It has long been thought that Ice Age cave paintings could provide a window to our past, but their meaning has remained a mystery. Now, using research into hallucination, the dances of the Namibian bushmen and South African rock art, experts are beginning to decode these stunning pictures. Why did our earliest ancestors leave the trees and start to walk on two legs? What were early people like? Did they have language? Were they predators or prey? Ape-Man tells the remarkable epic of our 5-million-year journey from ape to man.

This extraordinary story has been pieced together from a host of fossil finds, prehistoric cave paintings, discarded stone tools, and traces of ancient genetic material. In this dramatic and highly gripping show, the narrator unravels the saga of how these discoveries have allowed us to build up a picture of our ancestors’ lives. It is a gripping scientific detective story that reveals how our world has come to be dominated by a single primate species: Homo sapiens.

The clues to our past include astonishing human-like footprints, preserved in volcanic ash sediments for over 3.5 million years, made by creatures, half-ape, half-man, already walking on two legs; a startlingly well-preserved skeleton unearthed at Lake Turkana, Kenya, revealing the grim life-and-death story of an 11-year-old boy who lived on the African savannah 1.5 million years ago; and minute DNA samples which some scientists believe will help them trace back the lineage of Homo sapiens to one African woman who lived 200,000 years ago.

At the heart of this series are stunning dramatic recreations which bring into focus the lives of the early humans. It includes: the first human footprint; the radical re-drawing of European man’s family tree; DNA evidence of the interbreeding which occurred as the first humans evolved; and the future of human evolution.