I noticed that too. (the speech thing). I thought they should have used Baldwin’s commentary over graphics and images more than the shots of him.
It seemed like they extrapolated a lot of A. Afarensis behavior from chimps ( no problems there) while they extrapolated P. Boseii behavior from gorillas. Why they made those assumptions is not clear, except that P. Boseii were a lot stockier than A. Afarensis.
I didn’t get to watch it last night, but taped it and watched a good portion of it this morning. I also would’ve liked them to go into more detail about the ‘why’ certain hominid groups died off, how they arose, etc.
Now someone who knows more than me…were they using live actors and REAL sets or was all of that computer generated, because if it was…it sure had ME fooled. They looked very, very realistic for computer-generated images (if indeed that’s what they were).
But overall I can say it was informative. Heck…until I watched WWC, I didn’t even know about the existence of A. Afarensis, * H. Boseii* or H. Ergaster.
IDBB
Live actors, with makeup and prostetics, and real “sets”.
Was anyone else thinking “Star Trek Aliens!”?
My take on that scene was that the rock falling was accidental, and then they noticed the effect. I could be wrong.
The trick of pushing a rock down onto a mammoth seems to me no more complex than hitting a rabbit with a club. It’s a very simple tool, really, and probably the only way that these people could have killed one, other than causing a stampede over a cliff. (I believe that there is evidence of the latter.) Chimps, after all, have rock fights, so presumably they have the understanding that getting hit with a rock causes pain. It’s a simple leap, IMO, to killing something by hitting it with a bigger rock.
Lucy’s baby bugged me, but for a different reason. Why couldn’t they get a floppy doll? When the male was running through the brush with it, it was as stiff as a poker, with both legs straight up in the air. A floppy baby would have been more realistic.
I also questioned their choice of skin tones. All of the earlier species had very caucasion skins, even when living in desert climates. I wonder why this decision was made.
Really? I was led (originally anway) to believe they were computer-generated images.
I also was thinking about the question of the skin tones. Why were all the hominids caucasion until they started talking about the ones who lived in modern day Africa? 
Other than that…I felt they did pretty well except for the way they seemed to skip over a lot of stuff they assumed people had common knowledge of. Like…wasn’t there SOMETHING in between Neanderthal and the completely modern human? Or am I remembering my biology class wrong?
IDBB
Speaking as a dude who just saw WWC and Finding Nemo (and has no other expertise in this area), WWC most definitely and assuredly without a shadow of a doubt used live people and real sets and not computer graphics.
Also, anyone else notice how the ladies’ boobies got bigger as primates progressed toward homo sapiens? Does this mean that Anna Nicole Smith is a highly evolved human that should be worshipped by us all?
It was thought at one time that Neandertal might have been a homo sapiens ancestor, but recent DNA examinations have pretty much ruled out that out. If you go back far enough they have a common ancestor, of course, but they are different branches of the tree. It’s been suggested that they could theoretically have interbred, since they did coexist for a time, but things I’ve read suggest it’s very doubtful that they could have produced viable offspring.
IDBB, for quite a while now it has been accepted that neanderthals and modern (H. sapiens) were contemporaneous for most of sapiens’ existence. So-called “Cro-Magnon Man” was indeed modern H. sapiens, just primitive in lifestyle. WWC hews to the “out-of-Africa” theory, under which all of the evolutionary path to H. sapiens happens in Africa, and we descend from ergasters/heidelbergs who stayed in Africa, while erectus and neanderthal were distinct, separate branches grown from populations thereof who moved to Asia and Europe at different times (and thus there’s nothing “between neanderthals and moderns”).
There is a classification of “archaic” H. sapiens (160K years ago), but that is really for the sake of pigeonholing things at the dig site.
And yes, TaxGuy noticed the evolution of secondary sexual traits (the most easily visible/showable ones are breasts; it’s harder to show on basic cable the evolution of a permanent year-round mating season or how we are, proportionally, better hung than other primates); another body-shape trait that arose with uprightness were rounded buttocks.
As I mentioned in another thread, I, too, found a disconnect with the portrayal of language. We hear Alec talk about such-and-such species being unable to handle complex language, but there they are jabbering away. I find that this is often a problem with these types of complex documentaries in that the visuals footage is shot with one script, the narration is done with another.
Re: the manhandling (apehandling?) of Lucy’s baby – yes they should have found a floppier doll; no, this would not necessarily have crippled the little one. Considering the conditions under which these creatures lived, they were probably born way more rugged than you’d think at first. (Though if they ever went into neoteny as a shaper of the modern human form, and into how it makes for a more helpless baby, and how neotenous big heads combined with uprightness makes birthing more painful and riskier, I must have missed it.)
Technically, quite decently done and a good primer, but I’d hate for anyone to think this is anything but a gross simplification. For one, they make little mention of how for a while there were multiple hominid species cohabitating in Africa, so it risks reinforcing the linear-ladder model.
Excellent points, JR, and you did not miss anything about neoteny – they never mentioned it. IMHO that was probably a major contributor to the additional abilities of homo sap. The newborn chimp’s brain has already undergone most of its development without much stimulation. The fact that the human brain does most of its development while exposed to the outside world could not help but make a great deal of difference, and of course it’s the only way humans could have a big brain, since if it were any bigger at birth too many mothers and children would not survive.
I wonder if truly “black” skin evolved later, after Africa became a desert?
Except that large parts of Africa are not deserts. And there are apes with pale skin, you just don’t notice because they are hairy.
One thing I also did not buy in the show was where they said that the hominids developed a lack of body hair in order to survive in the hot sun. Am I missing something, or are there not billions of furry, hairy animals in Africa and other areas that are sunny and hot?
I wish I could remember where I read that one of the other major breakthroughs that permitted a group of hominids to develop large brains was a change in the blood vessels. Apparently there is a very efficient cooling system for the head, like a radiator, that drains the heated blood down the back of the skull to the nape of the neck. (Think of how it seems to cool your whole body if you put something cold there. )
I haven’t seen the show yet, I’m just here to give a language mechanic’s view of the Neanderthal situation. Because it’s been a while since I went to linguist school some of this may be out of date, and I hope someone will correct me if it is.
Neanderthal skulls indicate that they had a slightly brain than modern H. sapiens. They certainly had the brain capacity to have language. And some paleoanthropologists believe that they’ve found a channel for a nerve to go to the tongue - the nerve was relatively thick, indicating it would branch out into many nerve endings, far more than would be needed just to chew and swallow food. This is the evidence in favor of Neanderthals having language.
The evidence against has to do with the structure of the throat. Modern primates, with the single exception of man, have larynxes that sit very high in the throat. This allows them to eat and breathe at the same time, but restricts the movement of the tongue compared to that of humans. Chimpanzees simply can’t make all the sounds that humans can, because they can’t move their tongues in the right way. In humans, the larynx is high at birth (which is why babies can happily nurse away without stopping to breathe), but descends in late infancy. This allows humans to speak with a wide range of sounds, but it comes at a price: we can’t eat and breathe at the same time, and we can choke on our food. Most experts on Neanderthals interpret the fossil evidence to say that Neanderthals had throats like chimpanzees, not like modern humans. So if they did speak, it was with a restricted range of sounds.
The “grunts and sign language” hypothesis was popularized in the Clan of the Cave Bear books, but as far as I know there’s no special evidence in favor of it.
When I hear the “Walking With Cavemen” title, I can’t help picturing the old SNL skit in which a group of Biblical era tribesmen use “walking with” as a metaphor for sex. 
Mike Meyers: “My wife and I take walks less frequently these days”
Jon Lovitz: “I’ve been taking a lot of walks by myself lately”
I thought this was slightly better than the typical TDC show. A few comments:
Boseii are portrayed as gorilla like because of two things in their lifestyle that are very similar to gorillas: Vegetarian dieat and significant sexual dimorphism.
I really liked the ergastor/erectus bits. These guys are the interesting species, as they are about as close to being half-way between apes and modern humans as you can get. The bit with the aligator tooth was great. Pure specualtion, of course, but it shows to first glimmerings of symbolic thinking.
I actually liked the “language” part. We really have no idea how and when language evolved, but what they presented was, I thought, a very reasonable scenario. I guess I missed the disconnect between Baldwin and what they showed on the screen. I wasn’t listenning to him much other than to notice that he actually did a good job of pronouncing the species names correctly. This is how I saw it:
Australopithicus vocalized like chimps. Probably a good guess.
Habilis had somewhat more refined sounds, but still pretty much grunts. They didn’t seem to have actual words, but were clearly using sounds more than chimps to communicate “something”.
Erectus/Ergastor seemed to have a proto-language that consisted of what seemed to be nouns and maybe verbs, but not much else.
Neanderthalensis had what appeared to be a pretty full language, although it was hard to tell just how complex it actually was.
There’s a lot of debate about which species had how much language, if any, but I think it is unreasonable to assume that fully articulated modern language sprang out of grunts with nothing inbetween.
Actually it used a mix of human actors, extensive prostetitcs and makeup and lots and lots of CGI. Unless the happened to pull a real life Jurrasic Park. It appears that all or almost all of the “cavemen” were played by actors though. The Discovery Channel web site may have more extensive details on the precise mix of CGI used.
Finding Nemo is a fun little flick, but hardly the pinnicle of CGI- Attack of the Clones (i.e. CGI Yoda) probably gives a better idea of that. Pixar is known for their “cartoony” cheerful CGI.
As seen in in the Letters section of Viz Magazine (a puerile UK adult comic that Mr Sqwert subscribes to)
“Before they spent millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money on prosthetic make-up computer graphics in order to produce Walking With Cavemen, the BBC might have tried walking round >insert name of provincial town< with a camcorder on a Tuesday afternoon.”
Well, it made me laugh.
NB It actually said Kings Lynn, a town in East Anglia, but wasn’t sure how relevant thet would be to the rest of the world.
I swear this is from the description of WWC in our local Sunday paper’s TV section–“this new two-hour special merges dramatic re-creations and animatronics to bring ancient beings to life. Viewers are sent back 100,000 generations to the era of cave dwellers who fought off dinosaurs while hunting for basic necessities of survival”. WTF? Isn’t that more a description of Ringo Starr’s “Caveman”?
I just finished watching a far bit of “Walking with Cavemen” and found it enjoyable (and hilarious, at parts). Seems like at least a good way to lure people into the fascinating mystery surrounding evolution of hominids.
I read “Almost Adam” by Petru Popescu and “Neanderthal” by John Darnton a year or two back and found both books intriguing. (They’re historical fiction, basically.) Has anyone else ever read those? What did you think?
JRDelirious touched on the development of sexual organs and evolution of mating practices, etc. This is, for me, one of the most interesting and amazing areas of speculation and research. Anyone have any good recommendations for where I might be able to read up more on the subject? If you have any knowledge, I’d love to hear it. For example, in one of the aforementioned books, the shifting of female reproductive organs from the back to the front was discussed. Has any evidence been unearthed to lend credibility to this theory?