Deep in the Congo Basin — Nazir Brelvi

In this action-packed series, spanning five episodes, Zak and his cronies along with world-class scholars of the Life Sciences strive to identify, describe and understand the intricacies of human evolution by scrutinizing every fragment of fossilized evidence. Each science-based narrative reads like an adventure as the team travels to exotic locales around the globe, seeking to dispel the lingering pre-Darwinian belief in some uninformed circles that the complex interrelationships of various organisms reveal the 'intelligent design' of divine creation. Their basic premise is that due to the onset of the Ice Ages about three million years ago, the African landmass witnessed a dramatic shrinkage of habitable woodlands. This induced the early humans living there to adapt quickly or face extinction. As a result, they began to acquire physical characteristics, which made them neither as talented up in the trees as the great apes nor as facile on terra firma as us, modern humans. Over the next two million years, several other bipedal hominid forms arose, not all of whom survived. Each underwent countless rounds of physical adaptation and change as their bodies continued to be honed by the relentless process of natural selection. Consequently, our remotest ancestors essentially became neither apes nor human but a curious 'blend' of both. Thus we, as Homo sapiens, despite our remarkable cognitive abilities, merely represent just one of the many twigs on the prickly bush of hominid evolution. Contrary to popular opinion, humans are not the sole occupants of that lofty pedestal of biological perfection that all other primates have aspired to, but failed to reach.