Original subtitles

(tool scraping, water dripping)

NARRATOR: Archaeologist Randy White is far beneath the hills of France

searching for a special moment in evolution,

an era cloaked in mystery

when, with hardly a change in appearance

humans began behaving in ways they had never behaved before.

He wants to find out how it was

that our ancestors became truly human.

WHITE: It's downright scary to be in these cave environments.

They are cold, dark, damp, frightening, dangerous places.

When you see people going a kilometer underground

or two kilometers underground

and you find traces of paintings and that sort of thing

there's something much more profound going on

than just an interest in exploration.

Perhaps this cave that we're exploring here

opens onto our site, which could make...

if there were any paintings in this cave

could make them the oldest cave paintings on the planet.

NARRATOR: It's possible Randy White could one day make a discovery

as startling as that made in 1994

when others found underground caverns

adorned with over 300 images, some painted 34,000 years ago,

the oldest rock art known.

But finding art is not the only goal.

White wants to find something bigger

how the human mind was born.

Where once people had looked at bare walls

and had seen only walls

now others suddenly saw astounding possibilities.

And with art came human technology

human communication, human culture.

The question is, what happened to make all this possible?

How could it be that a species opened its mind

and burst into a new realm?

How was it that human ancestors

evolved a whole new way of seeing themselves

and, in time, transformed the planet?

NARRATOR: The Great Rift Valley of East Africa.

Here is where the human story began.

For millions of years

Africa was the landscape of human evolution.

Across this terrain

an ancestral people survived, reproduced

and passed on their traits from generation to generation.

Without Africa, humanity, as we know it,

might never have evolved.

This is an area that was once inhabited by hominids

before they were truly human.

Now it's a site scientists visit to understand how people lived

and what they thought about over a million years ago.

Soon after the rains each year, Rick Potts leads a team

that scours these badlands, finding stone tools and fossils.

Potts believes this place was once a tool-making factory.

POTTS: It takes really sharp eyes

to find that first fragment of fossil

or to find that sliver of stone tool

that says hominids were right here at this spot.

And so I knew that we were very close to an ancient soil

that was nearly one million years old

that had previously produced

lots of fossil bones and stone tools.

It turned out to be a hand ax,

one of those stone tools that our ancestors made

for a long, long time, hundreds of thousands of years.

These hominids were bringing these rocks

down from the highlands

and they were chipping the edges of the tool around.

And they could even hold it in their hand like this

use it for digging or for knocking off flakes

that they could use for butchering animals.

In a sense, this is the Swiss army knife of the Paleolithic.

NARRATOR: Here, these Paleolithic

(or ancient stone tool) people

made a variety of simple implements repeatedly

for nearly a million years.

POTTS: Indeed their minds were... were oriented towards survival.

They had the ability to make these tools

which had some sophistication to them.

But the fact that they kept making them means

that they had a kind of, um... a mental template

a regularity of thinking

that kept producing these same things over and over again.

Chances are they didn't speak to one another like we do

and, uh... and apparently

they got along just fine with this single tool.

So a million and a half years, this was around

which is an immense period of time, an absurd period of time

when you think of today where computer programs don't last

for longer than a couple of years before they're improved

before they diversify in some way.

And our technology is the same way.

It's not the way of the technology

of these ancient people a million years ago.

They didn't have something that we have,

the creativity, the innovation, the diversity of cultures

that, of course, characterizes our own species.

NARRATOR: On the tree of life

human evolution began around six million years ago

when hominids split off

from the common ancestor they shared with chimpanzees.

They descended from the trees about four million years ago

and entered a new world.

Two and a half million years ago, with a modified hand

they fashioned stone tools

and began to depend more and more on a diet of meat.

The size of their brains increased dramatically.

And about two million years ago, some began leaving Africa.

These early travelers were successful for a while

but, in the end, they all became extinct.

It wasn't until about 60,000 years ago

that the first truly modern humans (our ancestors)

began leaving Africa.

They were hunter-gatherers,

foraging for food, living in small groups

roaming a wide landscape.

But they were different from their predecessors.

They had begun a revolutionary way of life.

This lifestyle had emerged over millions of years

through the multiple processes of evolution:

mutation, selection, adaptation, competition, failure

punctuated by the occasional success.

It was a story of evolution, of change over time,

no different from the stories of so many other species

but, in the end, it produced results new to the planet.

MAN: Behavior changed very radically at around 50,000 years ago.

This is someone who lived in Israel

let's say roughly 100,000 years ago, this skull.

Now, you might say, Israel? Is that Africa?

At the time, in a sense, it was.

If you look at where Israel is today

Israel is on the very margin of Africa

and there have been times in the past

when Africa expanded a bit ecologically

and Israel was effectively incorporated in Africa.

This is someone who looks very much like us.

And I think if this person were alive today

if we put the flesh back on and dressed this person properly

we wouldn't see any significant difference.

It would not be somebody

who would cause you to cross the street

if you saw this person coming at you from the other direction.

NARRATOR: And yet this hundred-thousand-year-old human

did not behave like us.

And then here we have a fully modern person

someone who lived in Africa within the last 40,000 years.

Basically, the same kind of skull

particularly, the same kind of brain

or same shape to the part of the skull that contains the brain,

but this was someone who behaved in a very different way

than the prior person.

This is someone who made

a wider range of recognizable stone artifacts;

made a lot of artifacts out of bone and ivory and shell;

produced art.

People like this would be recognizable

not only in terms of their appearance

but in terms of their behavior as fully modern humans.

MAN: In a sense, we're all Africans.

If you took a bunch of human babies

from anywhere around the world,

from Australia, New Guinea, Africa, Europe,

and scrambled the babies at birth

and brought them up in any society

they'd all be able to learn the same languages

learn how to count, learn how to use computers

learn how to make and use tools.

It suggests

that the distinctively human parts of our intelligence

were in place

before our ancestors split off into the different continents.

NARRATOR: After leaving Africa some 60,000 years ago

this fully modern species headed east into Asia

and even to Australia.

Others followed the coast of the Mediterranean, north

dispersing into the hills

and leaving behind evidence that their minds were unique.

Here, in Turkey, Mary Stiner and Steve Kuhn have been excavating

a home that these early immigrants occupied,

a cave called Ucagizli,

one of the earliest modern human living sites.

KUHN: We're standing in the extreme back of the cave here

and there's been a variety of activities that took place

in this part of the site.

At a somewhat higher level

than the one we're excavating, about here,

there was a structure, a kind of wall of stones

that delimited what we think was a bedding area.

A little lower down, what you see is this triangular shape

which is basically a cone of debris

and this was a garbage dump.

There's this white material, which is ash

and this sort of yellowish, ashy sediment.

And every single one of these white specks

is a bone or an artifact.

This is just chock full of material.

It's a garbage dump.

Now, that may not seem very romantic

but as an archaeologist, it's a wonderful thing

because garbage is full of evidence

about how people lived and what they ate, what they did

how they made their tools.

NARRATOR: The team hoped they would unearth clues

to the routine of life 40,000 years ago.

They were in for a surprise.

STINER: Very quickly after we began excavation here

we realized that we had something truly extraordinary.

KUHN: As soon as we started digging into the sediments

we started finding lots of ornaments,

mostly shell beads

but a variety of other kinds of things.

They look like teeth when you first encounter them

and my heart rate goes up and I think, "More human fossils!"

Yep.

STINER: Yet another.

It'sNassarius?

Oh, yeah, that'sNassarius.

And it's got the little hole in it.

It's one of the local species here.

It's definitely perforated.

Oh, yeah.

This one's in very good condition, too,

even some of the original color of the shell.

KUHN: It's tremendously exciting and sort of daunting

because nobody had reported these before

from this part of the world.

And your first thought is, what did I do wrong?

NARRATOR: As they worked the layers of sediment

they began finding beads that dated back 43,000 years

making them the oldest beads found anywhere in the world.

KUHN: Now we have nearly a thousand ornaments,

mostly shell beads of a variety of species

but also things like the claw of a large raptor

or a large predatory bird that's been notched

to be suspended in a sort of necklace fashion.

STINER: They're always selecting the same species.

This is an animal that's relatively rare on beaches

but nonetheless does occur in the area.

And uniformly, people selected these.

You can see also that they've been artificially perforated

by a person so... in order that they could be suspended.

For the first time

in the Upper Paleolithic

people found it necessary in some areas

to say things about themselves

using durable material items.

NARRATOR: Durable items like beads are of no use for hunting, gathering

or protection.

They suggest that those who lived here

had more on their minds than simple survival.

So why were these beads so important?

And what can they tell us about the early days of modern humans?

Beads and artifacts have been found

along the routes our ancestors took.

43,000 years ago, humans had spread north to Eastern Europe.

Then they moved into the Russian Plain

and Central Europe.

By the time they settled in Western Europe, 38,000 years ago

they were not just making beads, they were mass-producing them.

In Southern France, Randy White has been scrutinizing

these ancient beads.

With powerful magnification

he can tell just how they were made

and he can reproduce prehistoric bead-making techniques.

WHITE: If I were to give you a piece of soapstone

or a piece of mammoth ivory

and I were to ask you to put a hole in it

I know exactly how you'd do it: you'd drill a hole in it.

You'd turn it, you'd rotate it to make a hole.

But you know what?

That's part of our culture, believe it or not.

That's the way we've learned how to do things.

Early modern human people

had a completely different technique for making holes.

They did it as I'm doing.

They actually dug a hole into a piece of material

at a very early stage of production

and it leaves some pretty ugly traces.

But because the process is one by which you grind

and you polish afterwards

they were able to remove all of those ugly traces

and to leave behind the tiniest of little openings.

I've got a hole, a very, very, very tiny little hole,

that I've opened up using a very, very large point.

It's actually a very emotional experience

to be sitting here, having finished a... a bead

using exactly the same techniques

that people did 35,000 years ago

with exactly the same raw materials

that people used 35,000 years ago

in exactly the same form, in exactly the same place.

We have, from this rock shelter, more than 1,000 beads like this.

We know that someone

who was mentally, emotionally very much like ourselves

sat somewhere in this vicinity 35,000 years ago

and made exactly what I've just made for you.

People have tended to look at beads

and suggest people were just sort of playing around.

But in fact, we know that here at Castel-Merle

they were spending thousands of hours making beads

when they could have been doing other things

that we might think to be more productive.

NARRATOR: Beads are artifacts of the mind's big bang.

They are evidence

of our creative and cultural beginnings

recalling a time when bands of humans

began interacting socially with one another.

WHITE: Expression in materials

is really one of the hallmarks of the revolution, if you will.

This is something really new on the horizon.

This is people creating social identities

that don't exist in nature.

This is saying, "I am a Cro-Magnon woman."

Uh, "I've given birth."

Uh, "I have a particular history;

I have a particular status within my group"

and anyone who's a member of that group

will be able to see that at a glance

by the fact that she's wearing certain kinds of animal teeth

certain kinds of beads

her clothing is decorated in certain ways.

It's a mode of visual expression

but it's expressing social relationships

and I think that's something, clearly, that's very new

in human evolution.

NARRATOR: Humans using technology in the service of social identity,

this was momentous.

The birth of the human mind occurred in Africa

and left its mark as far away as Australia.

But the evidence is most abundant in Europe.

It was here that these humans encountered

another species of hominid,

a species almost identical to them, but not quite

and it was this subtle difference

that influenced who survived.

We call these ancient Europeans "Neanderthals."

Compared to us, they were massive.

MAN: Meeting face to face a Neanderthal

would be quite an impressive experience.

They had a very large body mass,

some 200 pounds of muscles and bones for a male.

The face is very projected forward

in its... in its middle part

with almost no cheeks, and a receding chin and forehead.

And in the middle of this face

there was probably a huge and projecting nose.

NARRATOR: Neanderthals and humans were different in the ways they lived

and, most remarkably, in the ways they died.

HUBLIN: The burial of La Ferrassie shows the body of a male Neanderthal

lying on one side in a pit, and that's all.

And so far, we have very few evidence of Neanderthal burials

with any kind of... of complex construction or organization.

Neanderthals do not display many signs of symbolic life.

In fact, we don't know any kind of art or symbols or pictures

used by Neanderthals.

NARRATOR: In contrast

modern humans appear to have treated their dead

with extreme care.

In the permafrost of Russia

this man was found buried in clothing

embroidered with thousands of delicately wrought beads.

Does this suggest

that modern humans considered life more precious?

Could it be that even though human brains

were about the same size as Neanderthals

they had dramatically different abilities?

The evidence is controversial

so scientists like John Shea of the State University of New York

are reenacting the activities of both species

to understand how their minds might have differed.

SHEA: The Neanderthal point is big and heavy

and the nature of its heavy handle means

that it could not have been thrown very far.

In fact, it was probably not thrown at all.

It was probably a stabbing weapon

used more or less like a modern bayonet.

That means that in order to kill an animal

the Neanderthals had to get up really close

and stab this thing into a big, dangerous creature

putting their lives at risk.

NARRATOR: And if a Neanderthal spear ever was thrown

its range was limited.

19, 20...

21, 22, 23...

23 meters thrown with a Neanderthal-type wooden spear.

The modern human weapon, on the other hand

this piece of antler here, is very narrow

cone-shaped like a bullet.

It's attached to a very narrow handle

and this suggests

it was probably thrown from a great distance.

Making the antler point takes hours and hours and hours.

You have to soak the antler until it's just right

and then carve it by abrading it against a piece of sandstone

something more or less like this, you know?

It takes a tremendous amount of patience to impose will

to impose design on this antler.

It takes no great amount of time to impose one's will on stone;

stone's a very... very easy material to shape.

The Neanderthal point could have been made

in a matter of minutes; it's very, very simple

when you know how to chip stone correctly.

Quick and dirty is the name of the game

for Neanderthal technology.

The next thing you want to do is... see this ridge here?

Where this ridge sticks up

hold this up like I showed you

and then with your hammer stone

hit right there, plonk,

and you'll undercut this whole mass.

SHEA: What I'm doing in teaching stone technology here is

I'm trying to re-create the evolutionary environment.

This is probably the way modern humans

transferred these skills

is an older individual sitting around

with younger individuals.

You could share information.

Neanderthals, we don't have any evidence of systematic teaching.

It's probably something, they reinvented the wheel a lot.

Beyond 50,000 years back in earlier antiquity

it's the same thing over and over and over again

and that tells you

there's not a lot of information being transferred

probably just imitation.

But after 50,000

when the modern humans show up on the scene

every generation, there's something new.

NARRATOR: Not simply to duplicate old technology

but to build on the experience, knowledge and wisdom of elders;

this, for modern humans, was a vital strategic advantage.

Now technology could improve from one generation to the next.

With this new invention, the spear thrower

a weapon could be launched even greater distances

reducing the hunter's risk.

Neanderthals: 24 meters...

42 meters.

Advantage: modern humans.

NARRATOR: Improved technology suggests a great deal

about humans' emerging ability to transmit information

over great distances across time.

HUBLIN: These pictures are a way to communicate with someone else

without this person being here.

It can be at the far distance or it can be in the far future.

And this is what apparently Neanderthals did not do.

NARRATOR: Fossils tell us

Neanderthals lived in small, often isolated pockets

largely cut off from other Neanderthals.

HUBLIN: For some reasons

when they could not survive longer in this part

they would just move away.

The picture we have

of the Upper Paleolithic modern humans in Europe

is... is quite different.

NARRATOR: For modern humans

portable art may have served as a means of communication

some of it traveling hundreds of miles

from where it had been created.

It's very clear that these people were involved

in nets of exchanges at long distance.

They belonged to a big entity, a big cultural entity

and it's very likely

that Neanderthals did not have this at all.

NARRATOR: Perhaps the most compelling evidence of early culture

is concealed deep beneath the earth.

While we may not know exactlywhyhumans painted

in these caves

we now can guess howthey painted.

Archaeologist Michel Lorblanchet

has studied the techniques of cave art.

He thinks some of the images were rendered

by a process he calls "spit painting."

LORBLANCHET: Spit painting must have had very important symbolic significance.

NARRATOR: Through experimentation

he has been able to reproduce the technique of early artists.

By mixing pigment with saliva

he believes they achieved a bonding compound

that lasted long after the creators were gone.

LORBLANCHET: It's not at all like painting on canvas; it's quite different.

The cave is full of shape, natural shapes.

The cave is extremely, uh, it's exceptional.

It's beautiful.

NARRATOR: And what might renderings of wild goats and sheep

painted in these eerie caverns, tell us of the mind's big bang?

It is the first manifestation of human imagination.

Modern men tend to... to make their imprint on the landscape

on the territory.

So it's why they penetrated in the deepest part of the earth.

It's like to express themselves

to say that we are the owner of the earth in some way

and we have some relationship, personal relationship

with the spirit living inside the earth.

NARRATOR: In other corners of these caves

Lorblanchet has found artifacts made of bone

and a pattern of wear on the rock

that led him to speculate these cave explorers also made music.

(note sounds)

(taps out different notes)

I have the feeling to be in a cathedral here...

a big cathedral, an important cathedral.

NARRATOR: So... below and above ground

our ancestors were refining technology and art

and communicating in complex ways.

It appears as if these changes occurred rapidly.

How could it have happened?

KLEIN: My own view is that there was a brain change;

that there was a genetic change

that promoted the fully modern human brain

that allowed the kind of innovation and invention

the ability to innovate and invent

that is a characteristic of modern humans.

If you accept the idea that there was a neurological change

50,000 years ago, and that this was rooted in biology

it would just become the latest, the most recent

in a long series of mutations on which natural selection operated

to produce the human species as we understand it today.

It's very likely that the changes in the brain

didn't happen overnight.

There wasn't one magical mutation

that miraculously allowed us to speak and to walk upright

and to cooperate with one another

and to figure out how the world works.

Evolution doesn't work that way.

It would be staggeringly improbable

for one mutation to do all of that.

Chances are there were lots and lots of mutations

over a span of tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years

that fine-tuned and sculpted the brain

to give it all the magnificent powers that it has today.

The actual organization of behavior goes on at the level

of the individual nerve cells and their connections.

We have a hundred billion nerve cells

probably a hundred trillion connections.

It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways

in which they are arranged.

And a lot of our evolution consisted

not just in getting more of this stuff

but in wiring it in precise ways to support intelligence.

NARRATOR: So it may not have been the size of the human brain

but its "wiring" that endowed us with powerful new skills.

According to Richard Wrangham, one of these skills

was the knack for living a complex social life.

Here in East Africa, chimpanzees show us

how we might have interacted with others

before the mind's big bang.

MAN: Social climbing is the one thing

that really makes a male's world.

But they do it not in just a one-to-one way.

They're very sensitive to the interactions among each other.

So if I have a friend that I am trying to impress

then maybe what I will do is to attack the enemy of my friend.

And the enemy of my friend might be doing something

like grooming with one of his friends.

So I may detect the relationships among other chimps

and manipulate them to my own advantage.

But what we share with the chimps is an ability to be

very subtle in the way in which we can understand the meaning

of an interaction that we see

in terms of its threat to our own social standing.

(chimpanzees hooting)

In humans, a little word to the father

of a badly behaved adolescent

and all of a sudden, you can control their behavior.

But no such thing happens with chimps.

You have to actually exert physical force

or the threat of physical force.

NARRATOR: But after about six million years of separate evolution

humans acquired a significant social advantage.

WRANGHAM: How much subtler

how much more satisfying, if the council of elders

can sit round the fire at night

and say, you know, "Joe, there, he's behaving really badly.

We've got to do something about him."

That's what chimps can't do.

NARRATOR: There's much more chimpanzees cannot do.

The University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Here, Andrew Whiten considers differences

between chimp minds and human minds.

With unlikely tools, he and others have identified

another critical advantage, and possibly a key

to the human mind's stunning success...

Okay.

NARRATOR: Mind-reading.

Will this three-year-old be able to look at things

from someone else's point of view?

Can she make inferences about others' thoughts?

Can she spot deception?

Sally.

WHITEN: Sally? Watch this.

She's going to go put the marble in the basket.

Are you ready?

And cover it up.

Okay?

And then Sally's going to go out to play

like you did, out in the garden.

Ready, off she goes.

Okay, she's gone out to play, and while she's out to play

here's naughty Ann coming

and she's going to take the marble out of the basket...

NARRATOR: While Sally is away

deceitful Ann will now hide Sally's marble.

There we go.

Then Ann's going to come over here.

Do you know what's happening?

Where did Sally go?

She went out to play.

Here she comes.

She's coming back, and she's going to come

and look for her favorite marble.

Where's Sally going to look for her marble now?

I think it's in here.

Oh, you think Sally's going to look in there?

Why do you think she's going to look in there?

I think she'll find it.

That's where it was.

NARRATOR: Through the age of three, researchers have found

that a child is unable

to ascribe actions, motives and beliefs to others.

But by the age of five, the child's brain has developed

a capacity for stepping into someone else's mind.

WHITEN: Sally is coming back from playing

and Sally's going to go and look for her marble.

Where is she going to look for her marble?

She's going, um...

Where's she going to look?

Basket.

In the basket.

Okay, shall we let her look in the basket?

Yep.

Hmm! Why did she look in the basket?

Because the marble could've been there, but it wasn't.

Okay, so where is the marble, do you remember?

Yep.

WHITEN: It varies in different children, but generally

the four-year stage is thought of as a kind of watershed

when that particular refined theory-of-mind ability emerges.

So a three-year-old

would typically have difficulty with it.

A five-year-old has generally mastered it.

And so far, no chimpanzee has passed any test

of the attribution of false belief

that a five-year-old child passes.

I suppose theory of mind makes us as sublime as we are

because we can feel for others so much, perhaps

you might say, on the one hand.

At the same time, it allows us to... it allows us to be

that much more sneaky than any other species on the planet.

In societies of humans

being socially competent really counts.

Being socially competent allows you ultimately

to out-compete others, to gain better access

to resources, the best mates.

And in those kinds of societies

it seems that brain can be more important than brawn.

So it's potentially a very powerful evolutionary force

because it's driving a kind of upward spiral.

Social complexity begets greater social intelligence.

Social intelligence presents even greater problems

to the individuals in the next generation

and they have to become more socially complex.

NARRATOR: Complex social relationships; a theory of mind:

These are abilities we associate with modern humans.

But how could we express any of these abilities

without language?

With language, we can recall the past, ponder the future

teach children, tell secrets, manipulate crowds.

But imagine a world without language.

Nicaragua, Central America.

Managua.

Here, as in other places of the world

there are those who hardly have any language at all.

Maria No Name... "Mary No Name."

Deaf since birth, she has been isolated all her life,

both from the people who could help her

and from others with her disability.

Her friend, linguist Judy Kegl

understands the depth of her isolation.

The two can communicate just a little

using simple and primitive gestures.

KEGL: The first time I met her

she was missing the ability to tell me who she was.

She was missing the ability

to tell me how old she was.

She doesn't know her name.

In order to tell me who she was

she had to take me home and show me

the papers and pictures of her family.

We had to share a context.

She can tell me things... I can show you a bit.

She can tell me what happened to her father.

KEGL: I asked her about her father dying, and she said "three."

Okay? What "three" meant was he was shot three times.

I know this from working with the other deaf signer

who says he was shot in three places

and that's how her father died, right?

(vocalizing)

Yeah.

Right.

And uh, you know, but "three" is just not enough

to give me access to the information

that I would have needed

had I not had prior knowledge about that.

Papa.

Papa.

Okay.

What she's saying is... "I had a daughter

"that went away and got married and that was it.

"She never came back.

"I had a son that went away

"and I never heard from him again.

"You know, that's it.

"I'm alone.

That's my life."

She was language-ready.

The problem was, she didn't get access to language

within that critical period.

And that critical window

for learning language in the way that we learned it, is closed.

NARRATOR: This "window for language" remains open

until we reach age seven.

Then it slowly closes as we advance towards puberty.

Before the 1980s, many deaf Nicaraguans

were like Mary No Name.

They never encountered the window for language

because they never encountered others with their disability.

But in 1980, after the Nicaraguan revolution

the new government tried to enhance deaf people's lives.

It brought deaf village children into Managua

to end their isolation.

Here, educators tried to teach them an existing sign language.

The effort failed.

The children showed little interest

in learning a language forced upon them.

Instead, they began communicating with each other

in their own way.

Judy Kegl was summoned from the United States

to sort out the problem.

KEGL: I came down thinking wherever there were deaf people

there was a sign language, and that obviously there would be

a full-blown sign language in full swing here in Nicaragua.

And I said, "Well, you know, I can learn

"a bit of their sign language, if that's what you want

and work with you on learning it."

They said, "No, they don't have a sign language.

"They have'm?micas.'

They have mime gestures."

And they pointed to a group of kids

and said, "We want to know what they're talking about."

NARRATOR: It turned out they were talking about a lot more

than anyone dreamed possible.

Kegl had arrived in Nicaragua

shortly after the birth of a new language.

KEGL: Language needs company.

Language needs a community.

Language needs some sort of a trigger.

And I think that trigger is...

it's not so much that it needs a community

in the sense that there have to be lots of people

but part of being a community

is wanting to share information with each other.

NARRATOR: Might this moment resemble what happened

around 50,000 years ago, the turning point

that led to the explosion of human creativity?

Language does not need a voice.

It is our legacy, an inevitability of being human.

Today, we still don't know exactly when language evolved...

when it opened the door to our phenomenal success as a species.

KEGL: This is a verb reduplicated, meaning...

NARRATOR: But language, every language, depends on strict rules

all of them familiar.

KEGL: That's a role shift to man looking at the bird

then back to the man falling off the mountain

half dreaming that he's going to fly like a bird...

NARRATOR: While many species can communicate, even vocalize,

only human languages are driven by complex rules.

Every one of our world's 6,300 languages has them.

We call them "syntax."

In her isolation, Mary No Name never encountered syntax.

But it is commonplace in the children's language.

Syntax isn't the set of rules

that you learned in your third-grade grammar

that you had to memorize

so you spoke English the way you're supposed to.

Syntax is... or language, the constraints on language

are something that all human beings share.

They're the constraints that are imparted to us

by the fact that we share a single human brain.

They are the...

not just the constraints, but the ability

to hierarchically organize information that allows us

to construct sentences, novel sentences

that have never been said before.

That allows us to put a... to tell a story

that allows us to prophesy, that allows us to lie.

I can sheerly communicate for communications' sake

when I have syntax.

Then I can truly use a language.

NARRATOR: And those most gifted with the tools of language

might have been the ones to prosper

according to Richard Dawkins.

DAWKINS: We don't know when language started

but as soon as language did start

it provided an environment in which those individuals

who were genetically best equipped to thrive

and survive and succeed

in an environment dominated by language

were the ones who left the most offspring.

And that probably, in our forefathers

that probably led to an improvement

in the ability to use language.

NARRATOR: What exactly was

the evolutionary purpose of language?

Was it to discuss water holes, weapons, what lay over the hill?

Or might it have had another advantage?

The answer may be surprising.

MAN: The kind of situations we're looking for

to study language was just the sort of natural places

where you would have a conversation

and a very, informal relaxed conversation with a friend.

So we kind of looked in places like bars, trains

anywhere where you would kind of, um...

have a sort of... a natural, everyday conversation.

NARRATOR: Robin Dunbar is an eavesdropper.

He listens in to other people's conversations

to determine what we really talk about.

DUNBAR: I think the conventional view

of all those who work on language

linguists and all these kind of people

is that language is about the transmission

of technically complex information.

And this is what I kind of call

the "Einstein and Shakespeare" version of language.

And the answer is, "Oh, no, it isn't."

If you actually go and listen

to what people talk about on a day-to-day basis

back there in their homes or on the street

or over the garden fence

then it's about social relationships.

The most surprising thing was actually how much time

people did spend in social gossip, if you like.

We really hadn't expected it to be so great.

Social exchange of information

should be important in people's lives.

We really hadn't expected it to be

perhaps more than about a third of total conversation time.

And here we were at two-thirds.

NARRATOR: Two-thirds of all conversation, Robin Dunbar believes

is dedicated to gossip.

Throughout human evolution

could nature have selected not just for the fittest

but for those with the most acute social skills?

DUNBAR: What language does, the bottom line, if you like,

is it just allows us to hold big groups together.

It's like, kind of, opening a window of opportunity.

Suddenly there's all sorts of other things you can do with it.

Because you can use it

to solicit information about third parties

so you can now see what happened

when you weren't actually present at the time.

And the problem all monkeys and apes have

is if they don't see it, they don't know about it.

They never will.

PINKER: Gossip is certainly one of the things

that language is useful for

because it's always handy to know who needs a favor

who can offer a favor, who's available

who's under the protection of a jealous spouse.

And being the first to get a piece of gossip

is like engaging in insider trading;

you can capitalize on an opportunity

before anyone else can.

But language is useful for other things,

for exchanging technical know-how:

How do you get poison out of the gland of a toad?

What's the best way to make a spear?

Where are the berries?

What's the best time of year to hunt?

It's also good for one-on-one negotiations:

"If you give me some of your meat

I'll give you some of my fruit."

There are all kinds of ways that language can be useful.

Gossip, I think, is just one of them.

NARRATOR: Language, the force that created modern human culture

and that today tells us who we are, how we belong

and where we're bound.

Language, according to Richard Dawkins

is also central to a new and powerful evolutionary force.

DAWKINS: As far as a human lifetime is concerned

the only kind of evolutionary change

we're likely to see very much of

is not genetic evolution at all, it's cultural evolution.

And if we put a Darwinian spin on that

then we are going to be talking

about the differential survival of memes as opposed to genes.

Memes are ideas, habits, skills, gestures, stories, songs

anything which we pass from person to person by imitation.

We copy them.

Now, just as genes are copied inside all the cells of our body

and passed on in reproduction

memes are copied by our brains and our behavior

and they're passed from person to person.

And I think what happens is

just as the competition between genes

shapes all of biological evolution

so it's the competition between memes

that shapes our minds and our cultures.

So it's absolutely central to understanding human nature

that we take account of memes.

NARRATOR: Sue Blackmore believes

memes have been the forces driving human evolution

especially since the mind's big bang, some 50,000 years ago.

She sees ideas, prejudices

trends and breakthroughs behaving much like genes,

self-replicating and accumulating from mind to mind

society to society, generation to generation.

Memes are the building blocks of a new kind of evolution.

DAWKINS: If units of culture

replicate themselves in something like the same way

as DNA molecules replicate themselves

then we have the possibility

of a completely new kind of Darwinism.

Changes in the human lifestyle for the last 50,000 years

have had very little to do

with any biological change in our brains.

The reason that we live differently today

from the way that the cavemen lived

is not because we have better brains

but because we've been accumulating

all of the thousands of discoveries

that our ancestors have made

and we have the benefit of a huge history of inventions

that we communicate non-genetically

through language, through documents, through customs.

NARRATOR: Memes can be more than passing fads.

They can be titanic.

They can modify the world, revolutionize life

even suppress the forces of biological evolution.

Consider insulin, one such meme, now some 80 years old.

YOUNG MAN: Before insulin

diabetics weren't expected to live.

It was really considered a fatal disease.

I would probably not be here without insulin.

It's just been a huge...

It's allowed me personally as a diabetic to live.

NARRATOR: 14-year-old Jared is on a week-long hike

with others who share his disease, juvenile diabetes.

An outing like this may not appear revolutionary, but it is.

With exercise, a diabetic's blood sugar balance

can plummet dangerously.

JARED: Hmm, 231.

Normally that's pretty high, but on the trail we try to keep...

keep our blood sugars up, just in case we go low.

And, you know, we just want to make sure

that we've got plenty of sugar in there

since we're doing so muchexercise.

NARRATOR: Jared has his condition under control

thanks to a device that supplies him with insulin

the instant it's required.

(monitor beeping)

This may seem mundane today

but before the 1920s, individuals like Jared

would have died as children

never to reach the age of reproduction

never to pass on their genes.

Now young diabetics are no longer condemned to death.

JARED: Reconnect...

NARRATOR: Insulin, an idea that became a cure

is just one more meme that helps modern humans

elude the forces of evolution.

Like so many other scientific breakthroughs

it provides us with new ways to survive.

PINKER: A lot of the creations of the brain

can make up for physical deficiencies

and could actually change the course of evolution.

Thousands of years ago, someone who was severely nearsighted

probably wouldn't have had many descendants;

he would have been eaten

or fallen off a cliff a long time ago.

But we invented eyeglasses

and now being nearsighted has no disadvantage at all.

There are some people who might say

"Well, isn't this interfering with evolution?

"Wouldn't we be better off letting the diabetics

"and the nearsighted die an early death

to improve the physical vigor of the species?"

That really goes against the way human evolution works

which is that for tens of thousands of years

we've depended for our survival

on our own inventions, on our own creation

and this is simply extending that process.

NARRATOR: Our revolt against biological evolution has taken many forms,

call it "culture," call it "memes"

call it "mimetic evolution," whatever.

It makes every one of us this planet's best survivor.

So far.

BLACKMORE: Nowadays I would say

that mimetic evolution is going faster and faster

and it has almost entirely taken over from biological evolution.

Not entirely, in the sense

that the two are going along hand in hand.

For example, birth control:

the memes of the pill and condoms and all these things

have effects on the genes.

In fact, they change quite dramatically across the planet.

Who is... which genes

are getting passed on and which aren't.

The more educated you are, the less children you have.

That is memes fighting against genes.

What's also going on now at the beginning of the 21st century

is that the memes have suddenly made themselves a new home:

the Internet.

We thought we created the Internet for our own benefit.

In fact, if you look in any office

and you see people sitting there, slaves of the memes.

(imitating telephone)

"Hello?"

"Fax coming in."

"Yes... Oh, email."

It's going so fast.

I would say what's happened here is the inevitable consequences

of the mimetic evolutionary process.

The memes are getting better and faster

and more and more and creating as they go

better copying apparatus for their own copying.

I don't know where that leavesusin the future.

NARRATOR: For our species, as for all others

biological evolution has been the primary engine of change.

But since the birth of culture some 50,000 years ago

forces far more powerful have overtaken human evolution.

The mind's big bang was the birth of a new kind of change,

not of the body, but of ideas.

For the future of humankind

evolution may be no more than what we make of it.

Continue the journey

into where we're from and where we're going

at the Evolution web site.

Visit www.pbs.org.

The seven-part Evolution boxed set

and the companion book

are available from WGBH Boston Video.

To place an order, please call: