human migration to change Chinese physical characteristics, and considers the startling possibility that the Chinese are descended from an entirely different branch of humans to the rest of the world.

In the ultimate travel story, Dr Alice Roberts crosses the globe to find out how our ancestors colonised the planet.

On her journey, Alice examines bones, stones and the latest scientific theories to discover how one small group of people left Africa, their descendents crossing deserts, oceans and mountains, surviving an Ice Age and overcoming the Neanderthals to populate every part of the world. On the way, she examines how our skin colour and other distinctive features evolved across each of the continents to produce the global diversity of peoples today.

In the first episode, Alice treks into the remote wilderness of the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia to find the spot where the earliest-known remains of our species were discovered. Travelling across the continent, Alice learns how the Click language, the design of our bodies and ancient hunter-gatherer skills may have contributed to our successful survival and migration across Africa.

In Cape Town, Alice meets geneticist Raj Ramesar who tells her of the astonishing discovery that every single person who isn’t African is descended from one single group of people who left Africa around 70,000 years ago.

But how did they do it? With only stone-age tools, it seems impossible that one small group of our ancestors could have made the crossing – either over hundreds of miles of desert or across the Red Sea – to leave Africa. So Alice must turn to leading experts and the latest scientific research to discover the route that they may have taken.

In this five-part series, Dr Alice Roberts traverses the globe to tell the incredible story of how humans came to populate every corner of the world – overcoming unbearable landscapes, extreme weather and other hostile hominid species.

Alice pieces together precious fragments of bone, stone and new DNA evidence to discover how we are all related to one tiny group of people who left Africa – to conquer the world.

The series looks at that critical exodus from Africa, our colonisation of each of the continents, how some of us changed en route – for instance from dark to light skinned, and the vital skills we developed – uncovering ground breaking research in palaeoanthropology, archaeogenetics and climate modelling to find out how our journeys across the globe made us who we are today.