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Shocking discoveries.

Revealing glimpses of mankind's ancient past.

The bones of giants that lived centuries ago.

And primitive beast men roaming the wilderness.

Of all the mysteries that mankind has been able to solve, one still

baffles our collective curiosity. Where did we come from?

Were human beings the result of a spontaneous divine creation? Or is it

that we, as some evidence suggests, evolved over time

from other species?

And was there possibly a missing link that made us what we are today?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

Since the dawn of man, human beings have wondered how we came into existence.

And throughout history, people have proposed many different theories to try

explain the profound mystery of mankind's origins.

Since the earliest written records, it's clear that human cultures around the

world have been curious about our origin.

Where did we come from?

It's a great question, and the question means something different to everyone.

Every culture has different origin stories.

In many creation stories about human origins, humans are fully

formed from the start.

For example, in Genesis chapter 1 of the Hebrew Bible, we get a very structured,

very orderly account of creation.

In this narrative, through a series of spoken acts, God creates

the heavens, the earth, creates the land, the seas,

and then populates all of these domains with fish and birds and

creeping things.

And then on day six, God creates the humans.

And Genesis records that God speaks the human into existence, male and female,

in his own image and likeness. The implication here is that these humans

look just like we look today.

Throughout history, Before the coming of science, all we had were mythologies

about our origins, stories, tales, handed down generation by generation

thousands of years. That's all we had.

But then we had Charles Darwin. And Charles Darwin said that we are related

the apes. And that was a huge shock.

In 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man.

which proposed the theory that humans and apes share a common ancestor.

The natural evolutionary history of our lineage is that we were monkeys and then

we were apes and then eventually we became homo sapiens.

But when and how this happened is still something that scientists are trying to

piece together from the often fragmentary fossil record.

Ever since Darwin's groundbreaking work, Many have theorized that there could

have been a so -called missing link between us and our primitive ancestors

would explain how modern humans came to be.

But in recent years, scientists have suggested that this idea may be too

simplistic and that the truth about mankind's origins is far more

and mysterious.

I think our idea that there might be a missing link in human evolution stems

from the way humans may be inherently uncomfortable with the idea that

hasn't progressed towards us on purpose or with any particular direction in

mind.

In the relative scheme of things, we're just a very small branch in a much more

diverse tree of living things, which is kind of an amazing thought.

Human evolution in the past has been seen as a sort of... You see that sort

typical, an ape hunched over and slowly standing up.

But we're now realizing that it's not true.

In our past, there were multiple different species that actually had

traits to modern -day humans, and so evolution is not linear. It's not even a

tree. It's more of like a brambly bush.

It's all over the place.

Could it be that there's not one missing link, but rather many different species

that formed the human evolutionary tree?

And if so, could they have had a significant effect on the origins of

To answer that question, perhaps we should begin by examining the species

most closely related to, the Neanderthals.

Sunnyvale, California, December 15, 2011.

Genetics company 23andMe announces their at -home testing kits can now detect

how much of a person's DNA comes from the Neanderthals.

Neanderthals are an extinct species that were very similar to humans and died

out roughly 30 ,000 years ago.

But the 23andMe tests...

have shown that there is a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in each

one of us.

With the advent of these designer DNA tests, it's making us rethink the way

humans evolved.

Neanderthals are a subspecies of Homo sapiens.

We share a common ancestor with them around 800, 700 ,000 years ago.

They existed in what is Europe, the Middle East, and basically dominated the

Age. And hopefully, now that we know that we have Neanderthal DNA in our

we'll be more interested in actually learning about our past.

This is a shock, because we used to think that we didn't mate with anybody

but using the science of DNA, we begin to realize... Hey, there was a lot of

mating that went back and forth between Neanderthals and humans. We now have

data to work with to retrace the family tree of our race.

Modern humans and Neanderthals are both what scientists refer to as hominids, a

group of species that includes mankind and its closest relatives.

Thus far, fossils of 21 different hominin species have been found.

And new genetic discoveries are revealing that we have much more in

the Neanderthals and other hominins than previously thought.

Neanderthal fossils first came to light in the early part of the 19th century.

But at that time, they were dismissed as inferior to us.

So the idea that modern humans have Neanderthal DNA in them is incredibly

important because it shows that they are our distant cousins.

We're realizing now more and more that they were, in every respect, human.

If you had a Neanderthal today and you dressed them in a suit, would you know

was a Neanderthal? The answer is probably you wouldn't.

They were great tool makers and users.

They left behind art, different jewelry as well.

We're finding out that Neanderthals were actually burying their dead, which

shows that they were invested in their loved ones.

What we've learned by studying Neanderthal DNA is that some traits that

Neanderthals had were passed into modern human populations.

One of the traits that came from Neanderthals was a propensity to have

and so it ended up getting passed on, even though it provided a little bit of

disadvantage to those who had it.

Our closest relative is the Neanderthal, and they're gone.

But they also survive in our DNA.

The more we can learn about them, the more we learn about us.

Did the Neanderthals play an important role in the evolution of modern humans?

Or could it be that they only represent one piece of the puzzle? Because

recently, scientists unearthed the bones of another ancient species in Asia that

may have played a role in our development.

Species that was never known to exist.

Florence, Indonesia.

Archaeologists conducting excavations within the dark recesses of the Lianghua

Cave uncover the skeletal remains of a primitive human.

Oddly, the bones appear to belong to an adult less than four feet tall.

And genetic analysis reveals that the person's short stature was not due to

deformity.

Remarkably, this individual belonged to a previously unknown species of

miniature humans that lived 60 ,000 years ago.

The team of scientists excavating on Flores uncovered the partial skeleton,

which we now know as LB1, or Liangbuo 1.

It immediately sent shockwaves around the world. We know it's a member of our

genus Homo because it has characteristics of its teeth and jaws.

that we use to define our genus. So it's these features that help us understand

that it is closely related to us, but smaller.

After further study, the newly discovered species of miniature humans

the name Homo floresiensis, after the Isle of Flores, on which it was

discovered.

The $64 million question is, how did the ancestors of Homo floresiensis reach

Flores?

Flores is an oceanic island.

That means it's never been connected by land to either the Asian continent or

the Australian continent.

It's long been thought that only modern humans were clever enough to somehow

reach these kinds of islands by crossing open water.

And so to find Homo frisiansis on this oceanic island shows us how much we

underestimate

earlier hominins in terms of their dispersal capabilities.

What's most interesting is they found tools on the Isle of Flores.

Finding tools on this isolated Indonesian island opens up a Pandara's

ideas.

How did they get there?

How far back do these beings exist? And what level of sophistication do they

have?

Homo phrasiensis disappears roughly about 50 ,000 years ago.

But we only have evidence from this one cave.

And so I think there's still a lot that we need to uncover to figure out the

most likely explanation for their extinction.

Due to their stature, some anthropologists began calling Homo

hobbits, in reference to the furry -footed characters from Middle Earth,

popularized by author J .R .R. Tolkien.

in his 1937 book, The Hobbit, which has led many to wonder, could

Hobbit -sized humans be part of a missing link?

The Hobbit is the prime example of saying, hang on, stop and start thinking

what's going on here.

As time goes, we're finding more and more evidence that there was a range of

different kinds of humans.

In science, we always have to keep an open mind. Even when things disturb our

sense of who we are and where we came from, we're just beginning to realize

the Lord of the Rings is really a paradigm for other species out there

that have not yet been discovered.

Homo sapiens are not necessarily the only game in town.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis proves that humans, were just one of

intelligent species to inhabit Earth in the past.

But remarkably, there could be evidence of not only hobbit -sized humans, but

also species of giants that once lived in what is now modern Russia.

The Altai Mountains, Siberia.

Archaeologists conducting excavations inside a cave.

make an unexpected discovery.

They find two enormous human teeth, twice the size

of a modern person's.

What they found was some massive teeth that were so big they thought they were

cave bear teeth.

But then they were sequenced and they realized it's a new human cousin who may

have been seven, eight foot tall with massive skulls and jaws.

It's really a curveball of anthropology.

Further analysis of the teeth revealed they were more than 50 ,000 years old

belonged to a previously unknown human subspecies that has been named the

Denisovans.

From what little evidence of the bones and the teeth that have been found, not

only at the Denisovans cave in Siberia,

but also a huge jawbone that was found in a cave on the Tibetan plateau.

There is every indication that giants really did walk the earth

in ancient times.

Could the human family tree have once included a branch with actual giants?

Many experts believe it's possible, not only because of the fossil evidence,

but also because legends of extraordinarily large beings have

thousands of years.

In the European tradition, we have creatures like giants that are very,

widespread. We know now that folklore can last thousands of years.

So could ancient people have encountered Denisovans and interpreted them as

giants? It's sort of brutish, it's living differently from us, but still

interact with us.

Or maybe they dug up some bones and stumbled across them and said, wow,

guys look really different than we do, and then came up with this story.

I'm sure there are other archaic versions of humanity out there that we

yet discovered.

So I think we're just beginning to unravel the family tree.

There are other hidden branches out there that have not yet been found

we don't have evidence yet.

But I think we will as the years go by.

Many experts now believe that early humans coexisted with a number of

species that were similar to us.

But if that's true, then what happened to them?

Did they all just die out?

Or could some?

still exist in remote areas all over the world.

The Gold Coast, Australia, 1997.

27 -year -old Dean Harrison is out for a late -night jog in a wooded area near

the town of Ormahal.

Suddenly, he sees a large creature moving in the forest.

I got these chills that I could not explain that went from my head to my

and then back up again.

My hair went on end because I could hear it walking through the swamp.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Pulling up the foliage out of the ground and throwing it through the rest of the

forest, I moved my eyes to see this huge silhouette standing there in the bush

line. right behind me.

We're talking about eight feet, roughly.

There was something about this that just... Alarm bells went off in my head,

I ran as fast as I could.

Although Dean's nighttime encounter with the enormous creature was brief,

further research led him to believe that he had encountered an elusive species

that is commonly referred to as the Yowie.

The Yowie is a hair -covered man -like creature that's said to live on the

Australian mainland.

There's been thousands of sightings of this creature over the years, and

of it even date back to Aboriginal legends.

The Aboriginals had a lot of names for this creature.

It was Yahoo, or Yuri, Yowry, Yory.

Depending on which dialect and which area you came from, how you pronounce

The first sightings were written in the papers in Australia since the 1800s.

Most people describe them like a big human, the head sits on the shoulders

little bit protruded, massive shoulders like cannonballs, very, very muscular,

deep muscular chest, very long arms compared to a human, shorter legs,

deep set eyes and heavy eye ridges.

A protruding jaw, quite a flat -splayed nose.

You can get them anywhere up to about nine, even ten feet tall, some people

And there's no shortage of them because the sightings are growing.

Dean's encounter inspired him to form a group known as Australian Yowie

Research, or AYR.

We basically created a group where people can turn to...

and look for the answers once they have an encounter with one of these

creatures.

On our expeditions, we've had a lot of sightings and encounters over the course

of the last 25 years along the Great Dividing Range, from the bottom end of

Victoria all the way to the top end of Australia.

Could a species of giant ape -like humans really be hiding throughout

Australia?

It may sound far -fetched to some, but the truth is that the numerous sightings

of the Yahweh aren't the only evidence that a large cousin of man may still be

living in the wild.

Because there are reports of similar creatures all over the world.

The general idea of an undiscovered, large, ape -like creature living in the

woods is very common around the globe.

Whether we're talking about the Himalayas for the Yeti,

the U .S. for Bigfoot, or whether we're talking about Australia, New Zealand for

the Yowie.

This is something that appears to be a worldwide creature.

Evolutionary biologist Jane Goodall at one point said it was possible that such

a creature could exist.

And when you have someone with that sort of a scientific reputation that will

say there is a possibility that this creature exists, that's very compelling

evidence.

If we look back at early man, there's evidence of similar types of hominids.

If they developed in some shadowy place and continued to survive and evolve,

these early humans could have become what we know as Bigfoot, Yowie, or the

Yeti.

And if we were to actually find undeniable photo or video evidence of

creatures, It would completely change the way we've thought about everything,

including our own evolution.

These creatures could be closely related to us. This could be a branch of our

own ancestral tree.

Is it possible that the Yahweh, Bigfoot, and the Yeti are real, as

the countless sightings around the world suggest?

And if so...

Are these creatures part of a lost branch of the human family tree?

Perhaps the answer can be found by examining a creature that some believe

behind physical evidence of its existence.

High in the Himalayan mountains.

Nepal.

April 2019.

From their Makala base camp.

Located roughly 12 miles southeast of Mount Everest, the mountain expedition

team of the Indian Army releases a photo of an unusually large set of

footprints.

An expedition from the Indian Army noticed very strange tracks in the snow.

And when they looked at them, they realized that each one was 32 inches in

length and 15 inches in width.

And they came to the conclusion that they possibly belonged to the

legendary Yeti.

And we know it in the West as the Abominable Snowman.

The Indian Army are not prone to throw out such sensationalistic material, so

that caught a lot of people off guard.

And you look at these prints and you start to ask the question,

how big a creature would create them.

Curiously, this isn't the first time that massive bipedal footprints have

found in the vicinity of Mount Everest.

In 1951, British mountaineer Eric Shipton captured a photo of what

be a giant footprint with an ape -like thumb instead of a big toe.

One thing that supports the credibility of all these sightings is that so many

people have described the same thing.

There has been numerous footprints that have been cast and observed and

photographed over the years.

And this just corroborates the different witness sightings to suggest that

something is still out there.

The idea that massive creatures like the Yeti Our living in the wild might sound

far -fetched to some, but there have been many similar accounts of strange

bipedal animals throughout history.

For instance, there's a particular species that was believed to inhabit

America and would only come out at night.

Murphy, North Carolina, 1841.

Local farmer Felix Axley is planting his first crops of the growing season when

he feels his plow catch on something beneath the soil.

He digs beneath the dirt to find the source of the impediment and pulls out a

strange carved statue of two creatures that appear to be human but have short

bodies and large round heads.

Their face, they almost look flat.

And they showed their eyes as very prominent.

When Felix actually dug it up, he probably didn't know what he was looking

So he put them on a sled and drug it back up to his farmstead and leaned

it against the well.

And it stayed there for years and years.

The odd statue remained a local curiosity for more than a century. But

It is kept at the Cherokee County Historical Museum because experts have

determined that the carving depicts members of a legendary civilization who

Cherokee referred to as the Moon -Eyed People.

In 1797, Benjamin Smith Burton came out with a book and he cited a Revolutionary

War veteran.

who was an interface between the government and the Cherokee people in

who told him about the legend of the moon -eyed people.

The legend is that they were people with huge eyes who could see at night and

not so well during the day.

The Cherokee of the Appalachia of North America entered this region

around 1 ,000 years ago.

And when they got there...

It was already occupied by a type of population they refer to as the Moon

People.

And it was said that they had existed for many tens of thousands of years.

The Moon -Eyed People have been described as being about three, three

feet tall and having larger heads proportionally than we do.

They've also got pale blue eyes and pale skin, which also means direct sunlight

is not good for them. So they are primarily nocturnal.

The Moonite people lived on the eastern bank of the Valley River. And in the

Cherokees, they lived between the Hiawassee and Valley River.

The Cherokees lived with the Moonite people in harmony for a while.

But then they eventually got in an argument for property reasons.

And so the Moonite people were displaced by the Cherokees.

According to legend, after being driven westward by the Cherokee, the Moonite

people disappeared and were never seen again.

Was there actually a primitive society of pale, human -like beings with

eyes? that lived in North America, many experts believe it's possible because

the Cherokee aren't the only Native Americans whose legends speak of the

people. What's interesting is that Lakota, Sioux, so many tribes have

legends with short people with huge eyes.

It's been said that even Lewis and Clark met with Native tribes in South Dakota

and were told by the Native people there.

that these little people were malevolent and had poison arrows and actually

killed some of the members.

And we're talking about fierce warriors, not people prone to superstition.

One of the very interesting aspects is trying to overlay these sort of

characters with what we now have coming from archaeology. For example, we know

that there were a lot of hominids running around the Earth. It's not out

realm of possibility.

that some of these stories that we have refer to long -held folklore notions of

when the world was a much more diverse place.

Could there have been entire civilizations belonging to other

human family tree that disappeared from history?

It's a fascinating notion.

But in the case of the Moonite people, many researchers believe that actual

physical evidence of their societies

still exists.

Fort Mountain State Park, Georgia.

Standing atop the peak of this worn mountain at the southern end of the

Appalachians is a jagged rock wall that is 855 feet long.

the moon -eyed people. They are accredited with the creation of

structures on the sides of mountains and hills, like on Falk Mountain.

In fact, there's even a sign on Falk Mountain saying that these structures

created by the moon -eyed people.

We're pretty certain it was not built by the Cherokees.

Because the Cherokee did not use rock in their construction.

They even used a concoction called wattle and dawn.

And that was straw, clay, and mud.

Since it's not built by the Cherokees, it might very well have been built by

Moon Eye people.

It might seem unbelievable that there was a race of pale humanoids with

moon -shaped eyes that once inhabited North America.

But there have been reports of an even more incredible creature that dwells in

the swamps of South Carolina, a bizarre beast that is said to be part man and

part reptile.

Lee County, South Carolina, June 29, 1988, 2 a .m.

17 -year -old Christopher Davis stops to change a flat tire deep in the back

roads of Skateboard Swamp.

And he quickly senses that he is not alone.

About the time he's putting the jack and the flat tire into the trunk of his

car, he looks up and he sees something coming at him in the moonlight.

The closer this thing got, the more he knew this wasn't a person.

He looked up, and he saw a greenish -looking figure,

maybe about seven to eight foot tall, and arms that draped down to the side

three claws on each hand.

Sensing he could be endangered, Critton revolved into the car and drive away as

fast as he can.

Christopher looked in his rearview mirror and could see this thing pursuing

He was completely frightened, utterly overwhelmed by what he saw coming at

Eventually, it disappeared into the darkness.

Christopher got home safe and sound.

But his terrifying story quickly spread through the media.

Newspapers and television stations jumped on the bizarre encounter.

Deep in the skateboard swamp of South Carolina, there reportedly lives a

creature that is part man and part beast, a creature that 17 -year -old

Christopher Davis claims attacked his car late one night on this lonely

road. Seven feet tall, long arms, red eyes.

There was a media frenzy once the story got out. There were stories in

newspapers in Korea about the lizard man.

And that's just a tribute to the viralness of the lizard man.

During the media frenzy, dozens of other eyewitnesses began contacting the Lee

County Sheriff's Office.

They all claimed to have had similar encounters with a strange three

creature that appeared to be part man and part reptile.

But rather than dismiss such reports, law enforcement took them quite

They had the witnesses come in. They interviewed them.

In some cases, gave them polygraph tests.

And all of the witnesses that reported sightings of the lizard man were

credible.

Could there really be a reptile species that evolved to walk upright

like humans?

It may sound far -fetched, but many researchers believe it's possible.

And as evidence, they point to a creature in the Bible that exhibited

characteristics of both man and reptile.

The serpent in the Garden of Eden is not like normal serpents in that it can

speak.

The Hebrew Bible describes how the serpent tricked Eve.

And as part of the punishment,

is cursed and told that it's going to go on its belly in the dust, which implies

it had some prior mode of locomotion that was different.

So it may have been a walking serpent.

Some legends that develop, you see this in some medieval artwork, the serpent

was understood to have had legs.

Some of the Jewish...

Legends about Eve and the serpent imply that it may have also had some kind of

arms or hands that could push her to touch the tree or bringing fruit to her.

So the idea of this serpent -human hybrid is a very ancient one.

The notion that an ancient species of reptiles with human characteristics may

have evolved alongside people is intriguing.

But could there be scientific evidence to suggest that such beings exist?

Munich, Germany, May 3rd, 2018.

Neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute publish a landmark study.

They claim to have discovered an evolutionary link between the

the human brain and early reptiles that lived in the distant past.

We know that humans are mammals and reptiles are reptiles, but at a certain

point we had a common ancestor.

Cynodonts, which lived 235 million years ago, were the small -bodied creatures

that had rodent -like attributes, even though they were still reptiles.

In evolutionary terms, we share many features with our reptile relatives.

Things like the amniotic sac,

forelimbs, elements of our neurological system.

like the basal part of the brain, also our cerebellum.

So we can look at any familiar reptile, whether it's a crocodile or a turtle,

and know that it is, in fact, your relative, albeit a very distant

Could it be that many of the evolutionary traits found in modern

arise from ancient primates, but rather... from a reptilian ancestor

years ago?

And if so, is it possible that there are bizarre human and reptile hybrids that

are still alive today?

There have been a number of other sightings of the lizard man outside of

County and Sumter County in South Carolina.

There's some in Europe. There's some in South Africa.

Every one of them was about six to eight feet tall with red eyes.

It always had red eyes. That is one commonality that you can't get over. And

it is certainly possible that the lizard man is real.

If it was ever proven that a race of reptilians existed on Earth, well, that

would challenge everything we currently think about evolution.

Which could also be the case with some ancient skeletons.

that were recently found in Africa.

Skeletons that are shedding new light on the origins of mankind.

The Blue Bank River Valley, South Africa, September 13, 2013.

Two amateur spelunkers enter the rising star cave system and explore its

pristine depths.

Inside, they make an unexpected discovery.

The cave is littered with the bones of 15 people.

Carbon dating reveals the bones are more than 300 ,000 years old.

But even more astonishing, scientists determined the bones belonged to a

previously unknown species of hominid.

They name it Homo naledi.

So what was really remarkable about this discovery of Homo naledi was...

It's very small cranial capacity.

Homo naledi has a cranial capacity around 610 cubic centimeters.

And anatomically modern humans had roughly 1270 cubic centimeters. So we're

seeing a huge difference between these two species living at the same exact

time. And that says a lot about human evolution, that it's not necessarily

having a giant brain that's going to get you far in life.

The discovery of Homo naledi opened up a lot of questions about how we thought

about the evolution of our species in Africa where we find another species of

human overlapping with us that shares some aspects of their anatomy with us

other aspects look very, very different showing another direction that evolution

took in their particular lineage.

Ever since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, we've assumed that

evolution favors species that have the most desirable traits such as

intelligence.

But some researchers believe The discovery of home in a lady's smaller

size raises the possibility that survival of the fittest may not always

be the case.

Fittest doesn't necessarily mean you can run a marathon, you can scale tall

buildings. It doesn't even mean you can do calculus or win a Nobel Prize.

It's whoever can survive and hack it in their environment.

If it's true that being the strongest, the fastest, or the smartest isn't

required, to ensure the survival of a species.

Could our quest to unravel mankind's origins have been misguided all this

And if so, is it possible that we'll ever truly be able to answer who we are

and where we come from?

It's clear that our story is being rewritten all the time.

We know the basics, and we know that we're part of an evolving lineage.

But I'm sure more will be found in terms of fossils, but also in terms of the

DNA, which is giving us a lot of information about what makes us human.

Human diversity was just so much greater in the recent past than it is today.

Over the past hundred years, we've gone from having a handful of species, you

know, separated by vast periods of time.

to a very bushy, bushy tree, family tree, full of different examples of how

be human at different points in time over the past six million years.

It's incredible.

We talk about this missing link, but we're discovering more and more species

that fit outside of what we had expected.

So it's making us rethink the way humans evolved.

And I think we're going to continue seeing these discoveries.

to hopefully find more pieces of this puzzle that will help us understand

we came from and hopefully better inform us how to keep moving forward.

Will we ever find the elusive missing link that explains mankind's origins?

Each skull or skeleton that we uncover certainly brings us one step closer

to finding the answer.

But then again, perhaps we shouldn't assume that the purpose of evolution is

about us.

Maybe human beings are just one piece of a much larger mystery that, at least

for the time being, remains unexplained.