This episode explores the arrival of the first humans to reach the Pacific Ocean and their transformation into the earliest modern people of the area. The film describes how the first Australians reached their island continent.
This is a film about all the different environments of Australia and how Aboriginal people adapted to them all - deserts, coasts, rainforests and the cold of Tasmania. Over 60,000 years and more, people have been adapting to evolving landscapes across Australia.
In the northern hemisphere people were evolving - physically and culturally - to the landscapes of Siberia. Gradually they reached all its coastlines and explored its eastern end. We look at the way the Asian bodily features developed in deep cold and the many ways that Asian people learned to make a living in snow and ice.
This is a film about a crucial crossing, from Asia to North America, by small bands of hunters tens of thousands of years ago. It is a film about how the first Americans learned to deal with forests and mountains, deserts and swamps and prairies, and the complex societies they developed in these places.
More than ten thousand years ago in Southeast Asia an extraordinary discovery was made - how to control animals and plants. The beginnings of domestication ushered in a total change in the way that humans live. We explore the various plants and animals that were tamed and farmed - chickens and rice, mangoes and elephants, cattle and coconuts - and what these things meant to the new societies they created.
Along with the settled life that farming brought was another major change for Asian people - the discover of metals. In Asia copper and tin produced bronze, then iron became steel. New ideas emerged for furnaces and bellows that were to produce harness pieces for horses, spades and ploughs for farming, spears and arrowheads for warfare.
Many of the great social and economic changes that took place in Asia helped to produce its most powerful nation, China. In this film we explore some of the great Chinese inventions - silk, irrigation, ceramics, the compass - to see what it was that made China the powerhouse of Asia and soon perhaps of the world itself.
In stark contrast to China's social and material complexity stands the simple beauty of so much that is Japan. After repelling the invading Chinese in the 13th Century, Japan cut itself off and began in isolation to build its distinctive culture with its focus on simplicity.
In South America, also isolated from the rest of the world, there developed a set of societies that faced the continents various environments. People adapted to the cold of Tierra del Fuego, domesticated corn and tomatoes, llamas and guinea pigs. Finally there arose in the Andes a dramatic society, the Incas, the people who were to meet the invading Europeans.
The enormous complexity that was and still is Mexico rests on the series of societies that evolved there - Olmec, Toltec, Maya, Aztec. This film explores their rise, their links and differences in art and architecture, religion and city planning. So many different societies developed in such a complex region.
The last part of the Pacific Ocean to be settled was the huge expanse of the central Pacific itself with its thousands of tiny islands and atolls. We explore the people who left Asia to become the Polynesians, their navigation and extraordinary sailing skills. We see the sorts of societies they made in Hawaii, in Easter Island, Tahiti and New Zealand. We think about what happened when European sails appeared on their horizon to end the isolation of more than half the worlds people.