Walking with Cavemen is a four-part television documentary series about human evolution produced by the BBC in the United Kingdom. It was originally released in April 2003. It was subsequently presented in the United States as a two-part series by the Discovery Channel and its affiliates. There was an accompanying book of the same title.
Like previous Walking with... documentaries, Walking with Cavemen is produced in the style of a nature documentary, featuring a voice-over narrator (Robert Winston in the British release, Alec Baldwin in the North American release) who describes the recreations of the prehistoric past as if they were real. As with the predecessors, this approach necessitated the presentation of speculation as if it were fact, and some of the statements made about the behaviour of the creatures are more open to question than the documentary may indicate. The style is different in UK and US versions, as Robert Winston travels through time to the location of drama taking place, while Alec Balwin remains ever in the present day in a lit room with skulls representative of ancestral hominid species highlighted in each drama.
Each segment takes the form of a short drama featuring a group of the particular hominid in question going about their daily lives (the search for food, protecting territory, and caring for the sick and injured). The intent is to get the human viewer to feel for the creatures being examined, almost to imagine being one of them (a trait that the documentary links to the modern human brain).
Production
The documentary was not produced by the same team as the award-winning Walking with... documentary series, but a completely different one. The original series' director, Tim Haines, was not involved, nor Jasper James or the original production company Impossible Pictures, meaning Walking with Cavemen is technically a spin-off of the original series.
In the previous Walking with... documentaries, extinct animals were recreated with CGI and animatronics. For Walking with Cavemen, a slightly different approach was taken. While most of the animals depicted were still computer generated or animatronic, the human ancestors were portrayed by actors wearing makeup and prosthetics, giving them a more realistic look and permitting the actors to give the creatures a humanistic quality.
Episodes
See also
- A Species Odyssey a similar program on France 3
- Before We Ruled the Earth a two-part documentary aired on Discovery Channel
External links
- Walking with Cavemen at BBC Programmes
- Walking with Cavemen - BBC Science & Nature
- Walking with Cavemen on IMDb
