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Our
Ancient Origins
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The Leakey family Louis, Mary and their second son Richard have
between them made some of the key discoveries this century that
have shaped our understanding of human origins. Louis and Mary
spent more than forty years working in Africa - most of them
at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Richard talks passionately about
searching for the fossil remains of our ancient ancestors and
says one of the great highlights of his career was the discovery
of an almost complete skeleton of an African individual who
died 1.8 million years ago.
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Our
Closest Living Relative
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In 1960 Jane Goodall began
her unique study of wild chimpanzees in Gombe national park
in Tanzania. Through close observation she saw that chimpanzees
crafted tools to forage for food, significant because before
that it was thought that only humans were toolmakers. Jane says
she will never forget the day when her favourite chimp David
Greybeard communicated with her without words. Through her pioneering
work we have learnt much about our closest living relatives.
Photograph by Michael Neugebauer.
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The
Building Blocks of Life
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In 1952 Stanley Miller, a young chemistry student at the University
of Chicago, carried out an experiment in which he attempted
to recreate the conditions that first produced life on earth.
The results showed that life could have started sponaneously
on earth 3.5 billion years ago. His discovery caused an immediate
sensation.
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Searching
for Dinosaur Fossils
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When Tim Leland retired from work in 1998, he decided to go
on a quest to find the world's first dinosaurs. Tim gives a
fascinating description of his journey which took him to the
Valley of the Moon in Argentina. This barren and forbidding
terrain revealed the remains of animals that lived there more
than two hundred million years ago, a time when dinosaurs came
to dominate life on earth.
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The
Big Bang
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Radio astronomer Bob Wilson discovered evidence that supports
the theory that the universe was born in an enormous explosion
- or Big Bang. In 1962, Bob and his colleague Arno Penzias built
a radio telescope which detected a surprising amount of heat
and noise in the outer limits of our galaxy. After some extensive
research they decided this could only be the background radiation
from The Big Bang explosion fourteen billion years ago. In 1978
Wilson and Penzias won the Nobel Prize for Physics for their
discovery.
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