Neanderthals - Meet Your Ancestors (2018)

4.0 (4 votes)

1 Season

May 13, 2018

English

Documentary

Synopsis

According to recent science the Neanderthals are not the knuckle-dragging apemen of popular imagination. In fact they are our distant ancestors. About 2% of the DNA of most people is of Neanderthal origin—and it continues to affect us today. Ella Al-Shamahi enlists the skills of Andy Serkis, the master of performance capture, and a group of experts to investigate Neanderthals.

Creator

James Hayes, Andrew Jackson, Lucy McDowell

Network

BBC Two

Episodes

Episode 1

May 13, 2018

45 min

4.0

Ella Al-Shamahi, a rising star in Neanderthal research, enlists the skills of Andy Serkis, the master of performance capture, and a group of experts to create, for the first time ever, a scientifically accurate 3D Neanderthal. They discover that Neanderthals were more like us than we ever thought.

Episode 2

May 20, 2018

45 min

4.0

For around 400,000 years Neanderthals live and thrived right across Europe and Western Europe. But about 40,000 years ago they disappeared. In this second episode in the series, Ella Al-Shamahi - with the help of Hollywood actor Andy Serkis - explores the fate of the Neanderthals, asking why they became extinct, and discovering how they live on inside of us today.