The Incredible Human Journey
Episode Four
Alice looks at our ancestors' seemingly impossible journey to
Australia. Miraculously preserved footprints and very old human fossils
buried in the outback suggest a mystery: that humans reached Australia
almost before anywhere else. How could they have travelled so far from
Africa, crossing the open sea on the way, and do it thousands of years
before they made it to Europe?
The evidence trail is faint and
difficult to pick up, but Alice takes on the challenge. In India, new
discoveries among the debris of a super volcano hint that our species
started the journey much earlier than previously thought, while in
Malaysia, genetics points to an ancient trail still detectable in the
DNA of tribes today.
Alice travels deep into the Asian rainforests
in search of the first cavemen of Borneo and tests out a Stone Age raft
to see whether sea travel would have been possible thousands of years
ago, before coming to a powerful conclusion.