![]() But they are caught in the act, and, instead of being punished, are invited to stay and eat some cooked meat around a fire. Later we see this same tribe attempt to steal food from another tribe. ![]() This was the first great breakthrough that enabled humans to separate ourselves from the other apes.” Wrangham’s cooking theory is also endorsed and promoted in this episode. Richard Wrangham (PhD) author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, makes several appearances throughout the episode and stated on film, “Animals hunt, animals make tools, but only humans have mastered fire. This notion that cooking food has driven the evolution of mankind has been examined and rebutted by AiG in several articles. It is only by having a torch (which briefly goes out and must be restarted) that the tribe is able to fend off the vicious pack. (It seems to me that long-furred wolves would have been a more obvious choice for what appears to be snow-covered taiga-like forests than shorter-furred hyenas, but that’s just a minor complaint). Mankind is portrayed as primitive, a tribe running in fear from a pack of hyenas. While we would certainly debate the date postulated here, the scenery is clearly meant to portray mankind during the Ice Age, which we would pinpoint as the first few hundred years after the Flood (for round number’s sake, let’s say approximately 2,000 BC). Well, the question doesn’t hang in the air too long before we’re whisked back to “12,000 BC,” somewhere in the forests of Eurasia. From an animal like any other to the dominant species on earth because we figured out how to steal from the heavens and harness the power of the sun.” Just a little later, Jason asked the big question: “How did we get here?” “How did Homo sapiens go from swinging tree to tree, naked apes on a rock floating in space, to walking on the surface of the moon?” Fire and Ice “Fire: no single tool in the human arsenal explains our existence more than fire. In fact the opening line by the narrator/host Jason Silva left no doubt that human evolution from an ape-like ancestor was the starting assumption moving forward. Although most of this particular episode dealt with known historical events, there were quite a few which were pure speculation and from an obvious human evolutionary slant. This first episode, “Spark of Civilization,” examines how the discovery and use of fire has transformed human history in multiple ways. This series, titled Origins: The Journey of Humankind, looks at what the producers consider key turning points in human history, both those which are documented historically and those hypothesized from a supposed evolutionary past. OK, so maybe that’s not the opening line of the new National Geographic series-but it sure felt like it should have been. A long time ago, in a galaxy called the Milky Way.
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