Walking with Cavemen – A Retrospective Review

[Infinity Blade]

Walking with Cavemen – A Retrospective Review


Promotional poster.

Walking with Dinosaurs ended up getting three special episodes, two of which were marketed together as Chased by Dinosaurs (which I already reviewed). These special episodes each focused on one specific time and place in the Mesozoic. Although Walking with Beasts didn’t get the same treatment, the BBC did produce a separate documentary that takes place entirely in the Cenozoic, which I like to think of as something of an extension to Beasts. And sort of like the WWD specials, this series had a specific focus: hominins. Enter Walking with Cavemen.

Walking with Cavemen focuses on human evolution. It originally aired from March 27 to April 23, 2003 (hey wait, that means the last episode came out on my fourth birthday! It was around this time I was introduced to WWD), so it’s close to the show’s 20th anniversary. Now, I think, is a good time to review it.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a hominin specialist. I will try my best at researching, but forgive me if I don't get everything right.

Directory:

- First Ancestors (this post)
- Blood Brothers->
- Savage Family->
- The Survivors->
- Final verdict->


First Ancestors:


Screen capture from Walking with Cavemen.

• The presenter of WWC is Robert Winston, a British professor, medical doctor, scientist, politician, and television presenter. Like here. Did they really get some photos of his family from the early 20th century and put them in an album with a photo of a cave painting?
  
  Like Nigel Marven, Winston travels back in time to observe ancient hominins, but he isn’t there to tough out the prehistoric world the way Nigel does. That is to say, he doesn’t interact with them a whole lot, and whatever interactions he does have are not important to the plot. His life is never in danger like Nigel’s is in Chased by Dinosaurs or Sea Monsters (even though some of the environments he travels back into are pretty harsh, like ice age Europe in the final episode). So as both narrator and presenter of WWC, he’s somewhere between Kenneth Branagh and Nigel Marven in his role.
• This episode takes place 3.5 million years ago in Ethiopia, and starts out with the headlights of Winston’s Jeep flashing at a troop of nesting Australopithecus afarensis (one of which is the famous specimen Lucy). And here we discuss the first thing that stands out: the way these apes look.
  
  Unlike WWB, WWC solely uses actors in makeup and prosthetics to portray Australopithecus, and later Homo habilis, H. rudolfensis, and Paranthropus boisei. The reason for this different approach is that the creators wanted viewers to be able to read the hominins’ emotions and thoughts from their facial expressions, something CGI, at least back in 2003, was not able to do well enough. They also wanted to make the human-like movement of the hominins seem more realistic, and that any failures to do so with CGI “…would be easily spotted and would break the magic that the program is trying to create” (link->). So now we understand why the Australopithecus here look so different from that of WWB two years before. But do I agree with their rationale?
  
  Some people might disagree with me, but my answer is “not exactly”. While I definitely understand the need to properly convey the emotions of the hominins with real actors, using actors in makeup for the entirety of the program ends up looking very jarring (especially when you know that this was made by the same people who made WWB just a couple years before). And as I was flipping through the TVTropes page of this program, it hit me why: they tried to cram a modern human into an Australopithecus.
  
  The problem is that modern humans are not proportioned exactly like our australopithecine ancestors. It’s not as bad as literally jamming a square peg into a round hole, but by providing you with that analogy I think I’ve made you understand what I’m getting at. As the aforementioned TVTropes points out, the brains are way too big, the legs are too long, and the arms are too short. The way the Australopithecus in this episode move and look makes it very obvious that they’re just people in suits. Their stereotypical, almost cheesy, chimpanzee noises don’t help them feel like real Australopithecus either. If anything, all this actually diminishes the immersion for me. If I saw one of these guys on the streets and didn’t know they were from a Walking with documentary, I’d have just thought they were random people in ape suits. I’m also willing to bet that if you had a real Australopithecus alive today, it would at least be thrown off by the appearance of these costumed actors.
  
  Compare this to the way they made the Australopithecus when creating WWB->. The animators eventually settled on a walking cycle that, while certainly not particularly chimp-like, wasn’t quite human either. It made looking at these prehistoric not-quite-humans look more believable to watch.
  
  I admit the creators’ point about conveying emotions and thoughts from the hominins does have its merits, but I also feel it would have been a better idea to at least reserve actors in makeup for close-ups, while recycling WWB’s CGI models of Australopithecus for shots relatively farther away. After all, it’s not like every single bit of screen time for these Australopithecus is a close shot meant to convey their emotions. In fact, when it becomes morning, we see the Australopithecus rising up from the grass; this bit is clearly not meant to be one of those moments where we see how they feel or what they’re thinking.
  
  Alternatively, they could have maybe used animatronics too. Sure, it’s not the same, but it also isn’t as far down into the uncanny valley as the actors in makeup. Heck, even facial expressions in CGI, even at this time, shouldn’t look that bad. Again, I acknowledge it’s not the same as an actor, but in WWB they pulled off some convincing emotions from their Australopithecus. For example, look at this screenshot of Hercules from “Next of Kin”: he’s in 2001 CGI, but you can definitely tell he’s angry.
  
  
  
  TL;DR: IMO the actors in makeup don’t look right. It would’ve been better to reserve them for close-ups displaying emotion, or even just stick with CGI and animatronics altogether.
• Anyway, the Australopithecus are seen drinking water with Ancylotherium (recycled footage from WWB) nearby. A crocodile snatches the troop leader (and the father of Lucy’s infant) and kills him. Not gonna lie, when I was first rewatching this it actually surprised me a bit. Credit to them for that.
• Okay, maybe I can see what they mean by emotion. As Winston explains how Lucy’s troop is in a rivalry with another troop, one Australopithecus is seen looking at the off-screen threat, and then turning away, almost as if it were saying “ah shit, here we go again”. Although, the body language is definitely a big contributor to this as well.
• The troop rivalry thing is taken from chimpanzees. I genuinely wonder how violent Australopithecus confrontations were. Relatively reduced canines suggest minimized male-male aggression (as depicted in WWB), but I don’t think that’s to say that conflicts between different groups never got genuinely violent. If they did, presumably they relied more on blunt force trauma and sticks and stones to kill each other.
• Recycled WWB Deinotherium footage. But this time it doesn’t go on a rampage. In WWB just existing right in front of it was enough to piss it off (even when not in musth), but here making awful hoots and screeches just earns a casual glance from the hoe tusker.
• Lucy hides from male Australopithecus from the rival tribe by climbing high up on a tree. They can’t find things easily given that they’re in tall reed beds. Surprisingly, Lucy does not react to Robert Winston, who is atop another tree literally right next to Lucy’s. She can clearly see him too. You could argue that she doesn’t react out of fear of being discovered by the males, but I can’t imagine she wouldn’t be extremely surprised by this animal she’s never seen before.
• Now things get even more interesting. As Lucy’s troop and the rival males (which outnumber them) hoot and holler at each other across a river they happen to both use, Winston notes how Australopithecus are so ape-like in behavior, aside from walking on two legs like us.
  
  To answer why (TL:DR; climate change), Winston suddenly decides to take a quick break from this and travels back to Africa a further 4.5 million years in the past (8 Ma), because he can just do that, I guess (btw, this makes this brief segment the only canon appearance of the Miocene epoch in the entire Walking with series…and it’s live-acted by modern primates in a modern rainforest, RIP). It’s a lot more forested and the apes (here portrayed as the ancestors of Australopithecus) are arboreal. I think even back then there’s a good chance that the direct ancestors of humans were habitually bipedal. There is evidence that Sahelanthropus tchadensis was a habitual biped living around 7 Ma, but that arboreal behaviors were still significant aspects of their locomotion (Daver et al., 2022).
  
  Anyway, climate change is what pressured human ancestors to become bipedal, and I love how Winston gives us an easy to understand step-by-step explanation of how this happened. Seafloor spreads at a slow but steady rate->Indian subcontinent collides into Asia->the Himalayas form->these tall-ass mountains have an affect on local climate, prompting monsoons->all this heavy rain deprives the atmosphere of moisture->air currents that reach Africa are dry, not wet->drier environment of more scattered trees as opposed to rainforests->human ancestors must spend more time on the ground->two legs means somewhat more energy saved. I think the inclusion of this explanation is important because the average viewer is not going to understand how or why human ancestors evolved the way they did. The average person very likely wonders “Did apes evolve to walk on two legs because they just decided to?”. To someone paying attention, this explanation makes the first step of human evolution make sense.
• For some reason there’s some focus on a weirdly-rendered beetle as it flies around, only to land on an Australopithecus and get eaten. It looked so weird I almost thought it was some insect-shaped drone flying around to look at the landscape.
• An eagle (live-acted by a Verreaux’s eagle, which, oddly enough, is a hyrax specialist for the most part) attacks the troop to snatch an infant Australopithecus lying on the ground. Luckily for it an adult (Lucy?) gets to it before the eagle can. Less than a million years later, the Taung child (A. africanus) won’t be as lucky (Berger & Clarke, 1995; Berger & McGraw, 2007).
• To expand upon the point about bipedalism, the documentary makes the point that, although the total amount of energy saved is not a whole lot, it still gives an extra boost of energy to recover more quickly after giving birth. In turn, this means a female Australopithecus could have just one more baby in her life, and producing more offspring means less susceptibility to extinction. Again, I appreciate explanations like this.
• One of the males tries to mate with Lucy, but she makes it clear she’s not interested (I’m going to be honest, it was kind of uncomfortable for me to watch this bit for a reason I think you can deduce). A battle for leadership among the troop breaks out between the males, which is then complicated when one of them steals Lucy’s infant and the rival troop gets involved. Lucy grabs her infant in the foray, only to be killed by a blow to the head with a large tree branch.
  
  When Robert Winston inspects her corpse (the sad track playing is actually not bad), he notes that she and all other Australopithecus are just apes. Not especially smart (well, give her some credit Robert; all apes are pretty smart for animals), not especially fast, but with potential to become something more. Given how they frame it as “potential” to become something else, and how far removed from humanity Australopithecus is portrayed as, you could almost see it as “humanity evolving is not a given”. Of course, we do evolve, and the documentary makes no bones about it here.
  
  This is going to be a common theme throughout WWC: we meet a hominin, but something, or many things, about it is not quite like us. And we are in for a loooooooonnnnnggggg ride of this.
• By the way, you wanna hear a hypothesis for how Lucy might have actually died? She may have fallen from a tree (Kappelman et al., 2016), although this is by no means universally accepted->.
• Winston is responsible for Lucy’s fossilization in the Walking with universe (he picks up her body and sets it down on the river bank). Thanks man.

Final verdict:

So, my feelings towards this episode are kind of mixed. On the one hand, I’m honestly not too big of a fan of the people in ape costumes trying to make chimp noises. That’s not to say I don’t understand the creators’ rationale, but putting modern humans in the skin of their ancient ancestors just doesn’t look right and it doesn’t do it for me.

That said, this episode is definitely not without its positives. One minor thing of interest is we get to see some predatory threats to Australopithecus that we didn’t see in WWB, particularly crocodiles and raptors (a whole slew of predators would have threatened our ancestors, not just the often-depicted cats). Robert Winston’s scientific explanations for the evolution of bipedalism and the benefits thereof are very helpful to the average Joe viewer who doesn’t quite understand how evolution works. Likewise, in this episode we start to get a sense of just how many steps happened to go from even a bipedal ape to Homo sapiens. WWB may have said that Australopithecus had a long road ahead of them, but this episode is beginning to solidify it.

All in all, this episode is kind of like the Australopithecus it was about in a way: not too special, but has its good quirks and upsides.

[Infinity Blade]

Blood Brothers:

• Winston is in Africa 2 million years ago, first observing Paranthropus boisei. Although they’re more closely related to Homo, they’re given the social structure of modern gorillas. Paranthropus certainly had some features in common with gorillas (a powerfully-built skull with a huge sagittal crest, as well as sexual dimorphism), but I’m iffy on whether or not that means anything on a similar social structure.
• Some Homo habilis find Robert Winston’s Jeep, rocking and climbing on it. If I were in Winston’s shoes, I’d be a bit weirded out that these animals toying with my vehicle are technically humans.
• Also need to mention that habilis, and other early Homo, likely exhibited a high degree of sexual dimorphism, something not quite shown here (Plavcan, 2012). This is another disadvantage of using costumed actors to portray australopithecines and early Homo.
• ”Dinofelis, the false saber-tooth”? It’s literally in Machairodontinae (the true saber-toothed cats)!
• Deinotherium and Ancylotherium (footage recycled from WWB of course) from last episode are still around too (Dinofelis, Deinotherium, and Ancylotherium all have records as late as the Early Pleistocene). In other WW series, the creatures you find in one episode tend to be long extinct by the next. The fact that these genera are still around in the second episode goes to show just how relatively short of a timespan this entire series, and therefore this part of human evolution, takes place in.
• I find something oddly amusing about the Paranthropus’ movements as it gets up. It gets up almost as if it were getting up from a nap, about to throw down, or both.
• We’re basically given the premise of the episode here. Three hominin species living together, each having a different strategy for survival, and Winston is here to tell us which we get our “human-ness” from. Except not completely.
• We get an explanation for why there are three different hominins living together. As with the previous episode, I like the simple step-by-step explanation. Earth being slightly tilted when orbiting the sun (more extreme tilt=more severe seasonal patterns)—>tilt was getting bigger starting 3 Ma->polar ice caps didn’t melt away during the summer and grew->Earth becoming more arid->East Africa becomes less forested and more grass-dominated->huge diversity grazing animals and animals that live off of those grazers.
• I don’t find anything technically wrong with how they portray Paranthropus feeding on tough foods during a drought, but I do want to clarify that it was not a “specialist” like they claim it is.
  
  See, it was originally thought that Paranthropus, with its very robust skull, large amounts of room for jaw muscles, and megadont molars with exceptionally thick enamel, was a specialist of hard plant matter like nuts (hence the nickname “nutcracker man”). However, multiple studies, including both dental microwear and isotope analysis studies have found that Paranthropus was not especially beholden to a diet of hard or tough foods (Scott et al., 2005; Ungar et al., 2008; Cerling et al., 2011); in fact, the second study I linked to here found that none of the Paranthropus individuals they studied ate especially hard or tough foods before they died. The craniodental adaptations, as noted by the third study, are more likely an adaptation for processing large quantities of low-quality vegetation.
  
  Interestingly, P. robustus (not the species featured here) seems to have favored softer, tougher foods and used harder, more brittle foods as fallback foods (i.e. when their favored foods were not available due to drought, they would fall back on harder foods) (Scott et al., 2005; Ungar et al., 2008). On the other hand, P. boisei favored C₄ vegetation like grasses and sedges (Cerling et al., 2011) (but see Paine & Daegling (2023) for a bit more of a nuanced discussion on this).
• The newcomer female tries getting the attention of the dominant male, only to be driven off by the dominant female. The dominant male goes to find her (at the dominant female’s expense). I’m not gonna lie, when I first rewatched this a week before writing this review, this was kind of awkward to watch.
  
  Anyway, he spots her eating termites and eats termites with her, supposedly the one meat that Paranthropus can’t resist. Keep this in mind for later.
• Because they can’t process the same vegetation that comprises the bulk of what’s available during the dry season, the Homo habilis are faring considerably worse than the Paranthropus. What I appreciate about this portrayal is the fact that, although habilis is depicted as more of a generalist than Paranthropus, right now this fact is not serving it well. There ARE advantages to being a specialist, and this episode of WWC makes that lesson clear. In this case Paranthropus has the craniodental specialization needed to process tough plant matter. Because habilis is less specialized and more of a generalist, there are less potential options for food available to it. As a result, the habilis troop (well, really its dominant male) is forced to try to take apart a bee hive high up in a tree for food.
• As Winston is discussing how habilis is an inquisitive, tireless investigator, one of them proves just that by raiding his backpack without him noticing for a while. When Winston hears it making a noise, he chases it off with an “Oi! You!”. This was admittedly kind of funny. I wish this series had more scenes of the hominins directly interacting with Winston instead of just staring at him or doing nothing.
• The dominant male habilis falls out of the tree as he continues to try to get more of the bee hive. And it’s funny. But then he and the troop spot vultures circling up in the air. His up-close grin is one time where the “we want to convey their emotions” rationale actually shines through.
• The habilis find a fresh eland carcass. Though normally wary, the dominant male and his troop are desperate for food and run straight towards it, although one young male holds back, remaining on guard for the predator that killed the eland. Unfortunately, another troop of ape-men, this one of Homo rudolfensis, also finds the carcass and the two early Homo species get into a confrontation.
  
  It actually is interesting to see different hominin species at odds with each other (this painting by Jay Matternes-> of Homo habilis fighting Paranthropus is a great example). Of course, because the early Homo are played by people in costumes, the fighting is really just them going “oo ee ah ah!” and throwing their arms at each other’s directions, but…it’s the idea that counts, I guess.
  
  Also, an image from the companion book of the fight to get an idea of what this looks like (some of them end up looking kind of funny ngl).
  
  
• The rudolfensis differ from the habilis in being slightly bigger and having more darkly colored faces. On a deeper level, below is how the skulls of habilis and rudolfensis differ. The most obvious difference is how much longer faced rudolfensis is.
  
  
  
  And here’s a nice reconstruction of this hominin by Mauricio Antón.
  
  
  
  
  The other thing is that rudolfensis also had larger molar and premolar teeth than habilis, although it didn’t have the same heavy-duty jawbones and muscles of Paranthropus. This implies differences in how it fed, and therefore lived, from habilis.
  
  And yet despite these interesting differences, and despite the documentary mentioning the different survival strategies of all three species, rudolfensis is never elaborated on. Only that it is similar to habilis and often competes with it. It’s just here to hoot, holler, and throw its arms at Homo habilis, and never be seen or mentioned again. In fact, I literally forgot rudolfensis was even in this documentary until I rewatched it recently. If I had to make a complaint about the premise/narrative of this episode, this would be it. You advertised a three-way survival game between three different hominin species: deliver on it!
• The lion (which, as you’ll notice from their manes, is played by both an adult male with a well-developed mane, as well as a younger male with a smaller mane) that killed the eland comes over to see what all the ruckus is about, only to find the furry humans going literal ape-shit at each other. Although the rudolfensis are driven off, all of the habilis with the exception of the dominant male are as well (so it’s debatable if it was the lion’s return or the habilis’ aggression that drove the rudolfensis off). The dominant male habilis is killed by the lion for his troubles, sending the troop into despair.
  
  Then the rain finally comes, which is a good thing, but I also wonder if it’s supposed to signify the troop’s depressed state after the lion attack. I certainly like to think of it that way.
• Winston uses his time-based superpowers to stare into the future through his water bowl. To make a long story short, Paranthropus goes extinct due to being a specialist herbivore, while Homo habilis survives in the long run for its more generalist diet of both plants and meat. This is indeed the traditional view of these two species.
  
  But this may not be entirely true. Estimates of Paranthropus boisei’s energetics and nutritional value of its C₄ plant food, it is estimated that its energy requirements (2-4 times basal metabolic rate) could have been met within a 6-hour feeding day. This rather high nutritional yield suggests that P. boisei was probably a generalist like other hominins (Macho, 2014). What’s more, a recent study also reports one of, if not the, oldest Oldowan tools in Kenya (3-2.6 Ma), which were used to process a variety of foods, including C₄ foods (like what Paranthropus liked to eat) and meat, including hippopotamus meat! While it’s not 100% clear who used these tools, Paranthropus is associated with this site (Plummer et al., 2023). This may suggest that, contrary to traditional view, Paranthropus could use tools to butcher animal carcasses and eat meat…
  
  However, yet another recent study finds some support for P. boisei being an ecological specialist compared to early Homo. While I haven’t been able to read the full study, it found that early Homo occur in faunal assemblages that indicate a broader range of habitats than what P. boisei is found in. Paranthropus was also found to have had narrow environmental associations, unlike almost every other C₄ gras consumer in the Turkana Basin. This suggests that whatever C₄ plant matter it was feeding on, it was not widespread like grass leaves, seeds, or rhizomes (O'Brien et al., 2023). In fact, Macho (2014) says that even though P. boisei was a generalist, it did have a preference for corms, occupying reasonably wooded well-watered environments where corms thrive in. She suggests that when these deep-water lates and the climate became more arid about 1.45 Ma, the amount of corms would have declined, and forced Paranthropus to compete with baboons (Papio) and Homo for other resources. Other authors have found support for C₄ plant loss likely contributing to P. boisei’s extinction (Quinn & Lepre, 2021; Quinn & Lepre, 2022).
• But these Paranthropus won’t have to deal with that in their lifetime. When the rain ends, we see that the dominant female has taken the newcomer under her wing, although she still seems a bit sore from the dominant male’s behavior towards her. “He may well find that he has some making up to do”. Oof.
• In contrast to Paranthropus, habilis is portrayed as a stone tool-using scavenger with a big brain (from eating meat) and scaring off a lion in a group (I’ve already explained how the view of habilis as the only tool-using scavenger in the ecosystem might not be true, so I won’t go over it again here). And by using stone tools to crack open the skeletonized eland’s bones, they have access to bone marrow, effectively allowing them to go all hyena on even stripped carcasses.
  
  It’s a happy ending for the troop too, as the young male is said to likely become the new dominant male.
• The episode ends with the twist that Homo ergaster (or Homo erectus, depending on whether or not you think ergaster is a valid species) appears in East Africa around the same time this episode takes place. It is said to do what habilis does but better, and possibly outcompeted habilis. So this episode sides with the idea that habilis is not a direct ancestor of us.
  
  At the least, H. erectus did live with H. habilis and P. boisei in the northern Turkana Basin for some time. Whether or not it and/or similar species outcompeted the former, I can’t really say, I have no evidence for that (Behrensmeyer et al., 1997).
  
  

Final verdict:

As with the previous episode, I’m not a huge fan of the costumed actors, although the Paranthropus looks less uncanny due to looking less human. More than that, though, the episode has this clear narrative about which of the THREE species living in Africa at this time we inherit traits from. The episode goes into depth on habilis and boisei, but it neglects rudolfensis so much. Even when the program says that all three species have different survival strategies, rudolfensis is just written off as a slightly bigger version of habilis.

Surprisingly, the thing I’m cracking down least on is the Homo vs Paranthropus dichotomy. While it is true that Paranthropus may not have been the plant specialist it was made out to be, the bit of research I did for this review suggests that it did have some preferences, and could still be considered an ecological specialist. Thus, the narrative that Paranthropus went extinct due to specialization would only need minor tweaks and could very well still be correct overall.

Episode strengths include easy step-by-step explanations of things (in this case, why there are so many hominins in Africa 2 Ma), nuance on the specialist vs generalist dichotomy, and overall just covering this time and place overall. Although the ecosystem may be well known within academic circles, I don’t think much of the public really knows much about it (myself included, arguably).

Overall, I definitely have a few complaints (especially with one missed opportunity), but the episode’s alright.

[Infinity Blade]

Stickied this review, just because I think as a Walking with entry it deserves it.

[Infinity Blade]

Savage Family:

• This episode starts in southern Africa 1.5 Ma. Five Homo ergaster have run down a wildebeest to some salt plains, after chasing after it for two days. The wildebeest (which must have been taken from some other footage, as its color and lighting clearly don’t match the background) collapses, and the humans must wait for it to truly die. The H. ergaster look great here. After spending two episodes looking at uncanny ape-men, we now have some convincing caveman prosthetics and makeup. You could argue that the H. ergaster should be dark-skinned, but other than that, they look great.
• Although you can’t tell what they’re saying, it’s clear that the young man is getting impatient to attack the wildebeest. On the one hand, I can’t blame him, since it’s been at least two days since he’s gotten any food. On the other hand, the experienced leader of the hunt doesn’t even react with any shock when the young man pulls a Leeroy Jenkins, let alone stop him (unlike the guy behind him). He’s just like “let’s see how this goes”. Put in the same position I think I’d be pretty frustrated, but that’s just me.
• The young ergaster man falls and predictably, the hunt fails (the wildebeest is startled enough to get back on its feet and flee). Though not brought up, this just goes to show how important the “gatherer” part of “hunter-gatherer”. If a hunt fails (and it very well could), food that was gathered by other members would be crucial as fallback food.
• According to Winston, humans are the first animals to make inferences about the world from apparently unrelated things. For instance, to a carnivoran or a baboon, hoof prints don’t mean anything. To H. ergaster, though, it means an ungulate (or at least some animal) walked a certain direction.
  
  Is that really true?
• The young male ergaster sees Winston driving, but never draws the others’ attention to him. I get why they don’t have him do anything more than just stare, but still, I’m pretty sure any caveman would be extremely curious to check out a man driving an ATV.
• From our perspective, at least, it doesn’t take the ergasters too long to find the wildebeest, which collapses again. I think the narrative that a big brain is needed to understand other people is shown in a good way. The young male ergaster shows visible restraint when the group gets ready to attack the wildebeest, having learned his lesson.
• We get some more speculation into some unknowns. H. ergaster/erectus are stated here to possibly be the first of our lineage to have human voices, to be tied together by familial bonds/friendships, and to have whites in their eyes (to be able to read the intentions of conspecifics). I don’t find anything inherently implausible about this, of course, just want to note that right now it’s not 100% certain when these traits appeared in our lineage.
• The whole scene seems kind of heartwarming, not only with the hunters bringing back wildebeest meat, but also checking up on family members, and even trying to win the hearts of a potential mate. But then it all goes down the gutter when another young male ergaster gets into a fight with ours. I don’t even know if this other male is actually from their group or not, but either way, violence erupts, and it ends with the second male getting clubbed in the head for his troubles. Our male seems to get injured in the fight, as he’s lying on the ground in pain during the aftermath. Again, brilliant. We’re reminded of the duality of humanity.
• Ergasters travel out of Africa and into Asia. Winston tells us that the Asian form are actually called Homo erectus.
  
  To avoid confusion, I should point out that Homo erectus did not emerge by traveling to Asia. It first originated in Africa and migrated outwards to Asia and Europe. Again, the ergasters shown here may very well just be African H. erectus.
• It’s claimed that no tools are found where H. erectus lived in Asia, possibly due to the presence of bamboo. I’m sure H. erectus could have made use of bamboo for tools, but needless to say this depends on whether the particular place they live in even has bamboo. There are places in Asia where H. erectus tools are indeed found (Corvinus, 2004).
• One of them finds a tarantula nest, leading them to feast on the spiders. Now I’m thinking about how much money you’d have to pay me to do the same thing. I wonder how they deal with the urticating hairs.
• Remember how I said that we don’t have to look at janky-looking apes anymore? Well, it’s still true…for the most part. What do I mean by this?
  
  Behold: the Walking with universe’s Gigantopithecus:
  
  
  
  This is the worst thing ever. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but this is easily bottom or nigh bottom tier out of all the extinct animals I’ve seen in the Walking with franchise.
• Also, although size estimates of Gigantopithecus warrant caution due to its fragmentary nature, it most likely wasn’t three meters tall. At 200-300 kg (Zhang & Harrison, 2017), it’s more around the size of large gorillas, and even when up on two legs it most certainly would not have been anywhere near 3 meters tall. Here is a modern reconstruction by Fabio Alejandro->.
  
  
• Then comes a striking revelation by Winston. He travels forward a million years in the future and finds the exact same hand axes in Africa made by erectus/ergaster at the beginning of the episode. They have made no technological advances in a million years, and so make their hand axes no differently (from a cognitive perspective) than a bird builds a nest.
  
  At first it rubs you (or at least me) the wrong way (“Can you imagine such limited ingenuity?”), as if this documentary were writing them off as stupid and inferior. Only when Winston clarifies otherwise, and that their brains just don’t work like ours do, does it come across a bit better.
  
  I’m not sure if I can say that our ancestors made absolutely NO progress from the Early to Middle Pleistocene. For example, the oldest barbed bone points ever discovered was found in Olduvai Gorge and described in 2020 (Pante et al., 2020), and it was not found in the oldest beds of the fossil site (it was found in Bed IV, which dates to 0.93-0.8 Ma).
• And even then, Homo sapiens isn’t necessarily superior for its technological advancements in the past century either (WWC acknowledges this, but I just want to reiterate this point). Sure, we may have gone from the Wright brothers to space exploration in less than a century. But then again, we also spent the vast majority of our (at least?) 300,000 year existence as a species as hunter-gatherers; only in the last 10,000 or so years did we even begin to farm and build civilizations. It’s not because our Pleistocene predecessors were stupid, but because the Pleistocene’s climate was hectic. It was only after the end of the Younger Dryas that the climate stabilized and agricultural societies developed (Feynman & Ruzmaikin, 2018).
• According to Winston, this may have changed because of our use of fire. Nights became safer, allowing us to take some leisure time and let our minds wander about.

Final verdict:

I guess this episode was fine to watch. We get to some exciting parts in human evolution, such as when humans begin to look like us, hunt for prey, understand each other’s intentions in social interactions, and even spread across the globe. Explanations for what a big brain is needed for, whites in eyes, and the importance of fire seem relatively brief, but every big as informative as in previous episodes.

There is ambiguity on whether or not H. ergaster is a legitimate species in its own right, but even if not, that’s not really the fault of the creators. It must have been on recommendation of one of the numerous scientific consultants. If H. ergaster turns out to truly be synonymous with H. erectus, it’s simple Science Marches On.

I might take some issue with some concepts in the episode, namely the idea that Early-Middle Pleistocene Homo made absolutely no technological progress (which may legitimately not be true), but at least Winston makes it clear that this doesn’t make them stupid.

The extinct species portrayed in this episode are also a step up from the costume ape-men from the previous episodes, largely the result of the fact that they are free to look more like modern humans. And what a relief too…



Except you. What the actual f*ck is wrong with you?! Why didn’t your creators make a convincing CGI model out of you?!?! Seriously, the budget for this doc wasn’t much less than that of WWB, why not just-

-ah forget it.

[Infinity Blade]

The Survivors:

• The episode starts with three Homo heidelbergensis brothers hunting a bull Megaloceros giganteus. Before the theme plays, they’re seen throwing their spears at the deer, but right afterwards, they approach the deer (which becomes aware of them) with their spears still in their hands…
  
  Fun fact: this is actually the first bit of WWC I have ever seen in my life, back when full episodes were very hard to come by online. It is also the first time I learned of H. heidelbergensis.
• I *think* H. heidelbergensis is still considered a valid species? I’m sure there is still some controversy, but I’ve seen even recent publications refer to it as if it were a valid species.
• The Megaloceros is obviously the same model as the one from WWB, although its coloration-> is significantly less dull than the ones from WWB->. This is the one episode where WWB models don’t simply return in recycled footage, but make distinct movements in the show’s own right (for lack of a better word). This is one reason why this is my favorite episode.
• The other being the action. I mean, we now have humans hunting with spears and traps (the ergaster in the previous episode wait for the wildebeest to collapse of exhaustion, while the Asian erectus don’t hunt anything aside from tarantulas they found)!
  
  The Megaloceros mortally wounds one of the heidelbergensis brothers, gets stabbed, and falls to the ground in a motion recycled from WWB. To be honest, I do feel kind of bad seeing the family in grief as their brother dies.
• Watching this now, it feels just a little weird seeing Winston casually handle and talk about the dead brother. Originally he’s in a sitting position with a fur draped over his body, but Winston just knocks his corpse onto his side. He talks next to the guy’s dead body just as casually as he did talking about Lucy after she died. I understand he’s not our species, but the dude’s still a human. At least Winston tucks his arms in more, covers him again with the fur, and closes his eyes.
• According to Winston, as much as H. heidelbergensis love their family, they cannot conceive of anything beyond their physical world. In other words, they have no concept of an afterlife or religion. The family doesn’t bother to bury the dead brother: they just leave him there and move on.
  
  I did some research, and as it turns out, the earliest evidence (~400 kya) for humans treating their dead comes from Sima de los Huesos in Spain. The human remains are mostly concentrated in a discrete sedimentary level, which is not explainable by some kind of catastrophic event. It is believed, therefore, to be evidence of humans treating their dead (Carbonell & Mosquera, 2006). And you know what human species this was? Lo and behold, H. heidelbergensis! But because this study was published in 2006 and WWC came out in 2003, this is excusable, if true.
• H. heidelbergensis is depicted as the common ancestor of Neanderthals and our species (which at least one recent study suggests may not be the case; Gómez-Robles, 2019), with only one of us ending up with the “gift of a modern human mind”. The episode first focuses on the Neanderthals. One thing I really love is how WWC shows us how hard being a Neanderthal is, while also showing us how tough they were. While the three hunters were able to walk back to their home alright after three days of hunting, they haven’t caught anything in those three days. It’s not the complete end of the Neanderthal clan, but it’s very close to it. Making matters worse is that the leader’s partner is pregnant, and there is absolutely no way she and the unborn baby will make it if they venture out to escape the harsh weather.
• So, about the Neanderthal-rodeo rider thing (which WWC mentions): it turns out that Homo sapiens living at the same time as Neanderthals actually have similar injury patterns, which even one of the original proponents of the “rodeo rider” hypothesis later noted (Trinkaus, 2012). A later, even larger study found the same thing, with Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans exhibiting overall similar incidences of cranial trauma (Beier et al., 2018).
• Robert Winston just spying on the Neanderthals in the cave all chill while they’re barely making it with their rabbit and fire.
• The Neanderthals reach the end of their known hunting territory and have still found nothing. They call it quits and it really looks like they’re f*cked…
  
  …until a trumpet is heard in the distance, getting the men’s attention. And then the WWC intro theme plays, setting up my favorite scene in this entire series.
• As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a herd of woolly mammoths (like the Irish elk, their models are recycled from WWB). The Neanderthals are at the top of the ravine, with two of the men ready to push a giant boulder down on one of them. This is complicated when the leader coughs at a very inconvenient time, alerting the mammoths to their presence. Most of the mammoths run, but luckily they push a boulder down on a mammoth that wasn’t keeping up. The boulder crashes down on the mammoth’s hips, downing it. The hunters’ brief celebration, hugging each other and screaming in happy triumph, is absolutely deserved and kind of heartwarming to see.
• Again with my dude Winston spying on the Neanderthals in their own cave. Actually, now that I think about it…would this be ethically questionable in real life?
  
  Anyway, he makes a (self-admitted) unfunny joke about mammoths (going to the doctor for “trunk-uillizers” haha get it?). While the Neanderthals are laughing earlier, right when Winston makes his joke it cuts to silence on the Neanderthals’ part, as if they heard what he said and don’t even get it.
  
  Seriously, though, I’d say Winston had a good chance of being detected here.
• According to Winston, what makes Neanderthals different from us is a lack of imagination. “Flights of fancy…are simply beyond them”, and their ice age life apparently doesn’t need it.
  
  Once again, and this is the last example in the series, I think this a case of a presumption about when certain aspects of the human mind appeared. It comes across more as “we don’t have direct evidence of imagination”. I don’t think we can really prove that, but we could theoretically disprove it.
• Now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for. We head back down to Africa, where the human evolutionary journey started. We see what happened to the common ancestor population that stayed in Africa 120,000 years ago. They…are not doing well. If you thought the Neanderthals were tough enough to get by, these people are about to go extinct as a result of the horrid droughts in Africa.
  
  I tried to do some research, and it appears that it is indeed true (link 1->, link 2->). From ~195-123 thousand years ago (more or less, Wikipedia gives somewhat different dates) was a glacial period called Marine Isotope Stage 6. Although we don’t have a good record of Africa’s environment during this stage, we can assume from more recent and better-known glacial stages that Africa was almost certainly a cool, arid continent with expanded deserts. Much of Africa would have been straight-up uninhabitable, and this resulted in a population bottleneck ~150k years ago. It’s possible that the surviving population was as few as several hundred individuals…and are the ancestors of ALL of us living today.
  
  You know, learning about this makes me respect our own species’ hardiness every bit as much as the Neanderthals’. Neanderthals had to cope with the brunt of the ice age, but while we were further down south, we experienced aridity that drove us to the brink of extinction, yet we survived. Massive respect for their survival.
• Winston gives us the final ingredient for what makes us us: imagination. By storing water in ostrich eggs, these Homo sapiens have the imagination to realize that an egg can hold water, and the foresight to realize that they may come across this path again and need to drink. Regardless of whether or not imagination really only is a thing for our species, this is certainly a thing they would have had.
• This imagination is further exemplified by cave paintings. A recent study supports the idea that Neanderthals made cave art as well (Martí et al., 2021).
• Of course, with European H. sapiens comes interactions with Neanderthals. And hearing Winston talk about how we squeezed them out of existence is kind of jarring, considering how we just spent several minutes talking about how great H. sapiens is with our imagination.
  
  Our species and Neanderthals certainly interacted, as our coexistence involved episodes of interbreeding between our species. It’s possible that one factor contributing to Neanderthal extinction was absorption of Neanderthals into populations of H. sapiens.
  
  For the record, Neanderthals actually went extinct earlier than 30k years ago, as we now know. It’s closer to 40k years ago.
• Winston finds a baby girl…all alone in a Pleistocene human camp. The baby’s mother notices him. Winston, seriously, gtfo before you get speared to death!

Final verdict:

This was my favorite episode. The human hunts, the emotional moments as these ice age humans try to survive, explanations for what imagination is good for, all of it great. That said, I’m not really sure how to feel about the whole “our species is the only one with imagination” thing. There is now increasing evidence that this is not entirely true (again, see the evidence for Neanderthal cave paintings), but it also comes a bit across as “H. sapiens is superior”. And it…kind of feels wrong, mostly because it probably objectively is.

[Infinity Blade]

Final verdict:


Screen capture from Walking with Beasts: The Beasts Within.


Man, it's been literally half a year since I finished reviewing every episode of this series. It's been so long, and I've been preoccupied with or inclined to do so many other things that I'm not even sure what to say anymore. I will say this: Walking with Cavemen is not my absolute favorite installment of the entire Walking with series. I don't imagine it's anyone's favorite, actually, even ignoring the fact that its primary focus is restricted to hominins. I applaud their efforts in trying to create something dedicated to human evolution, but I don't feel they did it completely right, especially the first two episodes. Those ape suit actors just...really don't do it for me, especially in the context of a documentary series that masterfully immersed you into the past two separate times before (at least with the level of CGI and resolution at the time). The funny thing is, you already know what an Australopithecus in this universe is supposed to look like, and at least for the time it was a pretty serviceable Australopithecus (truth be told, the WWB Australopithecus is still what I imagine when I think of the creature, for better or worse). The suited actors, which you're going to have to stare at for two whole episodes, break that immersion.

However, WWC does have some strengths IMO. It goes into detail on how the changing world led to the evolution and extinction of all these different "cavemen". They also go into detail on what traits make us human in a step-wise fashion. Even if today we're unsure of when innovation or imagination evolved, you just know it must have happened sometime during all four of these episodes. Instead of leaving the program thinking that we're some arcane hairless ape, you get the sense that there's a lot to what actually makes us...us. And so weird-looking suited actors aside, these important lessons shine through and hit the viewer. Heck, I have to admit that even I had to think about everything this show was talking about that makes us human. Even if I disagreed as to whether a certain species of hominin lacked/laid exclusive claim to a certain ability, I was still left thinking "You know, yeah, this IS still a pretty important thing that makes me a human".

Robert Winston is a pretty nice narrator and host. Whenever we saw recycled WWB models being used again was also great to see, particularly the defensive Megaloceros and the herd of mammoths. The Gigantopithecus puppet still makes me want to cry, but luckily it's barely even there.

So overall, is Walking with Cavemen my favorite in the whole Walking with series? No. Is it still a welcome addition like all the other additions (except maybe the voiceover-ed 2013 WWD film)? Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so.