APE to MAN (new show) on History Channel tomorrow night (Sun. Aug. 7th)

Looks like it will be an interesting show. It's on at 9pm eastern time and runs for 2 hours or more.

I saw the ads for it and considered posting about it here.


Actually I am reading an interesting book about the Piltdown man hoax. It covers the early history of evolutionary theory in regard to man so I am looking forward to watching that.

I will be watching the program and then it will be a nice topic to debate here in this thread.

Thanks for the idea.

So did anyone watch it? I fell asleep when it was just starting...

I was only able to catch the last 30 minutes or so.
I noticed that they were a little off on the latest info pushing the origions of man back to 400,000 years. They kept refering to the age of man as only being 40,000. I may have missed their reasoning for this.
They also included evidence that the Neaderthal Man was not one of man's ancestors but a secondary line of humans that were killed out by Homo Sapiens.
Note there will be an Ape To Man - Encore August 11 @ 8/7c

The ads put me off. The basic info didn't quite match the latest research, as you said, and the line of humans (homo erectus, etc) goes back a million years or more. H. sapiens, as you noted, goes back about 190,000 years. However, that find was from January of this year so they could be forgiven for not including it. The next oldest before that was around 100,000 years or so.

But to the archaeologist, the other homo species were ALSO human and did all the things that the first h. sapiens did: buried dead, made tools, controlled fire, etc. I just growled at the ads and refused to watch.

Where is the proof? There is evidence corraborating evolution, but nothing corroborating the lineage of man's origins. It has been discovered that another bipedal ape was around at the same time as Lucy. Because it walks upright and uses tools does not mean it is human or a direct ancestor.

I only caught the last 30 minutes or so, too. I came in when they were finding Lucy.

But, it should be noted that they clearly said that Lucy was of a different species - too many mismatches in the DNA. Lucy is the earliest biped is what I think they were saying. Am I wrong that their conclusion was that the "Lucy bipeds" were shown not to be a direct ancestor of modern man?

I was a little distracted so, maybe I have this wrong. It seemed that they were saying that there were several species of bipeds that pre-dated modern man.