Origins of Us

Available on

BBC Two

Humans have evolved greatly through the years -- from forest ape to the most-powerful species on the planet. In this documentary programme, anatomist Alice Roberts uses the human body, from the way people walk to the shape of our faces, to illustrate how humans have evolved. Among the clues Roberts gleans from the human body are what our saliva reveals about humans' evolutionary journey and the advantages that our skeleton brought us as we learned to stand upright. But evolution does how its drawbacks. Roberts describes how our evolutionary progress has caused us to suffer from ailments such as bad backs and difficult childbirth.