Ape Man

Body (1x3)

Air date: Mar 07, 2000

The search for the 'missing link' has caught our imagination ever since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. This is the remarkable story of how the mythical half-man, half-ape, became reality - and how it changed our view of our ancestors.The film reconstructs the dying moments of a young boy, whose fossilised skeleton from 1.5 million years ago has revealed the true nature of the ape-man. Nicknamed Nariokotome Boy (after the lake in Kenya where he was found), he was a tall athletic youth we could be proud to call an ancestor, in a practically human body.His species were phenomenally successful predators and, from his origins in Africa, he dominated the world for over a million years. But his brain was tiny. Inside this human form was the mind of a wild animal.