Have you every wondered why the human body looks the way it does? Why our hands have five fingers instead of six? Why we walk on two legs instead of four? Scientist Neil Shubin has spent much of his life digging into our ancient past, to try to understand how our distant animal ancestors have shaped the human form. Using fossil evidence and our DNA history Neil traces back different parts of our body’s anatomy to animals that lived millions of years ago. Along the way he reveals that we can thank our fishy past for many of our body’s quirks – from hernias to hiccups.
With his natural wit and story-telling, Neil uses science to explore the origins of the human body. He travels from the high Arctic, to the deserts of Ethiopia to the high plains of South African search of the most important fossils.
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Neil begins a 375 million year old journey back in time in his anatomy lab in Chicago dissecting a human hand and ends in the high Arctic discovering a fish fossil that’s on the cusp of change.
It’s the story of how the basic shape of our hands and limbs can be traced back to the fins of an ancient fish that first crawled onto land. As well as hunting for fossils, he looks for the origin of limbs in the developing embryos of animals that share a common ancestor with us.
The genes that control limb growth in chickens, fruit flies and fish are also in us. This set of genes that shapes the human hand also forms the wings of chickens and the fins of fish. By combining both fossil and DNA evidence he explores the ancient history of our bodies. According to Neil Shubin we are, every one of us, just a jerry-rigged fish.
Neil travels back over 200 million years to a time when our ancestors were reptiles with features that we have inherited today.
Neil reveals how our reptilian past has left its mark on the structure of our skin, the shape of our teeth, and even our ears. The journey takes him from his dentist in Chicago, to the Karoo desert in South Africa, where he uncovers a key moment in our evolutionary past – the transition from reptile to mammal.
Neil looks at our primate past. Our ancestors spent tens of millions of years living in the trees – with bodies that looked a lot like modern monkeys. We can thank them for our versatile grasping hands, our amazing vision, and even the fundamental structure of our brains. But we’ve also inherited some hang-ups – bad backs, and a terrible sense of smell.
| Executive Producer (Tangled Bank) | Michael Rosenfeld |
| Series Producer | David Dugan |
| Producer/Directors | Alex Tate , Tom Cook |
| Senior Producers (Tangled Bank) | David Elisco , Anne J. Tarrant |
| Editors | Paul Shepard , Garry Crystal , Sabrina Burnard |
| Line Producer | Karen Lee |
| Junior Production Manager | Uli Pflanz |
| Junior Researcher | Fiona Clarke |
| Edit Assistant | Will Fiennes |