[calm music]
[narrator] In every corner of the world today are humans.
Seven billion of us.
How did we come to so dominate our planet?
It's one of science's greatest mysteries.
Amazing new evidence suggests
it began with a single tiny group of people
who left Africa on an incredible journey.
[dramatic music]
[narrator] Using bones, stones, and genes,
we'll uncover the trails their descendants left
across the world...
and find out how their journeys transformed our species
into the people we are today.
This time, we'll explore
one of the most intriguing mysteries of our human journey.
Did we survive a super volcano,
tackle hostile ancient humans,
and risk it all on an ocean crossing?
How on earth did we reach Australia?
[ominous music]
[narrator] How humans first reached Australia
is a story that's shrouded in mystery.
The only thing we can tell for sure
is that the journey had an end.
So that's where our investigation begins.
Mungo National Park in Southern Australia.
[upbeat music]
[narrator] It's over 40 degrees Celsius,
it only sees 30 centimeters of rain a year
and its main inhabitants
are millions upon millions of flies.
[engine revving]
[narrator] It may seem a strange place
to start a quest for human life,
but this barren wilderness holds crucial clues
about our ancient Australia ancestors.
The most poignant clue of all was unearthed here in 2004
by local Aboriginal people and scientists.
What they found is so precious,
its location is kept secret.
One of those who guards the find is Aboriginal tribal leader,
Warren Clark.
[tires screeching]
[ominous music]
[flies buzzing]
[narrator] The discovery was so delicate
that almost as soon as it was revealed,
the site was buried again to protect it.
[flies buzzing]
[narrator]But today our cameras are being allowed in
to film a unique event.
For the first time since the site was re-buried,
local Aboriginal people and scientists
are gathering once more to examine what they found.
[tense music]
[narrator] They are gently uncovering
the imprints of human feet.
When these footprints were discovered,
they provoked a debate
because some people believed they'd been made recently.
When they found the footprints,
some of the archaeologists were a little bit skeptical
because they thought, you know,
that these may have been done just a few weeks ago,
a few years ago.
Some of the footprints looked that fresh.
[narrator] But the Aboriginal people were convinced
that what had been found weren't new footprints,
but marks left by their ancient forefathers
in what they call the "Dreamtime."
Tanya Charles was here when the footprints were found.
[Tanya] Other people that was with us,
they were saying, uh,
they belong to the farmers that were here
and we're like, "No, they're ours."
[chuckles]
You fellows wear shoes, we don't.
We didn't, back then. [chuckles]
And we just needed the scientific mob to come in
and tell the rest of the world that.
[narrator]Samples were taken from around the prints and dated
using a technique called
optically stimulated luminescence,
which measures how long soil has been buried.
The results amazed the scientific world.
The footprints were made between 19 and 23,000 years ago.
For the Aboriginal custodians of the area,
this was evidence of what they've traditionally believed,
that they belong in this land and have always lived here.
[narrator] The patterns in the footprints
tell us stories.
There are several footprints in a line extending along here,
uh, and the curious thing about this particular trackway
is it's represented by just one right foot.
We don't have that corresponding left foot.
We had some trackers come down from central Australia
and they talked about the depth of this print,
how there's a lot more weight bearing just on that one print,
so it would appear that this was a one-legged man.
This particular man here was on the hop really quickly,
chasing a kangaroo, um,
and on his first throw he, um, he missed the kangaroo
and then on his second throw he, um, got the kangaroo
and he dropped it to one knee.
There's some really personal signatures in the trackway
which you really don't often see in archaeology,
particularly in archaeology
dating back as far as 20,000 years ago.
So it's an extraordinary site.
[narrator] The footprints are proof
of the presence of humans in Australia 20,000 years ago.
And, there, our first hint of the ancient people
who once lived here,
a moment from their lives frozen in time.
It may seem strange
these prints could last so long in such a dry landscape,
but they weren't made in dust and sand.
They were made in wet clay,
because 20,000 years ago,
Australia was much wetter than it is today
and around Mungo, there was so much water
that this low, flat land was the bottom of a lake.
And that shimmer in the horizon was the lake shore.
It was around these lakes
that people lived.
And tens of thousands of years after the lake dried out,
Mungo's shifting sands
still reveal clues about the past,
and about how long humans have lived here.
[crickets chirping]
[zooming]
[narrator] In 1974,
a geologist called Jim Bowler was exploring the area,
looking for evidence of Mungo's past.
Unbeknown to him, he was about to discover
one of the most important fossils in the world.
[Jim] I was walking along this horizon
and, uh, what I saw were one or two wombat bones
just back there,
and this white... bone
was, uh, showing through the sand just ahead of us,
which first I thought was perhaps wombat
but obviously worth investigating
and there he was.
Even to my uninitiated eye,
it was clearly human.
[tense music]
[narrator] He had found a piece of evidence
so precious to Aboriginal Australians
that we had to ask permission
from the tribal elders to film it,
the remains of an individual known as Mungo man.
He's looked after by Alan Thorn,
who helped uncover him.
[Alan] I remember vividly,
it was in February and it was blazing hot.
There was a storm coming so we didn't have much time.
[narrator] When Mungo man was brought back for analysis,
there was one question everyone wanted to know the answer to.
How old is he?
The answer is astonishing.
Recent work puts Mungo man at 40,000 years old,
while some believe he's as much as 60,000.
He's the oldest man in Australia
and possibly the oldest human in the world
outside the African region.
But such an early date
would mean something almost unbelievable,
that humans arrived in Australia before they reached Europe
and only a few thousand years after leaving Africa.
With the Indian ocean to cross,
is this really possible?
Not all scientists think so.
Mungo man is just one of a number of ancient remains
found across Australia.
Looking at them together,
it's clear there's a huge variety of shapes and sizes.
[Alan] There are amongst these gracile, delicate remains,
remains of a different kind,
absolutely the opposite of the Mungo man.
Big, long-headed,
very thick skull... cranial bones, big brow ridges.
These are the footballers of aboriginal pre-history.
[narrator] Recent scientific work
suggests that all non-Africans
descend from a small group of people that left Africa
around 70,000 years ago,
but Alan thinks the early skulls found in Australia
mean this cannot be true.
Australia has a bewildering array of diversity,
many different shapes,
but in none of them do I see anything that I'd say,
"Oh, that's African."
I don't see it.
[narrator] Controversially, Alan believes
that this is because the ancestors
of the Aboriginal Australians
came out of Africa not 70 odd thousand years ago,
but much, much earlier,
giving them time to develop a huge variety of skull shapes
of their own.
So where do the Aboriginal Australians
come from?
Were they part of the exodus from Africa
70 odd thousand years ago
or are they descendants of a much more ancient branch
of the human family?
An answer may come not from ancient remains,
but from people alive today.
[lively music]
[seagulls squawking]
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] All of us have DNA in every cell of our bodies,
half from our father's
jumbled up with half from our mother's.
There's one type of DNA called mitochondrial DNA,
which passes directly from mother to child,
but once in a while something goes wrong,
producing a harmless mutation.
It's these rare mutations
that help us build our global family tree.
The staggering thing this tree tells us
is that everyone outside of Africa
comes from this one branch,
descendants of a tiny group of people
who left Africa around 70,000 years ago.
But if the ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians
left Africa much earlier,
they won't fit on this tree at all.
[upbeat music]
[narrator] Advances in Genetic Science
may help us resolve this mystery.
For many Aboriginal Australians,
the idea that they descend from Africa
contradicts their creation stories.
This is one of the reasons
few have agreed to genetic investigation.
Australian scientist Sheila van Holst Pellekaan
is one of the few geneticists
to have worked with Aboriginal people,
talking with them about their ancestors.
She is analyzing several samples of DNA
from different population groups
to discover whether they belong to the branch of a family tree
which emerged out of Africa.
She has three Aboriginal Australia samples,
a European sample,
and some that are only found in Africa.
[tense music]
[Sheila] So these are little sample labels across the bottom.
These are the African samples
and you can see each of those has two little bands.
This is the European
and this is samples from Aboriginal Australians
from your area.
[stutters] There's three of them.
[narrator] If the Aboriginal Australians
descended from Africa 70 odd thousand years ago,
they should show the same genetic signal as the Europeans.
What you can see is that the Africans
all have these two little bands
and the European and the three Aboriginal Australian samples
all have the same one.
[narrator] So in this test,
the Aboriginal Australian genes do show a marker
which suggests a recent exodus from Africa,
and this is where they sit on the family tree.
They stem from the same out of Africa branch
as Europeans.
So even though Aboriginal people and European people
were separated by time, like, for thousands of years
-and also by geography... -Yes.
...it still points out that we've got
a common family ancestor out of Africa.
[Sheila] Yes, that's what the data says.
Doesn't matter how many samples you look at
that are out of Africa,
you'd get a similar result as you see here.
[narrator] So genetic evidence strongly suggests
Aboriginal Australians are descended
from that small group of people who left Africa.
But how did early humans make it all the way to Australia?
It's one of the greatest mysteries
of our human journey,
and to discover how it was possible,
we have to go right back to the beginning.
A new theory claims that after leaving Africa
across the red sea,
a small group of people pushed East,
hugging the shores of Arabia.
Continuing along the coast
would have brought them to India.
If that's the case, somewhere in this vast land mass
there could still be traces of that migration.
[indistinct chatter]
[seagull squawks]
[tranquil music]
[narrator] Living along the coast
would have been attractive.
[people clamoring]
[narrator]Food was plentiful,
they could find fresh water where rivers met the sea
and there was little need to spend time and energy
adapting to new environments.
But frustratingly,
there's little archaeological evidence
that this is what happened,
possibly thanks to recent changes in climate.
We've commissioned climate scientists
to use super computers
normally used to predict future climate change
to look back into India's past.
By turning time back from today,
we can see that sea levels drop away
and the land extends.
Sixty thousand years ago,
India was a much larger land mass than it is today,
so as sea levels have risen, any evidence of a coastal life
would now be 90 kilometers out to sea.
[waves crashing]
[narrator] But well away from the coast,
near the village of Jwalapuram,
one group of researchers has uncovered evidence
suggesting early man didn't only live on the beach.
The scientists were drawn here by an unlikely discovery,
volcanic ash.
Thousands of tonnes of it.
Today, it's mined by the local villagers,
who sell it to chemical manufacturers
to use in household products,
but what attracted the archaeologists
is that the ash doesn't belong here.
Its presence is evidence
that this area witnessed a terrifying event.
Seventy-four thousand years ago,
Mount Toba on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia
ripped itself apart.
[explosions]
[narrator]Over 100 times more powerful than Krakatoa,
it dwarves all other volcanoes in human experience.
It spewed out 2,800 cubic kilometers of ash.
Wind blew the ash over 2,000 kilometers north west,
where it rained down in India.
It poisoned the water and destroyed vegetation,
killing countless animals.
[suspenseful music]
[narrator] So what did it do to us?
[birds chirping]
[narrator] It's the Toba ash
that's still visible in India today.
So here we have the ash representing
the Toba super-eruption
and the ash actually begins at this level here,
where you see the contact zone between the brown sediment
and the base of the ash,
and it goes up for about 2 meters in height.
This ash would have been falling down on the landscape
and becoming settled in
and this Toba super-eruption
happened around 74,000 years ago.
[narrator] Most estimates suggest that 74,000 years
is before our species had left Africa,
let alone arrived in India,
so was anyone here to witness this ash fall
and, if so, what happened to them?
A team of archaeologists
from Karnatak University in India
and Cambridge in the UK
are searching for signs of human life.
This is the floor exposed
and we have the palace wall here.
[man 1] Yeah.
And then the river of ash.
[narrator] Looking below the ash should tell us
if anyone was here in India when the volcano erupted.
-[man 2] Okay. -[Michael speaks indistinctly]
[Michael] It does look like a blade.
-[man 2] Yes, sir. -[Michael] But most importantly,
-there's retouch... -Yeah.
-Retouch over here. -...all along here.
-Yes, sir. -And it looks like
an end scraper.
-Oh. -Yeah.
-[man 2] Here. -[Michael] Outstanding.
[narrator] The most common clues are stone tools.
This is a very special artifact
because you see here,
we have flaking all along the margin
to produce this shoulder,
and this... end of the flake
was, then, perhaps hefted into a shaft
and we think this is a projectile point,
so a spear point,
and if you also notice, the tip is broken
and this is what's called an impact fracture,
so we know that this spearhead was in fact launched
and the tip broke off.
[narrator] This discovery is incredibly new,
but the team thinks it shows something remarkable.
Because this spearhead was found below the ash,
they believe that humans were in India
before Toba erupted.
Not everyone agrees with them,
and even if they're right,
surely a volcano the size of Toba
would have wiped out everyone living here,
ensuring they played no further part in the human journey.
But amazingly, just above the ash,
the team have discovered more tools
of the same type as those below.
The tools are so similar
the team believe they're evidence
people continued living here immediately after the eruption.
[inaudible dialogue]
[narrator] It's an amazing thought
that our ancestors experienced a super volcano and survived.
[explosion]
[narrator] If there was a Toba super-eruption today,
it would be far more devastating to modern populations
than they were on hunter gatherers
78,000 years ago,
but today, in a sense, we're trapped
and that's because we are settled communities
living in cities, and villages, and towns.
It would just devastate populations
and it would devastate our agricultural base.
So these hunter gatherers were more adaptable than us
and the tools they left behind
give us our first hint of human presence in Asia.
And their ability to survive where we would now fail
may have helped the human journey to continue.
But the long migration towards Australia
was no deliberate journey.
Whilst some kept moving,
driven by the need for food, drink, and shelter,
others may never have travelled at all.
Throughout Southeast Asia are isolated tribes
who, like these in the Andaman Islands,
seem to look more like Africans than Asians.
It's as if they're echoes of the people
who first arrived here from Africa
tens of thousands of years ago.
Could this be true?
Can their presence tell us anything
about that first journey?
[ominous music]
[narrator] Stephen Oppenheimer is a genetics expert
based in Oxford in the UK.
His work has revolutionized the way we see our distant past.
He's pioneered the use of genetics
to trace the paths of the people
he believes came out of Africa round the Indian ocean.
[Stephen] It's something like a detective story
where you've got a very specific trail
which you can measure,
just like traditional trackers where they'll follow a trail
which nobody else could see.
[narrator] What can we tell about these people's past
and what do they show us about the human journey?
The Semang tribes in the north of Malaysia
are thought to have lived here for tens of thousands of years,
until recently in isolation.
Despite living in Asia,
some of their features look more akin to those of Africans
and their way of life hints at ancient origins.
But what story does their DNA tell?
[crickets humming]
[narrator] To find out, Stephen and his colleagues
have been granted permission
to take DNA samples from the tribe.
[Stephen] Looking at Lanoh
is a way of testing
that they are descendants
of the first settlers in this area
and, therefore, the first settlers
that came from Africa.
[narrator] Taking DNA from cheek cells
is the next stage in a process
Stephen and his colleagues have already begun,
tracing the Semang's mitochondrial DNA
and placing them on the human family tree.
[Stephen] What it showed was
they all belong to that single line
that came out of Africa
that gave rise to all other non-Africans,
Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Iraqis, whoever.
These were part of a single exit from Africa,
part of the... just one family that came out of Africa.
[narrator] When you plug the Semang
onto the human family tree,
they sit here
and here.
They have genetic markers which develop
from the first branches out of Africa,
at least 60,000 years ago,
suggesting the Semang are the descendants
of some of the first people ever to enter Malaysia.
But there's something else special
about the Semang group's genes.
They were unique.
They were unique to this population.
And they're not found anywhere else in the world.
[giggling]
[narrator] Because their genetic markers
are only found here in Northern Malaysia,
it suggests that since arriving,
in the vanguard of that first migration,
the Semang have never moved.
They're one of a handful of tribes
scattered around the Indian ocean
who are thought to have arrived in the first migration
and stayed ever since.
As such, they give us a hint of the original migration,
where people first spread east round the Indian ocean,
but ahead the journey's less clear.
At the end of Malaysia, the land runs out.
How did people make the crossing from the peninsula
to the islands of Southeast Asia?
[wind howling]
[narrator] Around 70,000 years ago,
the world was in the middle of an ice age.
During an ice age,
the polar ice caps expand
effectively sucking up water out of the seas.
Running the climate simulation backwards,
we can see what happened.
The water in between disappeared,
meaning people could have walked between today's islands.
But is there any evidence they took this route?
[foreboding music]
[narrator] The Borneo rainforest,
impenetrable, dripping with heat,
and home to creatures that bite.
But one man was so certain
this place would reveal secrets of our origins,
he decided to brave the heat, the sweat and the wildlife.
He was rewarded by the best evidence
of our first human journey in the whole of Southeast Asia.
Major Tom Harrison,
an anthropologist, adventurer, and eccentric.
He parachuted into Borneo on a covert mission
during the Second World War.
His guerrilla campaign
against the Japanese forces in the island
won him a distinguished service order.
Once the war ended, he returned.
Having built a relationship
with the tribal people of Borneo,
he wanted to look into their past.
First of all, let me put you in the big picture.
Well now, here's Singapore,
up here is China,
and this is Borneo.
The trouble with anything in Borneo, as always,
is knowing where to begin.
[tranquil music]
[narrator] His search brought him to Niah caves
in the jungle of Sarawak.
Undaunted by the spectacular size of the cave,
Harrison enlisted locals
to help begin one of the first ever
archaeological digs in Borneo.
In 1958,
4 years after work began,
a team were digging in the mouth of the cave
when they came across something
that was to make both the cave and Harrison legendary.
[translator 1] This box contains pieces of a skeleton
that was found in the Niah caves.
It was found in pieces and has been put together
to resemble the skull of a girl aged 18 to 25.
[narrator]Convinced he'd found something extraordinary,
Harrison arranged for the remains to be analyzed
using the new method of radiocarbon dating.
News of the results quickly spread.
The skull was apparently 40,000 years old.
At the time,
this made it the oldest modern human skull in the world.
But this wasn't the moment of glory
Harrison had hoped for.
Knowing he wasn't trained as an archaeologist,
other scientists were suspicious
and even assumed he'd manipulated the results.
So with its age in question,
the Niah skull has remained an enigma for 50 years,
but recent research has confirmed
it is at least 35,000 years old,
and animal remains that had been butchered
at the site using stone tools
are 10,000 years older than that.
This suggests people were hunting in Borneo
at least 45,000 years ago
and gives us another mark of human presence
on the journey through Asia.
But if these people had explored further afield,
they might have found they had unusual neighbors.
[ominous music]
[lively music]
[narrator] It's a well-known story,
how we evolved from primitive apes
to become the supreme power on this planet,
but when we look into the past,
it's clear this is not the full picture.
For instance,
the first species of human to reach Asia wasn't us,
but the stronger, bigger skulled Homo erectus,
over a million years earlier.
And in 2003,
a discovery in Indonesia
added another member to the human family
who may have had a critical influence
on our migration to Australia.
[news theme playing]
Scientists working on a remote island in Indonesia
have made a discovery
that changes the story of human evolution.
[reporter] Could this skull change our entire view
of millions of years of human evolution?
It's been hailed as the single most important discovery
about human evolution for nearly 100 years.
Scientists on a remote...
[narrator] Indonesian and Australian archaeologists
working on the island of Flores made a peculiar discovery,
a tiny skeleton.
At first, they thought it was the body of a child,
but wear and tear in the teeth convinced them
that this was an adult.
An adult that stood just one meter high
with a tiny brain the size of a grapefruit.
Their discovery became known
as the "Hobbit."
[wind rumbling]
[narrator] It tore the scientific world in two.
The archaeologists who found the remains
were convinced they'd discovered a new human species,
but others claimed the skeleton
had merely suffered from a disease
affecting its growth.
Still today,
when at least eight more individuals have been found,
the debate rages on.
And the most intriguing question for the Human Journey
is what impact did the Hobbit have on us
as we move through the area?
[tranquil music]
[narrator]Today, not far from where the skeletons were found,
villagers still tell stories of little hairy people
who lived in a cave on the side of a ravine.
[firewood crackling]
[narrator] They're known as Ebu Gogo
and sound remarkably similar to the Hobbit.
[translator 1] Their distinctive features
include long hair,
particularly on the head and their chest.
Their faces are almost like a monkey's
but with smaller chins.
They had a broad chest with a kangaroo style pocket,
usually used to hold stolen goods.
The female ones had big and long breasts,
down to their knees.
When they walked or wanted to steal things,
they put their breasts on their shoulders.
When they wanted to breast feed their babies,
they grabbed it back to the front.
They stole the crops belonging to the peasants,
crops like cassava, fruit, and others
were always stolen by Ebu Gogo.
[narrator] They weren't just said to steal food.
They stole children as well,
which angered the villagers so much
they set fire to Ebu Gogo's cave.
So it this creature the same as the Hobbit?
Did these one meter high hominids
fight with our ancestors?
Curiously, no human remains
from the time of the first movement of people
have been confirmed in Indonesia.
Did the presence of other human species
keep our ancestors away,
or did these tiny, unexpected creatures
drive us on towards Australia?
Whichever route people took through Indonesia,
the greatest challenge still lay
between them and Australia,
because at the Timor sea, the land completely runs out.
[lightning crackles]
[narrator] It's nearly 500 kilometers
between here and Australia,
and all that's visible on the horizon is sea.
[waves crashing]
[narrator] So were humans capable of making a crossing
to a land they could not see?
And if so, how did they do it?
[wind howling]
[waves crashing]
[narrator] Robert Bednarik is fascinated by this question.
On a mission to find out whether prehistoric humans
could have successfully crossed huge expanses of sea,
he has so far carried out seven sea voyages.
He constructs vessels using materials
he believes could have been available to stone age man.
Giant bamboo,
readily available across the area,
may have been an obvious choice,
as it's a natural float.
Lengths of it can be cut with stone tools
and lashed together with vines from the forest.
Tomorrow, Robert and a crew of local fishermen
are going to attempt another crossing,
his eighth, their first,
from the island of Lombok
to the next land mass, Sumbawa,
just visible on the horizon.
The crossing may not be as far as Australia,
but if it can be achieved successfully,
it will be an indication of whether the longer voyage
was possible.
Tomorrow's journey is estimate to be a day's paddling
in treacherous waters.
Well, the currents in any sea strait
anywhere in the world are unpredictable,
so a little treacherous.
Those... those kinds can be four, five, six knots,
it can be quite strong currents.
And they change frequently and sometimes
you have two different currents
in the same, uh, in the same strait.
The northern entrance is fairly well protected
but at the southern end, I do have a problem.
If we can... If we go too far south,
we are going to be in trouble.
[narrator]The crew of fishermen all know this water well
but don't know if a few pieces of bamboo
can cope with the challenges they know they'll face.
For me, I worry about, uh...
the sun, yes, if hot sun...
or rain.
[fisherman 1] He worry about the wind for tomorrow.
Or if come from the east and he worry about the...
current coming.
and we cannot get there.
But we will do the best we can do.
We will find it some power.
[narrator] To protect themselves,
they enlist a local shaman
to ask the blessing of the spirit of the sea.
She marks them with crushed rice mixed with salt water
and makes an offering of gifts to the ocean.
Then the crew returns home
to prepare for the challenge ahead.
[birds chirping]
[narrator] The following morning,
the conditions are perfect.
The wind is low and the sea is calm,
but even in these conditions, launching the raft is risky.
[speaking in native language]
[narrator] It weighs over a tonne
and could smash the sailors against the shore,
but they are full of optimism.
[speaking in native language]
[men clamoring]
[waves crashing]
[narrator] Now that the first challenge is over,
the long, hard slog begins.
Given the scale of what they're attempting,
Robert believes people must have had a very good reason
[Robert] Let's remember that all of these people
are hunters and gatherers,
they are all very attached to the land.
If you have been living here for generations and generations,
it would be foolish to leave.
[narrator] Even today,
Indonesia is alive with volcanoes.
Perhaps it was one of these
which made people leave their land.
[Robert] To me, a volcanic eruption
is an obvious reason.
I mean, if you look at the volcano up there,
you know, that huge thing.
Imagine when that exploded, that must have been incredible.
[water sloshing]
[narrator] After five hours paddling,
the crew are only halfway in,
but Robert's pleased with their craft.
[Robert] Well, it's working extremely well,
it's very well balanced.
It performs exactly as we expected it to.
We have almost no wind,
so there are no waves.
We have a maximum speed of around about three knots.
Our main obstacle really are the currents.
[singing in native language]
It's all going according to plan.
We are not really off course.
[narrator] So far, so good.
But suddenly, the weather begins to take a turn for the worse.
A storm is closing in on the paddlers,
sitting between them and their destination.
[foreboding music]
[narrator]Tantalizingly within sight of land,
the crew get caught in a current
pulling them away towards the open sea.
[Robert] It took an enormous amount of courage
to take a one-way trip to a land mass
that they had never seen.
They didn't know what was over there.
There could have been the monsters
and in the said stories there probably were monsters.
[waves crashing]
[tense music]
[narrator]Ten and a half hours after they began,
the crew finally make it ashore.
[man cheering]
[narrator] Robert's success shows it is possible
to cross the sea on a vessel made with stone age tools.
And using our climate computers to look back in time
might give us an idea of when
a voyage could have been possible.
As we move into the last ice age,
we can see something interesting.
Water levels fall away and at about 65,000 years ago,
the sea reaches its lowest point.
The distance between the two land masses
drops to 160 kilometers, a third of its current width.
Maybe this gave people the chance to make a crossing.
[calm music]
[narrator] If so, it was most likely
somewhere in Northern Australia
that the first people landed,
in a territory now known as Arnhem land.
Today, it's remote and inaccessible
and you need a permit to enter it.
But hidden beneath rocks in the area,
archaeologists have found
artifacts nearly 60,000 years old.
It's a final piece of evidence of human presence.
The date fits in with the time of the lowest sea level
and gives us our last clue
to when humans set foot in Australia.
[upbeat music]
[narrator] Today, Arnhem land is home
to the Aboriginal community of Gunbalanya.
Following the arrival of white settlers,
they no longer live in rock shelters,
as their grandfathers did,
but they keep their ancient culture alive.
So far, we've relied on modern science
to retrace the human journey.
But is there anything in their culture
that can give us a final insight
into the path of the first Australians?
One of the ways that Aboriginal people
pass down their culture is through art.
Like a survival guide, their pictures contain knowledge
which has enabled them to survive
in the hostile environment of the outback
for thousands of years.
Gary Jollom and fellow artist, Wilfred,
are respected in Gunbalanya for their knowledge.
Today,
they're visiting somewhere that's special to them,
the site of some precious and important Aboriginal art.
[water splashing]
[narrator] Their finely tuned understanding of the bush
allows them to make use of everything they find.
[bird chirping]
[narrator] An instant paintbrush.
The Australia Outback can be a deadly place.
Without knowledge of how to live within it,
you'd quickly die,
but it seems possible Aboriginal Australians
might have advantages over everyone else.
Some research suggests
they have an especially good spatial memory
which might help them find their way through the landscape,
and they're also thought to have exceptionally good
long distance vision.
Amongst the rocky outcrops,
they see sources of food in every corner.
[birds chirping]
[narrator] The first piece of art they come to
contains knowledge about food.
But deep in the recesses of this extraordinary place
is a piece of knowledge
that's fundamental to our quest.
[narrator] In Gary and Wilfred's culture,
this lady arrived during the time of the creation.
She carried bags, each holding a baby
which she planted down in the ground.
These babies are Gary and Wilfred's first ancestors.
[narrator] But what's special about this story
is where it says the creation mother came from.
She came from across the sea.
It's a fascinating parallel
that here, in the land where the first Aboriginal Australians
most likely set foot,
these people's creation story
seems to echo what the bones, stones, and genes
tell us of the journey from Africa to Australia.
The evidence, however faint,
lets us look back through time
at one of our ancestor's most amazing journeys.
Over 12,000 kilometers,
it stretched human kind to the limit.
But perhaps it's here at the end
that we find the clearest insight
into the people who made this journey.
[firewood crackles]
[speaking in native language]
[narrator] The Aboriginal Australians
give us a picture of the characteristics
which made our human journey so successful,
Ingenuity, resourcefulness, and courage.
It's these qualities that allowed people
to make their way out of Africa,
perhaps survive a super volcano...
[lightning cracks]
[narrator] ...outward enemies in the jungle,
and overcome the elements to reach Australia,
and it's these qualities which are at the heart
of what it means to be human.
[closing theme music]