Man on Earth - Season 1

Man on Earth - Season 1

Season 1

Network
DatesDec 7, 2009 - Dec 28, 2009

Episodes

The Triumph of Homo Sapiens
Season 1Episode 160 min

The Triumph of Homo Sapiens

Tony Robinson explores how a small group of our earliest African ancestors were rescued from extinction by the last great global warming 130,000 years ago. The barren landscape surrounding the oases in which they lived was transformed to lush savannah, enabling them to traverse the continent and eventually make it to Europe. As temperatures rose, so they would also later fall: in the Russia steppes Dr Joy Singarayer finds out how the European Homo Sapiens adapted to survive the last great Ice Age. But not all humans coped so well. In Gibraltar, Tony finds the last resting place of our Neanderthal 'cousins'. Lacking our 'social brains', which enabled us to trade and get help from outsiders, the Neanderthals starved, dying out in lonely communities, and even resorting to cannibalism.
Dec 7, 2009
The Birth of Civilisation
Season 1Episode 260 min

The Birth of Civilisation

Tony Robinson traces how global warming at the end of the last Ice Age was the catalyst for the dawn of civilisation, but also unleashed devastation. Twelve thousand years ago our planet emerged from the last great Ice Age, with temperatures rising by five degrees in just a few decades. After 190,000 years living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were forced to change with the world around them. In Europe the rise in temperature unleashed an agricultural revolution, while in North Africa around 7,000 years ago a savage drought led Saharan refugees to settle along the River Nile. In the limited space they had to learn new skills and form new social structures, going on to found the Kingdom of Egypt. Five hundred years later this same global warming triggered catastrophe as Canadian ice sheets containing 900,000 trillion tonnes of water melted into the Atlantic, causing massive flooding. In less than a year Britain was amputated from mainland Europe, and the Black Sea was formed, washing out the pioneer farmers from that region. What happened to the people that had cultivated this fertile land changed the future of the continent.
Dec 14, 2009
Killer Climate
Season 1Episode 360 min

Killer Climate

Tony Robinson picks through the ruins of three great civilisations from the last 2,000 years to ask what made these civilisations more vulnerable to climate catastrophe than the ones who survived. In the jungles of Central America he investigates how decades-long drought brought the advanced Mayan civilisation to an apocalyptic end, resorting to human sacrifices to plead to their gods for salvation. Dr Joy Singarayer travels to the extraordinary landscape of Greenland to discover how the mini-Ice Age of the 13th century wiped out the 'advanced' Vikings, while their 'savage' Inuit neighbours developed new tools and strategies to stay alive. Meanwhile, in the deserts of America's southwest, Dr Jago Cooper investigates the climate crisis that made the Puebloan inhabitants of extraordinary cliff cities homeless 750 years ago.
Dec 21, 2009
The Modern World
Season 1Episode 460 min

The Modern World

Tony Robinson examines societies similar to our own, who not only survived climate change, but flourished. In Peru the Hauri people embraced a savage drought, developed advanced techniques of water management and founded a great empire, itself the basis of the great Inca nation. In Europe, Tony learns how a mini-Ice Age triggered the Black Death; but rather than cripple medieval Europe it launched a period of unprecedented progression. The Industrial Revolution and globalisation were hastened by the benefits of a stable climate, but Tony also learns how this stability appears to be ending, bringing a new threat to human societies.
Dec 28, 2009

Recently Updated Shows

Recently updated shows that might be of your interest.
CIA
Running

CIA

CIA centers on two unlikely partners — a fast-talking, rule-breaking loose cannon CIA case officer, and a by-the-book, seasoned and smart FBI agent who believes in the rule of law. When this odd couple are assigned to work out of CIA's New York Station, they must learn to work together to investigate cases and criminals posing threats on U.S. soil, finding that their differences may actually be their strength.

GenreDrama, Crime
Mayor of Kingstown
Running

Mayor of Kingstown

Mayor of Kingstown is set in a small Michigan town where the only industry remaining are federal, state, and private prisons, the story follows the McLusky family, the power brokers between the police, criminals, inmates, prison guards and politicians, in a city completely dependent on prisons and the prisoners they contain. It is a stark and brutal look at the business of incarceration.

GenreDrama
The Lincoln Lawyer
Running

The Lincoln Lawyer

Mickey Haller, an iconoclastic idealist, runs his law practice out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, as he takes on cases big and small across the expansive city of Los Angeles.

Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches
Running

Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches

Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches centers on an intuitive young neurosurgeon who discovers that she is the unlikely heir to a family of witches. As she grapples with her newfound powers, she must contend with a sinister presence that has haunted her family for generations.

Star City
Running

Star City

Star City is a propulsive, paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward.