Friday, August 27, 2010

Walking With Cavemen

A few days ago when we were talking about "cavemen" Harry had the wacky idea that they had cars. Cars? I think he must have caught a few episodes of The Flintstones at some point and it made a greater impression than it should have. Regardless, to give him a better portrait of what those cavemen might have looked like and to help our history studies I thought we'd take a look at BBC's Walking With Cavemen.

Not quite what I'd assumed from the title as it's not a series on Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, the traditional cavemen. It's actually a look at human evolution starting with Australopithecus afarensis and it's pretty darn good. Predictably there's lots of talk about sex and much nudity but given the subject matter that should be expected. None of us were bothered in the least.

It set off yesterday's activity with the cave paintings quite nicely as the last episode concludes with a caveman doing the thing that the narrator maintained was what truly made us human - using his imagination to paint scenes on a cave wall.

We enjoyed it (although since we watched all 4 episodes in one sitting Harry was a little antsy by the end of it) and Catherine has requested Walking With Prehistoric Beasts next. And I'm happy to report that Harry no longer thinks it possible that cavemen had cars.

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