Origins: The Journey of Humankind

Which of the great primates of 25 million years ago is our common ancestor? Is it pierolapithecus? Follow the journey of primates developing into Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens through the millions of years of evolution and the thousands of miles of migrations.

Sir David shines the spotlight on some of nature’s evolutionary anomalies and reveals how these curious animals continue to baffle and fascinate.

Professor Robert Winston meets Lucy, the first upright ape, and follows her ancestors on the three-million-year journey to civilisation.

Andrew Marr explores how Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has taken on a life of its own far beyond the world of science.

Carl Sagan covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.

Sir David discovers a microscopic world that’s invisible to the naked eye, where insects feed and breed, where flowers fluoresce and where plants communicate with each other and with animals using scent and sound.

David Attenborough embarks on a remarkable 500 million-year journey revealing the extraordinary group of animals that dominate our world, and how their evolution defines our human bodies.

Taste: The Flavor of Life

Traveling to the far corners of the world, we discover the extraordinary ways animals are adapting to our rapidly changing planet. We witness nature’s remarkable resilience, as our perception of evolution and its potential is forever transformed.

Life is a fragile thing. It changes and adapts so specifically to survive in the environment it's placed in. This ability to adapt is called evolution, and it's the reason that life has endured for the past few billion years. But evolution takes a long time, so when environments change too quickly for the inhabitants to keep up, the result is a drop in population or at the worst… extinction. And sometimes these changes can be so big that they affect the entire globe. Leading to some of the most catastrophic events in our planet’s history… mass extinctions. Content creator Angel of Death explores the five mass extinctions and the effects they had on life on earth in this five part miniseries.

The story of the tragedy on board the Scandinavian Star in 1990, is still the biggest unsolved murder mystery in Scandinavia in recent times. 30 years after the disaster, a new Danish documentary series tells the entire story.

A long journey in 8 episodes to discover the human body, with Piero Angela who closely observes our organism, focusing each time on a theme: the eye, the ear, taste and smell, the stomach and the intestine, liver, bones, lungs and heart. How does our "wonder machine" work? To make each explanation direct and clear, the program uses films, animations and photographs developed with the scanning electron microscope.

Some people see their lives dramatically turned upside down because they waited for too long before seeking care. The documentary series showcases individual who should have rapidly consulted with a doctor when the first signs of illness appeared, before the situation became critical.

Series exploring the origins of human life, from African beginnings to Ice Age artists.

Mike Maloney takes you to Egypt to unravel the difference between currency and money. This is one of the most important lessons you will ever learn, and will pave the way for your understanding of future episodes. Because without knowing exactly what money is...how on earth can we expect to learn about it?

The Body in Question is a landmark British medical documentary series of 13 shows made for the BBC. It was a groundbreaking show, being the first to ever televise an autopsy (in the final show on 29 Jan 1979). Dr Jonathan Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience. He explores our attitudes towards our bodies, our ignorance of them, and our inability to read our body's signals. The first episode starts with vox populi asking where various organs in the body are located. By the final episode we are left in no doubt. Taking as his starting point the experience of pain, Dr Miller analyses the elaborate social process of "falling ill", considers the physical foundations of "disease" and looks at the types of individuals humankind has historically attributed with the power of healing. The series was nominated for two 1979 BAFTAs: Best Factual Television Series and Most Original Programme/Series.

This three-part series follows comedian Jon Richardson and his friend Matt Forde as they face up to the adult realities of mortgages, marriage and parenthood.

The series investigates Paolo Macchiarini’s claims to have invented a ground-breaking method to create new organs. His method using plastic tracheas sown with stemcells has been operated on patients in the US, Russia, Sweden and the UK. So far, unfortunately, the track record of his plastic organs is not very good. Almost all patients are dead. And several of his former surgeon colleagues in Sweden claim that not only does the method not work, but that his scientific claim to fame is based on falsified and misrepresented data. Some even claim that his patients have been used as human guinea-pigs.

In this "entertaining medical series" (The Sunday Times, U.K.), Dr. Michael Mosley shows how drugs have revolutionized medicine and changed the course of human history. Unfolding over a period of 200 years, it's an extraordinary tale of daring, self-experimentation, revelation, genius, and outright luck.

We spend it, we borrow it, and save it. Now let's talk about money and its many minefields, from credit cards to casino, scammers to student loans.