This is our planet.
Planet Earth.
It's a planet I'm literally on right now,
and unless you're watching this on a long-haul flight
or while falling off a building,
chances are you are, too.
This is the incredible story of how humankind transformed our world
from being a load of pointless nature like this
to full of modern things like this...
CAR BEEPS
..and how it did it using nothing more than its hands...
..and its imagination,
and also tools and electricity
and the internet.
It's a journey that'll take me to every corner of the globe
money and pandemic travel restrictions would allow,
getting up close to some of our species most stunning achievements.
And I'll be asking questions...
Who are you?
..to leading academics, clevernauts and expertists
who will help me unlock the mystery of human civilisation.
Why do they say it's a mystery how the pyramids were built
when it's obviously just big bricks in a triangle?
This is not just the story of the planet we live in.
This is the story of the world we live on. Or both.
So, join me, Philomena Cunk,
for a landmark look at the world we built together.
This is Cunk on Earth!
This programme contains some strong language
For billions of years, there was no civilisation on Earth.
Just animals, plants and gases, getting on and mingling.
Must have been beautiful, but also boring.
Until along came a creature that would change all that -
human man.
Was Early Man similar to us?
I mean, was he made out of the same sort of meat that we are?
You know, did it have a brand name like beef or pork?
As far as we can tell, they were made out of the same stuff as us.
All we have is bones, of course,
and they're exactly the same as our bones.
We can only assume that the bones were encased in flesh,
something like ours, but I'm not aware of any kind of brand name
that they would have had. So it would have just been flesh?
Just flesh, I think, yes.
It would be hard to come up with a brand name for human flesh,
wouldn't it?
"HuF"?
We often assume early men were stupid because they had big eyebrows
and said, "Ug," but in fact they were pioneering inventorers.
They were the first men to use tools, which is something most men
have forgotten how to do today, which is why they have to get
someone in - a real man.
How did Early Man make tools whilst walking on all fours?
Well, we don't think that they walked on all fours for too long.
We're pretty sure they were walking upright for at least
the last two million years.
So, did they make the tools with their front legs
or their hind legs?
Well, I don't think humans have ever been very good at making things
with their feet, so, yes, it would have been the front legs
that they used for making tools. Right.
So, in leg terms, it would have been their top legs? Yes.
I think they would certainly have used the top legs for making tools,
or arms and hands as we call them today.
One thing they did invent was fire,
which allowed them to see at night and kept them warm,
tragically prolonging their already tedious lives.
But they had to invent something to do
during the long, boring evenings, and that something was art.
I'm entering a cave, not by mistake or because I'm a wolf...
..but because I've been specifically asked to come here by the producers
to look at cave art.
Cave paintings like these
are one of the first examples of civilisation on Earth.
Don't worry, it gets better.
Early cave artists started out painting whatever was close to hand,
like their hands.
Then, they branched out into stories.
Initially, just boring stories
about cows standing still.
But soon they began creating
white-knuckle fight scenes like this.
Humans versus cows 2D.
To a caveman, this was the thrilling equivalent
of Fast and Furious Part 7.
Have any of the cave paintings been adapted into films?
Suppose they couldn't get the rights anyway, though, could they?
Film-making, obviously, arose much, much later than the end
of the cave paintings.
So, there hasn't been a cave wall that's been like,
"Oh, my God, that's an incredible story.
"We need to get Steven Spielberg to make this"?
It would be hard to come up with a story that would last
an hour and a half based on just one panel in a cave.
Some believe these violent images were painted as religious acts
intended to bring good luck in upcoming battles.
We don't know why humankind was at war with the cows
and, tragically, we never will.
In fact, we'll probably never even know the name of the artist
or these cows, because whoever painted this
is almost certainly dead now.
Hunting animals every day was a pain in the arse
until someone came up with the idea of also eating plants,
which were easier to catch because they couldn't run away.
This simple act of laziness led to the invention of farming,
a huge leap forwards,
which was now more dangerous because you might land
on one of the farming implements that were suddenly lying around.
The early farmers grew wheat and learned to bake bread.
They also grew barley, peas and lentils,
so they could have made a passable vegan burger
to put inside the bread
but, luckily, they didn't have to.
Because they'd also invented this - the fence.
A high-tech wooden machine for containing animals.
Humans quickly enslaved sheep, chickens, goats
and their number one enemies, the cows.
Farms became a lot like zoos.
Except, of course, in a zoo, you can't pick out an animal
you like the look off and kill it and eat it.
Unless, perhaps, the zoo itself is struggling financially
and the owner's lost all hope.
Humans turned animals they couldn't eat or ride into pets
if they were pretty enough.
Early Man domesticated dogs for companionship...
..and cats for whatever we have cats for.
This was the first time in history life could be described as cosy.
People lived in proper houses,
which soon grew to become cities.
It's hard to believe I'm walking through the ruins
of the first-ever city, because I'm not.
That's in Iraq, which is miles away and fucking dangerous.
But the remains of it look pretty much like this,
so you'd never know I wasn't actually there
if I wasn't telling you now by accident.
Today, it's just a dismal load of bricks and dust,
but if you use a modern computer to simulate what it used to look like,
the results are nothing short of breathtaking.
Civilisation had begun.
Who invented civilisation?
Civilisation wasn't something
that was invented
or something that started abruptly.
We talk about civilisation once humans started agriculture,
once they started building cities
and creating laws.
That was something that happened gradually in different parts
of the world rather than just being invented suddenly. Yeah.
So, it wasn't just one man
who wanted to remain anonymous?
No. Cos that would be something we shouldn't go along with if it was.
Do you mean we shouldn't go along...?
If it was one man who wants to remain anonymous,
there's something a bit shifty about that, isn't there?
So, civilisation was invented in Mesopotamia
by person or persons unknown.
But whoever they were, they were way ahead of their time.
Did the Mesopotamians have any of the same things that we have today?
Yes. Like what?
Weapons, jewellery,
temples, animals.
Right. No, I meant, like, feet and eyebrows and that sort of thing.
Yes, yes. They did?
They had the whole set of organs,
holes, bits that work together,
and bits on the outside, bits on the inside.
So they had the same number of holes and everything?
As far as science is in a position to reassure you, yes.
One of their most significant killer apps
was something we still use to this day - the circle.
Wheels might look complicated to the likes of you,
but the way they work is actually simple.
The circle bit here revolves around a sort of sticky out bit
in the middle,
and then, as the wheel skin here pushes against the ground,
the pressure rolls the entire planet back and away from you,
giving you the impression that you're moving forward,
which, incredibly, you actually are.
The wheel allowed people to travel around trading things,
but first they needed to count how many things they owned,
and that led to the tragic invention of maths.
Let's talk maths and numbers.
Were numbers worth less back in ancient times
or did they have the same value as now only bigger?
Numbers had the same value as they do now
in ancient times, yeah. People still needed to count things.
And did they have the same number of numbers as we do,
you know, from one to 700,
with 700 being the biggest number?
700 has never been the biggest number.
You can count to as many as you like.
No, no. I saw a thing on YouTube -
after 700, numbers repeat.
They just give them different names so you think they're still going up.
Do you want me to send it to you?
With numbers going as high, but no higher than 700,
people needed something to help them count.
That's where this came in.
It's called a bacus.
Using a bacus, our ancestors could count how many
possessions they owned.
It was a short step from this to the invention of money,
in the form of cash.
Ancient people invented currency to make life on Earth easier,
but in doing so, they inadvertently invented capitalism,
which is going to kill everyone.
Sorry, that's not a question. It's just something I read on Twitter.
Having conquered numbers, humankind moved on to something
even more boring by inventing writing.
Was the invention of writing a significant development
or more of a flash in the pan, like rap metal?
I think once writing was thought up,
once it appeared in the world, it was unstoppable.
So, it was much, much bigger than rap metal then?
Yes, much bigger. What about acid jazz?
Hmm...
I still would put writing ahead of it.
No, I just wondered what you thought of acid jazz.
What's this? It's a cast.
It's not the real thing.
It purports to stand in for a Mesopotamian clay tablet
written in cuneiform writing.
The first kind of writing that appeared in the world -
writing on clay tablets.
As books go, I have to say it's quite a boring cover, isn't it?
It doesn't even look like it opens properly.
Are you one of the people that judges a book by the cover?
Yeah, I am.
That's a sad and misguided view.
If someone shouted this aloud, would that have been the first audiobook?
No.
Writing changed the world.
Suddenly, ideas didn't have to disappear just because the person
whose head they were trapped in had died.
Instead, you could convert your ideas into writing,
and then anyone else could come along and upload those ideas
into their own brain by wirelessly importing them through their eyes.
Incredibly, despite being invented thousands of years ago,
writing still exists today
underneath video clips that we watch online.
And it's here you'll also find another kind of handmade language
that still endures - emoji.
Or as the ancient Egyptians, who invented them, called them -
hieroglyphics.
They told whole stories in hieroglyphic code.
It's like a more coherent Marvel comic.
Rather than being put up in public
where living people could enjoy them,
these Egyptian comic strips were painted on the walls of tombs
to entertain dead people,
and those tombs laid beneath some of the most recognisable,
not to mention pointiest, buildings in history.
I'm talking about the Pyramids.
Looking at the Pyramids today, it's impossible not to be struck
by the thought that they're basically big triangles
with a sort of square arse.
There's probably a word for that shape,
but literally no-one knows what it might be.
It's one of the many timeless mysteries of the Pyramids.
Why are pyramids that shape?
Is it to stop homeless people sleeping on them?
I don't think they had many homeless people in ancient Egypt.
Oh, did they not? No, no.
People looked after each other, I think, and helped each other.
Right. I suppose it's good with rain cos it'll just roll off.
How did Egyptians build the Pyramids?
Did this start at the top and work down?
Or start at the bottom and work up?
They had to start at the bottom and work up
because it would be impossible to start at the top and work down.
The Egyptians believed the most significant thing you could do
in your life was die, and the more important you were,
the more complicated your death had to be.
Egyptian kings were known as pharaohs and, when they died,
they'd get turned into mummies of Scooby-Doo fame.
The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with dead people, weren't they?
But they're all dead themselves now,
so do you think they still feel that way?
The ancient Egyptians weren't obsessed with dead people
but, actually, they were obsessed with life.
They wanted to be alive, and they wanted to make sure
that, when they died, they came alive again,
and that's why they did mummification.
So, how did they mummify people?
Talk me through the process.
You'd get your dead body
and you'd you lay it out on a table,
and then you wash it, and then you start by removing the brain.
Then, they would cut open down the middle of the body.
They would take out anything that they thought would rot,
and then they would cover it in salt and dry it out,
and then they would wrap it in bandages,
and then, that would be a mummy.
So, the kind of spa treatment
that Gwyneth Paltrow has on a weekly basis.
Has a mummy ever ridden a bicycle?
Not that I know of, no.
But the ancient Egyptians didn't have bicycles.
Right. They didn't even have roads.
So, they couldn't have a bicycle cos they couldn't ride a bicycle.
I don't know why I asked that.
I just couldn't think of anything else to say.
While the pharaohs of Egypt left a legacy of temples and tombs,
across the water, an even more impressive empire was appearing.
Greece - the country, not the musical -
was where the birth of civilisation was born.
The ancient Greeks invented lots of things we still have today,
like medicine and olives,
and lots of things that have died out, like democracy and pillars.
As well as these impressive ruins,
the ancient Greeks also developed culture in the form of yoghurt
and theatre in all its tedious forms.
The Greeks were into tragedies.
In a tragedy, sad things happen,
like people dying or killing themselves,
but the ancient Greek tragedies happened ages ago.
Are the things that happen in them still sad?
They are still sad because what the tragedies tell are stories
about humans who we can relate to in some cases.
But it was so long ago.
Why should I care?
Well, again, tragedy is often about human situations.
Even today, if you found out that by accident,
you'd killed your own father and married your mother,
you'd be quite upset, just as Oedipus was.
Maybe I'm cold, but I just don't give a shit about people
in ancient Greece.
That's a shame.
Do you? I do care quite a lot.
Yeah, it's my job.
My mate Paul wrote a story about a man who got a new potato
stuck up himself following an ill-advised sex game.
And he wrote that in the form of a limerick.
No-one died, but it sounds horrendous.
Is that a tragedy,
or would the potato have to take root and kill him for it to qualify?
It sounds like a very unfortunate incident.
I'm not sure it has a more timeless relevance
that might make it a tragedy.
Paul said it really happened, as well.
Honestly, he's had such a time of it lately.
He really needs a holiday.
The Greeks also created a kind of theatre for stupid people,
known as sport.
They started the Olympic Games without inviting other countries
to ensure Greece would win.
The contenders at these early Olympics took part completely naked,
partly because an athletic physique was considered a virtue,
but mainly because Lycra wasn't available.
I heard that, at the early Olympics,
athletes had to compete in the nude.
So, they did compete naked.
There are writings about this
being quite an erotic sight in some cases.
With wrestling, with all that wriggling about,
they'd have seen right up their bumholes and everything.
Couldn't they censor it for people watching it in the auditorium -
modesty patches or something -
or ask people to close their eyes each time someone bends over?
I think that probably wouldn't have worked.
But you'd have seen right up their bumholes.
In some cases, people might have done.
Did Zeus really approve of that?
But perhaps the most famous form of wrestling the Greeks invented
was mental wrestling.
Philosophy is basically thinking about thinking,
which sounds like a waste of time because it is.
Although a philosopher might argue that that time they've wasted
never existed in the first place,
at which point you probably give up talking to them
and open a packet of biscuits.
These are the ancient Greek philosophers. Not the actual ones.
There'd be a lot of dust and bones now.
Maybe some teeth if you're lucky.
These are just clever simulations made of rock.
The Greek philosophers came up
with bold new theories about life on Earth.
That's why we still know their names today,
even though they haven't put out any new material in ages.
Socrates.
Pythagoras.
This one.
Him.
And this is Plato.
As you can see, even now, centuries after his death,
he's still deep in thought,
concocting clever theories in his head.
If only we could hold a microphone to the side of his brain
and hear them for ourselves, but we can't.
And even if we could, there'd be in Greek,
which no-one on our production team can speak.
Plato handed his wisdom on to a student
who would become one of the most influential thinkers of all time -
Aristotle.
Aristotle said a lot of clever things, didn't he?
My favourite is, "You've got to dance like nobody's watching."
It's so true, and you can apply it to anything.
Because my confidence is quite brittle at times,
and I know I come across as quite confident,
but sometimes, when I'm talking to experts,
I worry that, you know, I might come across as a bit stupid.
And when I think of, "Dance like no-one's watching,"
that really helps me. You know, it's like a gift.
What made Aristotle think of that?
I'm not aware that Aristotle said that particular thing
about dancing when no-one's watching.
I don't think he said that. He did, didn't he?
If he did, I don't know and I don't know why,
but I don't think he did.
Is there something similar that he might have said,
something about one's confidence?
Erm, I don't think so.
Right.
OK.
Experts may disagree over what they actually said,
but there's no doubt these Greek pioneers changed the way we think.
Did a philosopher ever think of an idea so big
it split their head open?
Not that I'm aware of.
You know how the human brain is full of pipes?
Philosophers... I'm not.
You didn't know about that? I didn't know about that.
OK, well, the brain's full of pipes.
You know how philosophers have these thoughts
and they try and push these thoughts through these pipes?
When you're having a big idea, is it best to break it up
into lots of little thoughts, about the size of peas,
and squeeze them through in quick succession,
or just bite the bullet and force it through your mind pipe
in one huge clod?
Like, gritting your teeth and thinking for dear life.
Well, that's a very interesting way
of describing two general tendencies in philosophy.
One, the more analytic style,
which means cutting problems up
into bite-sized portions. Peas.
And the other, a more synthetic approach,
which takes on a larger perspective.
So, your characterisation is, in fact,
a rather intriguing delineation
of two major strands in current philosophy.
Is that good? Excellent. Oh, great.
Meanwhile, ancient Greece was being spread across the globe
by this man - Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great became a king at 20,
conducted a military campaign throughout the Middle East,
and had an empire stretching all the way from Greece to India
by the time he was 30.
What did his hair look like?
I don't know.
And Alexander wasn't the only megastar with his own empire.
Huge swathes of China had been unified by Qin Shi Huang,
the first cartoon character to found his own empire
and build the Great Wall of China.
They say the Great Wall of China is the only landmark
audible from space.
Yeah, you can't hear it.
And they say that you can see it from space,
but it's not true.
They've tried. You can't see it from space?
Chinese astronauts have tried to see the Great Wall and they can't.
They can't see it.
So, it's invisible. It's an invisible wall, like a forcefield.
It's only invisible from space.
On the ground, you can certainly see it.
That's so weird, isn't it?
Is that one of the great mysteries?
And do we know if China has a roof?
Is there a Great Roof of China?
No, no great roof.
The Chinese empire was a powerhouse of intense creativity
and philosophical thought,
captured in historical documents produced centuries before
the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem
Pump Up The Jam.
MUSIC: Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic featuring Felly
# Pump up the jam, pump it up
# While your feet are stompin'
# And the jam is pumpin'
# Look ahead, the crowd is jumpin'
# Pump it up a little more
# Get the party going on the dance floor
# See, cos that's where the party's at
# And you'll find out if you do that
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your...#
The Greeks had an empire and the Chinese had an empire,
but when most of us think of the word "empire",
we think of the big one, Star Wars.
Or Rome.
And this is history so it's Rome, I'm afraid.
Its empire rose to supremacy
under the leadership of Julius Caesar,
the most notorious Roman until Polanski.
One of the reasons we still know a lot about the Romans today
is Wikipedia,
and the reason Wikipedia knows a lot about the Romans
is because of what happened in Pompeii.
Pompeii was so advanced it had its own volcano,
which is Latin for "Angry Hill."
For years, humans and the volcano lived in harmony,
until one fateful day they fell out and the volcano went off,
burying Pompeii beneath a thick layer of ash.
Everyday life was frozen in its tracks
as though someone had magically stopped the hands of time
and then shat dust everywhere.
It was deadly at the time
but, on the bright side,
it gave archaeologists a treasure trove of information
about how the Romans lived.
Thanks to the volcano, we know everyday Romans had grey skin,
were totally bald, and spent their time lying around
inside their shockingly dusty houses.
But it also preserved glimpses of how sophisticated Roman life was,
with creature comforts like indoor plumbing and cunnilingus.
The Roman Empire was years ahead of its time.
People think the Romans invented loads of things,
but often they only perfected things that other people had made.
I'll say some things and you tell me if the Romans invented them
or just perfected them.
Right? Invented or perfected. Test me.
Underfloor heating. Invented.
Ding!
The calendar. Perfected.
MIMICS WRONG ANSWER BUZZER
You wallied -
that means you can't answer the next one.
Roads.
No, the roads were invented by Persians.
Plenty of people knew about roads.
You're wallied, anyway, you can't answer that one. Oh, right.
Concrete.
Invented. Ding! Yep.
The alphabet.
Oh, definitely did not invent it,
and probably didn't really perfect it either.
I mean, that's sort of... Got to pick one.
Have I? Yeah.
Um, I mean, perfected is wrong. Ding!
Anal bleaching.
What? Anal bleaching.
Anal bleaching...
Um...
I have no idea what that would have done.
Go on, give it a go.
I don't even know what it is. It's when they bleach your arse.
Really? Yeah, lighten it up.
Well, not round my way, they don't.
But anyway, I have no idea what they did with that. Pass.
Invented or perfected. You can't pass.
Bleaching? Yeah.
Bleaching the arsehole.
Um, OK. Well, I'll say they invented it, but...
MIMICS WRONG ANSWER BUZZER
Just a few 100,000 years ago,
humans had been living in caves like animals.
Now, following a series of technological and cultural
breakthroughs, we were living in cities like people.
Looking around ancient Rome,
our ancestors could have been forgiven for feeling almost as smug
as James Corden.
But little did the Roman Empire know it was about to come up against
its biggest challenge - a man of peace.
Jesus Christ, Almighty. Street name, "Son of God."
Next time, we look at religion and how it spread - like memes,
but with a whole lifestyle and clothing line attached.
And we'll be looking at two of the most important books
in history, the Bible and the Koran,
and finally answering the question, which is best?
In the first brilliant instalment
of this soon-to-be award-winning series,
I showed you - for the first time
and better than anyone else -
how humankind dragged itself out of caveman times,
invented farming, thinking and sand triangles,
and eventually founded the brand-new city of Ancient Rome.
But that wasn't the end of the story, obviously,
because it was only Episode One.
There was no denying man had come an incredible distance,
but could he come even further,
or was he spent and in need of a lie-down?
To reach the next level,
humanoid kind would need to believe in something
bigger than man himself.
Bigger even than elephant itself.
In this episode, I'll see how humankind found religion,
and we'll settle an argument that has raged for centuries.
Which is better, the Bible or the Korun?
The Koran.
So, that one?
It all happened right here,
on the only planet still worth fighting for.
This is Cunk on Earth.
This programme contains some strong language.
The time is half past Rome o'clock BC.
The Romanite Empire is at its most biggest.
But despite the fancy columns and mosaics,
there was an emptiness at the heart of Roman culture.
Holding endless wine-fuelled orgies
in cramped vomitoriums is all very well
but, eventually, you need something more.
And also, a mop.
Humans craved enlighten-ingment.
To find it, they'd need a spiritual role model, an icon,
an almost Christ-like figure.
And as luck would have it,
someone fitting that bill was about to arrive.
None other than Mr Jesus Christ.
He was born in a humble stable
which, ironically, isn't a stable environment for a baby,
unless it's a baby donkey which, if records are to be believed,
Jesus wasn't. In fact, as this
actual painting makes clear,
when Christ was born, he had a magic flaming circle on his head,
which would have set fire to all the hay and pubes as he came out.
Don't worry, I'm doing Islam later.
Jesus was born Jewish, but soon converted to carpentry,
as he followed his dad into the primitive chair and table industry.
What's ironic about Jesus Christ becoming a carpenter
was he was actually named after the two words you're most likely
to shout after hitting your thumb with a hammer.
Scholars believe he was a real historical figure,
like Justin Timberlake or Garfield.
Whether or not they think he was
the actual son of God who performed miracles,
like walking on wine or helping a deaf man see...
..they all agree he preached tolerance and forgiveness -
a message so important, his most ardent followers would eventually
start killing anyone who didn't want to hear it.
Little wonder this radicalised woodsmith
scared the Roman authorities.
They considered Jesus so dangerous,
they had him crucified.
And not just a little, but all the way,
to death.
Just imagine Christ's conflicted emotions.
He'd been sent to Earth to save mankind and, yet, here he was,
enduring the physical agony of being nailed to a cross,
while also knowing what a great logo it would make
for his long-term campaign.
Jesus was killed because people didn't like what he was saying,
so could you call him the first celebrity victim of cancel culture?
I think cancel culture would sort of require
the idea that people...
..really saw Jesus as standing for something,
and they were sure they knew what it was. Oh, no, sorry.
Yeah? That wasn't a question. I'm literally asking if
you could call him the first celebrity victim of cancel culture
for our show. Down that lens, there.
Just, you know, it's for a credit sequence
with punchy sound bites in it.
Off you go.
Down that lens.
OK, down this lens? Yeah.
You might even say Jesus was
the first celebrity victim of cancel culture.
Brilliant, thank you.
But incredibly, just when it seemed the life of Christ was over,
he respawned, danced up a hill and leapt all the way up into heaven,
breaking all world records for a standing jump in the process.
During his lifetime,
Jesus only had 12 followers,
fewer even than my Uncle Steve's
uninspiring Instagram account.
But that all changed once his teachings began to spread,
in the form of the written word.
After he died, Jesus came back to Earth
in the form of a book, didn't he?
Why do Christians call that special book The Bib-le?
The Bible.
Is that how it's pronounced?
I've literally never heard anyone say it before. How do you say it?
Bible. So, why is it spelt Bib-le?
Cos I've seen it written down - B-I-B-L-E. BIBle. Yeah, Bible.
Christ's message was spread
far and wide by the apostles,
almost 2,000 years before
the release of Belgian techno anthem Pump Up the Jam.
MUSIC: Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic
# Pump up the jam, pump it up
# While your feet are stompin'
# And the jam is pumpin'
# Look ahead, the crowd is jumpin'
# Pump it up a little more
# Get the party going on the dance floor
# See, cos that's where the party's at
# And you'll find out if you do that
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor tonight
# Make my day
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor... #
But not everyone appreciated the swinging sound of Christianity.
Especially in Rome, where Christians were persecuted,
which is Latin for shat on.
And if you were a Christian back then,
perhaps the worst place to find yourself was the Colosseum,
an area of misery on a par with Birmingham.
It was here the Romans first threw Christians to the lions,
possibly to see if their pacifist message would rub off on the beasts
and make them less angry and bitey.
If a Christian won, right, and ate a lion,
would they then go forward to the next round?
You know, and would they have to eat
something else, like a whole horse or something?
Do you know, there's not a lot of evidence
that they threw very many Christians to the lions.
Just for this, can you pretend that
loads of Christians were thrown to the lions? Really?
But that's wrong. Do you think the Christians would forgive the lions
for eating them, while it was happening? They probably didn't
blame the lions. I mean, a lion was only doing
what lions naturally do and... Do we know how the lions felt
about only ever being given one thing to eat?
It can't have been fun, can it, you know?
Imagine if every day, your lunch was just screaming and wouldn't stop.
That's going to have an impact on your mental health.
The mental health of lions? Yeah. Mm.
HE SNIFFS
Incredibly, within a few hundred years,
the Romans had become Christians themselves.
But why?
Tragically, none of the people involved
in Ancient Rome are still alive today.
So, to find out why that happened,
we have to sift through ancient texts,
like you do at the end of a relationship.
Thanks to the modern science of reading, we now know
the Roman Emperor Constantine - whose name means constant,
or unchanging - one day unexpectedly
changed to Christianity.
Soon, all the Romans had converted to Christianity.
And shortly after that,
they stopped throwing Christians to the lions altogether.
No-one knows why.
The Romans had found God almost overnight.
What is it about religion that can win us over so unexpectedly?
Why do humans need to believe in something bigger than ourselves?
Is it so we don't feel quite so fat?
Well, I think the sense of purpose
and value constitutes a very important element of a happy life.
But it must help, if you think how big the world is,
suddenly, you feel a lot slimmer.
Quite possibly.
Some people have a sudden religious conversion, don't they?
My mate Paul was driving to Winchester
when a lorry jack-knifed in front of him,
and he was hurtling towards it and everything went slow-mo.
And Paul, who's never been religious, spoke to Jesus and said,
"I promise if I survive this, I'll believe in you."
And he did survive, but he fractured his skull and broke both his legs.
Why did Jesus do that to him?
Well, you've raised a very significant question
about the nature of providence.
Have I? You have, indeed.
If we believe in a good God,
why is there so much evil in the world?
Now, your friend... Paul.
..Paul, his accident,
you know, to what extent can one blame God for that?
See, Paul never forgave him.
He said, "If I ever see Christ again, he's a dead man."
Right.
Rome had become a beacon
of Christian faith, but disaster
was just around the corner
because the Romans had converted to a religion of peace,
just in time to have their arse handed to them
by some people who mainly believed in hammers and smashing.
They were the Vandals,
an ancient group notorious for their appetite for destruction,
like Guns N' Roses.
HORN BEEPS
Right now, I'm standing on - and also in - modern Rome
which, by an incredible coincidence,
is on the same site as the ancient one.
And it's here the Vandals' terrifying assault
on the city took place.
The Vandal hordes would have swept through there,
past the coffee shop with the rude staff,
all the way down here, killing, looting and burning as they went.
We also know that traffic intersection
wouldn't have been there at that time,
so they could have safely ignored
any associated road signals during their invasion.
Also, that pizza place wouldn't have been open
because they think the rampage happened on a Sunday.
And according to TripAdvisor, it closes over the weekend
and isn't suitable for large groups, anyway.
But everything else you see around here
would have been completely destroyed.
By the time the Vandals rolled out of this part of the city
and into the next one, they'd left nothing but destruction
and horseshit in their wake.
Rome had been sacked, destroyed,
properly fucked to bits.
And once Rome fell, the entire Roman Empire went kaput.
The grim period that followed became known as the Dark-ages.
Ow, shit!
Dark-ages sort of sounds like a symptom, doesn't it?
You know, maybe like a plague thing.
Do you mean the Dark Ages?
Oh, right. Is that what it is?
If you...if you mean an old-fashioned term
for the early Middle Ages. Right.
Except we don't really use that term any more. Oh, do we not?
Well, it has very negative connotations of being a dark
and ignorant and benighted time and, um... Which it was.
Not really.
It had fantastic thinkers and historians
and artists and authors. But it was a bit...
SHE WHISPERS: ..shit.
The Dark Ages was a depressing era,
during which the whole of Europe fumbled about in the dark,
banging its shins on stuff and getting all diseases up its bum.
It must have properly done people's heads in.
Whenever you see medieval times, there's this sort of annoying,
Heigh-nonny-no music playing constantly.
Yeah, pretty much. You know that...that music?
You know, that sort of...
SHE MIMICS A TRUMPET
Yeah.
SHE CONTINUES IMITATING TRUMPET
Yep. Yeah, there's a lot of that.
Where's that sound coming from?
Couldn't they switch it off?
The Dark Ages were a tragedy for human progress
that put back the roll-out of 5G
by hundreds of years.
So, we've had the Dark Ages. Has there been a Light Ages?
Well, the claim was made by people in the early modern period,
the so-called Renaissance, that theirs was the age of light.
And then, of course, we have a whole era later
that people called the Enlightenment.
Is that in this episode, or will that come up later?
Well, I'm guessing it will come up later.
Which episode are we in now? Erm... I...
Probably something about the Middle Ages.
Yeah, but is it, like, Episode Three or Episode Four?
I'm afraid I'm not sure. We're both just lost here, aren't we?
This is fucking awful.
But luckily, Europe wasn't the only country having a history back then.
Boffins now believe other countries such as South America and Asia
were having their own histories too,
and they were keeping civilisation going in their own funny, exotic,
foreign little ways.
This is the city of Chichen Itza,
built by the Mayan people in what is now Mexico.
And this is its centrepiece,
the Temple of Kukulkan.
If you were brought here 1,000 years ago,
chances are you were about to be sacrificed
to appease Chaac, the Mayan god of rain. Today, you're perhaps
more likely to be dropping by as part of a pleasant day trip out
from the nearby holiday resort of Tulum.
That's where I'm staying,
at the five-star Casa de Lujo Hotel and Spa.
This all-inclusive resort,
nestling on the picture-perfect Tulum coastline, really is
the last word in luxury.
All the rooms are en-suite, and with this stunning ocean view,
it's hard to think of a reason to get out of bed.
Apart, of course, from the beautiful
beach and constant sunshine
right here on your doorstep.
If the sunny skies get too much,
there are three pools to cool off in,
including one for adults only.
There's plenty for the little ones too,
with the Turtle Club giving them
the holiday of their allegedly important little lives so far.
And with five on-site restaurants to choose from,
you'll never get bored of the food.
If all that wasn't enough, the stunning Inspiration Spa
offers world-class wellness options,
from toenail filing to vigorous rubbing.
And when the sun goes down, the nightlife begins.
With local spirits, wines and beers all included,
there's no reason to hold back.
With sunshine all day
and partying all night,
you won't want to go home.
Philomena stayed five nights at the Casa de Lujo Hotel and Spa.
All-inclusive prices start at £200 per person per night,
based on two sharing, VAT not included.
Terms and conditions apply.
While the Mayans worshipped their gods,
thousands of miles away in Arabia,
a prophet named Muhammad was founding another religion, Islam.
Apparently, Islam can be a sensitive topic,
and the producers say if I don't follow this script to the letter,
there's a chance I'll cause a serious international incident.
That's quite a blow, to be honest.
It's all right, I'll busk it.
So, what can we say about Islam? Well, for one thing...
I, for one, don't think any of that is controversial at all.
Islam represented a radical break
from previous religions
because the buildings it happened inside
were a slightly different shape.
It expanded across the globe
almost as quickly as Fox News
thinks it still does today.
It was an apparently irresistible spread, like Nutella.
TALKS WITH MOUTH FULL: The Koran said, accumulating
knowledge is a worthy act. So, Islamic mega-nerds created
the first universities and libraries,
containing all the world's knowledge
which, at that point, could probably
fit into one pamphlet, to be fair.
Mm.
Because they needed more knowledge to fill their libraries,
Muslim boffins got into maths, calculus, geometry
and, of course, the most Islamic sounding one - al-gebra.
Not to be outdone, Christianity was also expanding,
thanks to missionaries.
The missionaries were known for their position,
which was that the big man, God, was on top
and the rest of us had to lie back and take it.
Sent by the Pope, missionaries
took the Bible and the cross
and set out from here,
painstakingly making their way
right across the map,
and eventually ending up
all the way over here, in Ireland,
where they spread the word by reading aloud from the...
Hold on, I forgot the book.
Travel in those days was exceptionally perilous
and gruelling, so the early missionaries wouldn't have wanted
to undertake their journey twice, any more than I do.
But once they arrived at their destination,
what they brought would change the world forever. The Bible and the...
Who moved the cross?
Christianity was the fidget spinner of medieval times,
a huge craze that would last forever.
It led to a boom in religious iconography.
Images of Jesus were everywhere you looked.
In medieval times, there were lots of paintings of Jesus.
How did he find the time to pose for the artists?
What was his availability like?
Well, he was everywhere, always... Mm.
..figuratively speaking.
So, they're painting him from memory,
like someone describing an intruder to a police sketch artist,
but an intruder who's the son of God?
In all paintings of Jesus, he comes in two modes, doesn't he?
He's either a baby or he's being crucified.
Are there any paintings where he is being crucified as a baby?
No. No. Right, they missed an opportunity there, didn't they,
to play the sympathy card?
Did Jesus ever paint himself?
Uh... It...
I don't believe so. Certainly, there's no record of that happening.
Well, can we be sure? You know, he might not have signed it.
He was quite modest, wasn't he? Well, he was modest in parts.
He did also say he was the son of God.
Yeah, he could have kept that quiet. Then he wouldn't have been killed.
Yeah! What an idiot.
Of course, Jesus wasn't the only deity to inspire art.
There are lots of paintings of Muhammad, too,
but our producer had to sign a form promising not to show them.
By the 11th century,
most European countries had converted to Christianity,
but it didn't stop them constantly going to war with each other.
Then, in 1095, Pope Urban Two persuaded them to stop fighting,
come together in harmony and attack the Muslims instead.
The European Kings agreed
and launched a sort of armed charity drive
to forcibly provide the Islamic world with crucifixes.
They called it Crus-Aid.
Soon, armies from Europe headed east,
hoping to dish out a righteous
international kicking.
So, during the Crusades,
the Crusaders went all the way to Jerusalem in armour.
That sounds really uncomfortable.
Was it sponsored?
It was sponsored by the church, you could say... Yeah.
..because these expeditions had to be funded. Yeah.
My mate Paul did a 30-mile sponsored walk to Harrogate,
dressed as Spider-Man for Help For Heroes.
And on the day, he had terrible diarrhoea, but he soldiered on.
And it was one of the most noble,
but disgusting things I've ever seen.
Eventually, the organisers had to intervene, but he raised £368.
You know, the Crusaders never did that, did they?
No.
In 1099, the Christians captured
Jerusalem. But then, they made
a tactical mistake -
they went home without it.
So, the Muslims, under their leader,
Saladin, crusaded right back,
retaking Jerusalem in the process.
By now, everyone was really into the Crusades,
so they started holding them regularly,
fighting back and forth to see which side would win Jerusalem this year.
The Crusades sound very violent.
Why can't the religions all learn to live together in peace,
like they do in Ireland?
I think if you find someone who knows the answer to that question,
then you should definitely publicise it as soon as possible.
Right, yeah, OK.
But while Christians and Muslims came to blows,
one man miles away decided he'd show them what
proper warmongering looked like.
That man was the leader of the Mongols, Genghis Khan.
In Mongol, Khan means king, and Genghis means...something else.
These days, Genghis Khan comes up in conversation
less often than Dennis Quaid,
but back then, he was the most feared man on Earth.
Genghis and his Mongols went mongoling free
across much of Europe and Asia.
Millions of thousands of people were mercilessly slaughtered.
Many of them got their heads chopped off.
Others had their legs hacked off first, then an arm or something,
and then maybe their face, which was probably still screaming
as it flew across the hut, or wherever they lived.
Then the invaders might have taken the carcasses and hacked them up
and boiled them into soup and carved all the discarded pelvis bones
into big ladles to drink it with,
and then sat around the fireplace slurping their gory soup
and laughing and blowing off.
Honestly, it was seriously out of order.
How much blood, in terms of pints...
..was spilt because of Genghis Khan?
Well, you'd have to somehow know
the number of people killed.
Right. There were stories of a few hundred Mongol soldiers
dispatching perhaps up to a million people.
How many pints are in a person?
I think eight. So, minimum, eight million pints? Yes.
And, of course, they didn't have blood banks back then, did they?
What a waste!
With all that going on on their doorstep,
is it any wonder people in Europe took to building fortified homes?
The answer is no.
Standing here now in...whatever castle this is,
I can't help but wonder what life must've been like in medieval times,
because medieval times aren't happening any more,
so wondering is my only option.
But just imagine it.
Here, in the central atrium, the tables laid out for a feast.
People are bashing tankards together and laughing.
The table is bedecked with haunches of venison, blackbird pie,
roast goose inside a pig.
The full works.
A little bowl of plums there. I think that's a side dish.
Over here, peasants are toing and froing in their finery.
Oh, a knight...clanking by in his armour.
In this corner, someone's playing medieval flute music.
FLUTE PLAYS
And in front of that, a jester,
jumping up and down in his little bells.
BELLS JINGLE LAUGHTER
There's a big sort of ogre thing watching...
GROWLING
..enjoying the sight of that.
Then, up at this end, the King's sitting on his throne
next to the Queen, a bishop and a rook.
They're watching Merlin getting his head chopped off,
which rolls all the way across
the floor...to there,
where some wild boar gobble it up.
BOARS GRUNT
Ugh! Ugh, that is disgusting!
You're lucky you can't see that.
Suddenly, the gaiety's interrupted
when the glass in a window shatters and an arrow flies into the room.
It thuds into this wall, right in the middle of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Gasps ring out and give way to whispers,
as Thomas A Becket - that's me - pulls the arrow from the wall.
SHE GROANS
Hold on.
Oh, Christ.
The arrow has a message on it.
Thomas carefully takes the message off, discards the arrow...
Oh, fuck! Sorry.
..unfurls the message and reads it aloud.
It's from Robin Hood... GASPING
..threatening revenge on the entire Round Table
for what he did to Gandalf.
Another gasp, the jester faints,
worried murmurs fill the air and get louder and turn to screams.
SCREAMING It's chaos.
The flute goes mental.
A dancing bear howls in anguish. BEAR HOWLS
Someone starts loading pigs into a catapult.
PIGS SQUEAL
A Space Invader floats across the room,
shitting a harpsichord made of glass horses onto the floor.
HORSE NEIGHS GLASS SHATTERS
Finally, up at this end,
the King stands up, bashing his gavel.
BANGING He shouts, "Order, order!"
But in a deep man's voice, with a medieval accent.
The castle falls silent.
You can hear a pin drop...
PIN DROPS ..but not literally.
"Off with his head!" shouts the King.
And that breaks the ice.
Everything's OK again.
The jester's back up on his feet, the music's up and running.
MEDIEVAL MUSIC PLAYS
Everyone's merrily knocking back the mead.
Life in the castle is back to normal.
Just in time for everyone to suddenly drop dead from plague.
COUGHING BODIES THUD
Anyway, that's what life was like in my castle.
Have you ever really thought about yours?
But humans couldn't simply
cower behind thick walls while
holy wars waged outside forever.
Religion was supposed to unite humankind
in harmony and bland smiling,
but it had mainly succeeded in tearing it apart,
like a bear in a maternity ward.
But little did this church, and others like it,
know that a challenger was just around the corner.
Next time, we'll see how a new generation of artists
and brainiacs arose and challenged God to a fight
during what historians are already calling the Renaissance.
So, is this painting actually good,
or is it one of those things that we only think is good
because we're told it's good, like seafood?
Last time, in this potentially award-winning
history of human civilisation, I showed you how our ancestors
underwent a sudden spiritual awakening,
like my Aunt Carol.
Like Carol, they found exciting gurus to follow.
But unlike her, they didn't leave their husband
to live on a farm in Wales with them alongside eight other women,
in a situation I can't discuss further as it's currently
under investigation by North Wales Police.
Our world changed forever as religious messages
of tolerance and forgiveness inspired mankind
to fight like rats in a shoe for hundreds of years.
But the world was about to have its mind expanded
and then split at the seams by a different
kind of higher calling.
Humankind was about to undergo a renaissance
by having the Renaissance,
here on the same planet we still use today -
a glistening space rock known as Earth.
This programme contains some strong language.
It's the year 1440 -
not now, but then, in 1440 -
and a new invention is about to spark a blaze
beneath the bush of possibility.
Centuries earlier, the Chinese had invented printing,
but no-one in Europe paid attention until the printing press
was invented again by a German called Johannes Steve Gutenberg.
Gutenberg's press was the first of its kind in history,
except Chinese history.
Did the printing press actually change anything
of significance?
If Gutenberg hadn't invented printing,
which meant that ideas could be communicated
throughout the world,
our culture would not have developed in the same way as it has.
So, in many ways, he has made the world,
our modern world today.
So that's your idea of significant?
The first book to be printed on Gutenberg's press
was The Bible.
But as well as spreading the word of God,
it spread the word of scientists, philosophers,
and eventually Dan Brown.
Writing new books takes a long time.
So to give their presses something to do,
people reached back through time
in search of old material to repackage.
That's how the philosophy of ancient Greece
suddenly came back in fashion and blew minds.
At the time, most people's lives were as grim and joyless
as my Uncle Martin.
Their only hobbies were doing backbreaking work,
dying of the plague or being tortured.
As far as they were concerned, this was all there was to life.
So, for them, being exposed to ancient Greek philosophy
wasn't boring like it is now,
but a mind-expanding experience that transformed
the way they saw themselves.
Like when I mate Paul ate five ketamine brownies
and thought he could communicate telepathically
with any animal he saw on television.
Although, whereas Paul ended up sectioned for his own safety,
our ancestors decided to change the world.
This is Florence.
The Italians call it Firenze to try and stop tourists from finding it.
But it's definitely Florence,
because we double checked it on a British map.
Florence might look like a pointless mess today
but, in the 15th century, it was the epicentre
of an unprecedented artistic and cultural phenomenon.
What was Renais' sauce?
Was that a sort of 16th century ketchup?
Renaissance comes from the French, Renaissance.
Re-naissance.
Naissance is birth.
So it was seen as a rebirth.
So it's not a condiment at all?
No, not as far as I know. OK.
What sauces did they use back then?
So, this is an area of culinary history
I'm not very familiar with - the history of sauces.
Oh, so you're not the sauce person?
I'm not predominantly a sauce person.
We're going to have to rethink this whole interview.
During the Renaissance, Florence produced artists
who, for the first time in history,
were competent enough to create paintings worth looking at.
One of the most competent paintsmiths
was Botticelli.
So, what's this painting?
So, this is Alessandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.
It's one of the great paintings of the Renaissance.
So, do we know if the birth of Venus actually looked like this?
Well, it's depicting a sort of mythical figure,
so it's sort of metaphorical.
So it's the idea of a goddess... Yeah.
..who is coming into being rather than being born.
Her neck's very long.
Was she part-giraffe, or could he just not do necks?
Her neck,
it's meant to be a sign of beauty -
that he would have elongated the neck...
I've spotted a mistake here.
Look, he's blowing and her hair's all whipping about.
But look at these trees on the right.
Not moving at all. No wind.
I think these people have been Photoshopped in.
It's all fake.
Other notable artists produced 3D paintings, or "sculptures",
the most famous example being this very naked man
known as Michelange-los David.
If you manage to look past his little marble goolies,
you'll notice there's an incredible amount of detail
all over the rest of Michelangelos' body.
His eyes have pupils in them, like a Furby does.
His muscles are really detailed.
Look at his abs!
They proved gyms are bullshit,
because they didn't have gyms back then.
But look how toned he is.
Then there's the realistic veins in the back of his hands,
carrying statue blood to his fingers.
Yet, despite all this attention to detail,
a quick inspection of his back half reveals he doesn't have an anus.
It's a baffling omission.
Maybe the sculptor got embarrassed
or the model had to leave early that day
or didn't actually have an anus.
We just don't know.
The undisputed master of the Renaissance
was a human known as Leonardo da Vinci.
This is The Vitruvian Man.
It's a drawing made by Leonardo in about 1490.
What's it for?
You know, what's the point of it?
The point was that Leonardo wanted to know
how to sketch the human body proportion.
Just to be clear, you can see his bits, too?
I'm not imagining that?
Is there a version of this with underpants on?
Oh, no, no. No.
He thought that was fine, did he?
It's a bit rude, isn't it?
No, it's not.
Because, you know, the beauty...
The beauty of the human body, of course...
But look at the todger. You can't say that's beautiful.
Look at it.
Leonardo also filled notebook after notebook
with drawings of inventions years ahead of their time.
What's that?
This is a flying machine.
It's like the helicopter.
It doesn't look very convincing.
Like, my mate Paul invented a treadmill
for his fiancee's pet snake.
And the sketches for that were much more convincing than this.
And he was on mushrooms.
Mind you, the prototype did pull the snake's head off.
Yeah.
Worst ending to a birthday party I've ever been to.
His inventions were one thing,
but it's mainly for his paintings that we know da Vinci today.
This is the Mona Lisa, an actual painting
that exists in our world and on this wall.
It's Mona Lisa's enigmatic character
that draws people in.
Like all women, you simply can't tell what's going on in her head.
Just looking at her prompts so many questions.
Who is she? What's she smiling about?
Is she holding a balloon between her knees?
And if so, what colour is it?
Has she got a boyfriend? What's his name?
What's between his knees and how can we find out?
The answer is we can't.
And that's why people keep returning every year
to gaze upon her and wonder.
Then stop wondering and go home.
As well as looking all right,
da Vinci's work demonstrated mastery of the trailblazing techniques
of the age, it says here.
Before the Renaissance,
other people's paintings were in a sort of wonky 2D.
That's because artists had no sense of perspective.
A bit like my mate Paul, who punched a waiter in a TGI Fridays
for dropping his banoffee pie.
Just look at this 14th century painting of Jesus
having his fateful tea party.
The dimensions are all wrong.
The room's squashed up so it looks like it's happening
in the lid of a cardboard box.
Jesus is twice as big as the others,
so it looks like he's enjoying an intimate dinner
with some schoolboys - not a good look.
And what are those? Bowls or seashells?
It's just shoddy craftsmanship.
Absolutely disgraceful.
Shouldn't even be in a museum.
But da Vinci's reboot of the same painting is a different story.
He knew how to perspective the fuck out of things.
Look at the angles of the walls in The Last Supper,
and the table there.
You almost feel like you could crawl inside it and betray Jesus yourself.
Perspective was a huge leap forward for human art,
on a par with the release of Crash Bandicoot
centuries later.
There's no denying the Renaissance was a pretty big deal
for civilisation.
Just how important it was is for experts to decide.
Which was more culturally significant -
the Renaissance or Single Ladies by Beyonce?
They both have their period.
They both have their time.
Beyonce, I'm rather fond of.
But what the Renaissance was trying to do
was to reform culture as a whole.
And whatever Beyonce does,
I don't think she's quite got that ambition.
So, what? The work of a few straight white men
just blows Beyonce out of the water.
Is that what you're saying? On camera?
The Renaissance might have been expanding minds
but, without programmes like this around to educate them,
people were still largely ignorant about the planet
they were living on.
Ask a medieval peasant where America was and you'd get a blank look.
Or worse still, the plague.
That's because, to them, the world map looked like this -
a garbled mass of the countries they'd discovered so far,
all squashed together, with America nowhere to be seen.
But one man changed all that.
Italian sailor and detective Christopher Columbo.
Columbo thought that if he sailed off the edge of the map,
he'd reappear on the other side like Pacman.
It would be a short cut to India,
and he'd shake off any ghosts on his tail.
It was a huge risk.
If Columbo was right, he'd be a millionaire.
If he was wrong, he'd be a laughing stock,
but a dead one.
And he could live with that, which is why he set sail.
Columbo failed to find India,
but his ship eventually bumped into the New World,
Planet Earth, part II, aka America.
And before long, others were following in his wake.
This is Plymouth.
Gathered here in 1620 was a group of pilgrims
who yearned for a better life,
which isn't surprising because, like I say, this is Plymouth.
The pilgrims leapt into their watermobile or boat,
the Starship Mayflower,
and bravely sailed across this drawing of the Atlantic Ocean
to arrive on the other side, still in Plymouth.
They must've been devastated.
Luckily, it turned out this Plymouth wasn't the one they'd just left.
At first, the European colonists found life in the New World hard.
Luckily, some Native Americans taught them how to grow corn
and where to fish.
In exchange, the colonists introduced
the Native Americans to smallpox.
The settlers never forgot what the Native Americans
had done for them, although they did ignore it
when they massacred them years later.
While the New World was undergoing massive change,
a controversial breakthrough was brewing in the Old World.
It's the early 1600s, and this stupidly-dressed scientist
is about to change the way mankind sees itself forever.
His name is Galileo, one of the few figures in history
to become so famous they're known by just one name,
like Churchill, Pepsi or Garfield.
Galileo's full name was Galileo Figaro Magnifico, wasn't it?
I'm not sure that's right. I don't know...
That's what it says in Dominican Rhapsody.
Are you thinking of Bohemian Rhapsody?
What was his name, then?
Well, as far as I'm aware,
his name was Galileo Galilei.
Galileo Galilei? Yes.
That's like me being called Philomena Philomeni.
Actually, I quite like that.
Galileo invented a telescope so powerful
he could watch people getting changed on the Sun.
Bloody hell! This makes everything look massive!
Have you had to go on this yet? It's amazing!
How did you do that?
Are you the real Galileo or an actor one?
Was the real one busy?
Galileo's astronomical smart-arsery led him to a discovery
so shocking the Pope shat his hat off.
According to the Old Testament,
the Sun goes around the Earth - not the other way around.
So, as far as the church was concerned,
Galileo was calling the Bible a liar.
Rather than overreact, they did the Christian thing
by accusing him of heresy
and finding him guilty in a corrupt show trial.
Galileo was sentenced to spend the rest of his life
under house arrest on a planet with a sun spinning around it.
The church thought the Sun went round the Earth,
but Galileo thought the Earth went round the Sun.
Whose side are we on, here?
We're most definitely on Galileo's side,
as I think the church is today.
Is it possible they were both right, and the Sun and Earth
go round each other?
That would keep everyone happy.
Can we just agree on that?
If only he'd invented some kind of immortality engine
instead of his pointless telescope,
Galileo might have lived to see his ideas accepted.
Sadly, he simply wasn't that clever.
Like science, the world of philosophy
was also expanding,
thanks to massive thinkers like this man.
Who was Jim Des Cart?
Well, I don't know who Jim Des Cart might be,
but I do know that Rene Descartes is often thought of
as the founder of modern philosophy.
What did he mean by, "I think, therefore I am"?
Descartes meant that self-awareness,
self-consciousness
is the defining feature of human identity.
So, hang on, if I think, therefore I am,
what about other people?
Do they think, therefore they am?
How can I tell if they're thinking, therefore they am?
Or am I just thinking they think, therefore they am,
but actually they're not real
and I'm only thinking they am?
Are you thinking, therefore you am right now?
Well, I wouldn't want to say that my existence is dependent
upon my thought,
but that is not the claim that Descartes wants to make.
Is it possible to think you're someone else?
Like, if I thought really hard
that I was Eddie Murphy,
could I eventually become him?
If I did become him, would he become me
or would he just disappear?
Did Des Carts ever cover this stuff?
No, that's not a topic that Descartes is covering,
as far as I'm aware. Why not?
Descartes inspired an intellectual movement known as
the Enlightenment,
during which Metrosexual Elitists published essays
that expanded humankind's horizons in a manner that will go unmatched
until the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem Pump Up The Jam.
# Pump up the jam, pump it up
# While your feet are stompin'
# And the jam is pumpin'
# Look ahead, the crowd is jumpin'
# Pump it up a little more
# Get the party going on the dance floor
# See, cos that's where the party's at
# And you'll find out if you do that
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor tonight
# Make my day
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor tonight... #
The man trapped inside this painting
is Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
a name so French he might as well have been called Pierre Baguette,
but wasn't.
Which is why I didn't call him that.
Rousseau wrote, "Man is free, but is everywhere in chains."
He dreamed of a new society in which people
were masters of their own destiny.
It was the same dream that was tempting colonists
to the new world in droves - and boats.
After arriving in America to forge a life
of honest hard work and toil, many of these colonists
quickly discovered they couldn't be arsed,
so they stole people from Africa and made them do it instead.
You might think these were precisely the people
Rousseau had been talking about when he said mankind
needed to throw off its chains.
But they weren't.
Like many humanists, he'd found a clever loophole.
By not thinking of slaves as human, he was free to not give a shit.
As luck would have it, around this time, the colonists started getting
interested in freedom.
Although as luck wouldn't have it, it wasn't the slaves' freedom
they were interested in, but their own.
The British colonies were ruled by king, and line drawing,
George III.
But the relationship between Old England
and the New World was getting frosty.
What started the tension between the British and the Americans?
Was it because you say "cookies" and we say "biscuits"
and you say "sidewalk" and we say "pavement"?
Cos I find, in a relationship, it's those little things
that start to grate after a while.
It was worse than that!
Britain decided they were going to tax the colonies,
and this hadn't happened before.
So it was a disagreement over money, basically?
It's like the situation between me and my ex, Sean.
When we used to get a takeaway -
or "takeout", as you call it -
sometimes, you know, he would always insist that we go halves,
and yet he would want to buy things like onion bhajis,
which he knows I hate.
And they made his breath stink. Mm.
So I had to pay for half of that.
That doesn't seem fair to me.
Does it to you?
Put that way, no.
No, and that's from a professor, Sean.
Finally, in Boston, in 1773,
a group of colonists decided they'd had enough.
So when the people in Boston got angry with the British,
why did they just hold a prissy tea party
instead of having a proper fight like British men would?
Why has there always been this big, cowardly streak
in the Americans, even to this day?
Well, the only cowardly streak in that, I suppose,
is that they dressed themselves up as Indians
and no-one said who their names were.
But would you voluntarily, when you didn't have to,
go to jail?
It depends what facilities they had, I think.
Disrespecting our tea was one thing,
but an even nastier slap in the tits was to come.
In 1776, the leaders of the 13 colonies
decided that they didn't want to be called "British" any more,
but Americans.
This straight, white supergroup, known as the Founding Fathers,
drafted the most famous break-up text in history -
the Declaration of Independence.
All the men you see here became idols,
if you're American.
Otherwise, they're just not all that.
It led to all-out war between American and British.
Because no-one had invented camouflage yet,
the British troops of the time wore bright red coats
and were consequently shot in their thousands
while looking amazing.
This painting depicts one of the war's most pivotal events -
George Washington crossing the Delaware River.
As you can see, he had to stand up for the whole journey
because he hadn't reserved a seat.
He didn't fall in, but he also didn't help with the rowing,
which must've been annoying.
Eventually, Washington won,
becoming America's first president,
the single most revered role in the world until 2016.
Washington and the other founding daddies wrote the Constitution,
an instruction manual for their new country containing some of the most
influential political concepts ever.
I read somewhere that America isn't just a country, but an idea.
But it is just a country, isn't it?
Well, it was founded under an idea,
so it's organised around, has always been organised around,
the idea it's a land of liberty for everyone.
Yeah, but, like, having a sandwich - that's an idea.
Painting your bicycle blue - that's an idea.
Going...
That's an idea.
America is just a place.
The American Revolution sent shock waves around the globe,
not to mention the planet.
It hit especially hard in France,
where the common man, or homme, had to scrabble about in the muck
while the rich had got so posh they'd evolved frills.
Soon, the average Jacques had had enough of their ruler,
King Louis the 16th,
and his identical wives, Mary and Toinette,
who enjoyed lavish lifestyles
while the poor were forced to survive on cake.
Finally, in 1789, it exploded into topless revolution.
The poor toppled the king and invented a machine
that would rid the world of royalty forever.
The guillotine was specifically designed to be
the most humane way to decapitate someone
in front of a jeering crowd.
You simply fed a royal, head-first, through the chopping hole here,
then the razor sharp blade up there would drop down
and slice their head off, sending it sailing away
from their neck and body.
At that point, they probably thought they'd escaped,
but any sense of victory was short-lived
because moments later they'd land face first
into this horribly coarse wicker basket.
If you look, there's no padding in there.
So the fall would have caused extensive bruising
and maybe even concussion.
I suppose it could've been worse.
They could've made you stick your head out of a carriage
and driven really close to a building.
Even so, being guillotined would have had a huge impact
on anyone, but especially King Louis.
With his head gone, he could never breed or wear a crown again,
and was almost certainly unemployable
in any other line of work.
Perhaps that's why he chose to withdraw
from public life completely shortly after it happened.
The French Revolution wasn't the first time the masses
had risen up against the elite, and it may not be the last.
A lot of revolutions seem to be about poor people
overthrowing the rich.
Do you think billionaires, like Elon Musk,
should be worried about getting guillotined?
I think that the French Revolution certainly made a lot of people
who were powerful very, very worried about their existence.
I suppose Elon Musk could invent a machine
that chops his own head off electronically
before the mob arrives.
Ah, you know much more about this than I do.
I'm just guessing. Yeah.
Soon, France decided it needed a strong man to take charge
of things, and they got one in the form of the Emperor Napoleon.
No relation to the Emperor Penguin,
as far as we can ascertain at this time.
Napoleon did a load of massive wars on land and sea,
which remain far too expensive to properly recreate
in historical documentaries to this day.
LOUD BANGS
Laying sound effects over a painting of a battle like this
gives some idea of what it might have been like,
but there was still a key ingredient missing.
A soundtrack of classical music was the only thing
that would really bring these Napoleonic wars to life.
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS LOUD BANGS
See! Loads better!
And luckily, classical music was being perfected
elsewhere in Europe by a composer called Beethoven.
Did Beethoven have an actual full-sized horse
living inside his face?
Sorry, I've misphrased that.
I mean, was Beethoven good at music?
Yeah! I mean, he's considered to be the best composer
of Western classical music ever.
Beethoven wrote that song that goes
"Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum."
What do those lyrics mean?
Er, well, it's a really strong orchestral motif.
It's just the word "dum" over and over again.
Is it a dig at his audience, or is it German for something?
With the Beethoven symphonic music, it's all just instruments.
So there are no words to these pieces at all.
No lyrics? How are we supposed to know what it's about
if it doesn't have lyrics?
It's literally meaningless.
Despite enjoying great success with his pointless tunes,
Beethoven faced huge personal challenges in his career.
Is it true that, in the final years of his working life,
Beethoven was dead?
Well, he was deaf for most of his life.
No, dead.
Dead? Yeah.
No...
The producer wrote it in the notes.
It's definitely here.
Let me see.
"In his later years, Beethoven was profoundly dead."
Profoundly deaf.
D-E-A-F.
Obviously he went deaf when he died,
but was he deaf when he was still alive?
Yes, he was profoundly.
Yeah, he was profoundly. But not dead?
He wasn't dead... He wasn't dead.
..when he was alive. No, no, not.
So how did he write the music when he was dead?
On the 26th of March, 1827,
Beethoven did roll over
and his genius was thought to be lost forever.
Until now.
Silicon Valley boffins have recreated his mind
and installed it into this smart speaker,
the B8-Hoven Smart Home Plus.
Let's see if it works.
B8-Hoven, compose a new symphony.
Was war das?
Compose a new symphony!
Where am I?
What? Just compose your thing.
Mein Gott, it is dark in here! Why am I speaking English?
I cannot see my legs! Just...
..play my Friday night playlist.
Playing Friday night playlist.
# Nah, na-na-na-nah...
Why am I doing this?
Mein Gott im Himmel, kill me.
# Here comes the hotstepper Murderer
# I'm the lyrical gangster... #
As we've seen, in just a few hundred years
humankind had undergone a series of massive cultural
and political revolutions.
Next time, I'll show you an even bigger revolution.
An Industrial Revolution forged in steel, steam, sweat,
planes, trains, automobiles and planes again.
People tried, for years, to make an aeroplane.
Why were we so interested in conquering the sky?
There's nothing up there.
There's not even anywhere to sit.
Last time, we saw how the Renaissance turned Europe
from a load of mud and parsnips into a posh resort full of paintings,
and how this awakening led to a string of people-power uprisings
that put the establishment on its arse.
But the revolutions were just beginning.
Humankind was about to leap forward again
by taming metal and electricity.
Progress would usher in a new era of convenience and entertainment,
but also threaten the existence of all life on Earth.
So, swings and roundabouts, really.
This week, it's the rise of the machines here on Earth,
and also here on Cunk On Earth.
For centuries, everything in nature, from people to cows, ran on this...
..fresh air.
If you haven't heard of air, it's an invisible blend of gases
so addictive we suffer fatal withdrawal symptoms
within minutes of our supply being cut off.
This dependency made air's rival, water, jealous.
Water needed to up its game.
It needed to become more indispensable to us,
its natural masters. It was feeling the heat,
heat that turned it into something useful.
Steam.
Steam could be harnessed to power all kinds of machines.
And nowhere went steam bonkers quite like America,
where it would change the shape of the country's face forever.
To understand why, I'm afraid we have to look at a map.
At first, settlers had stuck to the edges of America,
leaving the middle untouched, like a frozen pie in a microwave.
But Americans back then weren't the humble, unassuming people
they still aren't today.
They believed in something called Manifest Destiny -
the belief that all the land belonged to them
and that God wanted them to go west
and claim it back from the Native Americans
he put there first by mistake.
What is Manifest Destiny?
Manifest Destiny is an ideology that was, in the 1840s and '50s
in the United States, that America had a God-given right
to take over the rest of the continent
and sort of spread its values and its virtues from sea to shining sea.
Right. So, it's God's plan?
That was the idea, yes.
Doesn't this make you God's slaves?
Well, I think what the people at the time would say
is that they were God's missionaries on Earth,
and so they felt that they were willingly enacting his policies
rather than being forced to do so.
But at the very least, you're God's bitches.
But manifesting your destiny was dangerous.
You had to trundle across a perilous landscape in a rickety wagon
on the brink of starvation or shitting yourself to death
with dysentery, getting bitten by snakes or butchered by Apaches.
Almost as if God didn't want them to do this, after all.
But the invention of the steam train changed all that.
The steam train laughed in the wagon's face.
Not literally. This isn't a children's book.
The Americans released steam engines into the wild,
carving routes across the land and changing the balance of power.
Now, fighting with Native Americans could be conducted at high speed
and with an accompanying buffet car service.
Thanks to the railroads, small towns formed all across the West.
They were tough, lawless places where summary justice was dispensed
down the barrel of a gun
as cowboys did whatever it took to protect their cows and their boys.
So, can you talk us through what this is here?
So, this is the Colt Single Action Army revolver, the Colt .45.
And you load it through here.
And you'd have to cock the hammer back for each shot.
Would this only kill people during the olden days,
or could it kill modern people, too?
I'm afraid it definitely could kill modern people.
It's so old. It sort of looks clockwork, doesn't it?
It does. Do the bullets come out slowly?
Could you sort of outrun the bullet?
You definitely couldn't outrun the bullet.
You're right to say it looks clockwork.
It's very like a clock mechanism, with a ratchet inside.
Rat shit? A ratchet.
Where did the bullets come out? Do they come out of that pipe bit?
They do. Yeah, that's the barrel.
Can I... Can I hold that up and look down the end of it?
Or will that shoot me in the eye?
It's generally frowned upon.
So, would getting shot in the eye actually hurt?
Because it's just a sort of water bag, isn't it, your eye?
I bet it would just pop and sting a bit,
but you'd basically be able to go about your business.
I don't know. I don't think there's any good place to get shot.
Why does humankind feel the need to invent
killing machines like this?
And could you keep your answer to a sort of sound-bite length?
Because we're human, I suppose.
It seems to be built into us to fight for resources...
Yeah. ..other humans. Yeah.
We can't seem to get away from it.
I don't know. I just think we're mental.
Guns played a huge role in shaping America and also in killing people.
Even now, the use of firearms is an integral part
of their national identity.
How come Americans have the right to kill anyone they want with a gun?
Well, they don't. Murder is illegal in the United States,
but they do have the right to own weapons.
They have the right to bear arms.
Correct. But bears don't have arms.
They do, actually.
Oh, do they? Yes. I thought they were legs.
Well, I'm not a biologist, but I suppose that when they stand up,
they're probably arms.
With its cowboys and guns and steam-train rides,
America became known as the land of the free,
which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves.
The barbaric practice of slavery was still prevalent in America,
particularly in the Southern states.
But by finally thinking hard about the subject,
the people of the Northern states made a horrifying discovery -
that inside each slave was an actual human person.
The North asked the South what kind of America it wanted to live in -
one where white people leeched off other races
while treating them as inferior,
or one where they pretended they didn't.
The argument escalated into a civil war,
a time when America was almost as polarised as it is today.
The Civil War tore America apart, didn't it?
Brother turned on brother.
Did anyone get so conflicted they turned on themselves?
I don't think so.
There may have been some very strong debates within individuals
of which side to join,
and I think that could be what you're perhaps referencing.
How come people say it was the first modern war, when you can see
from the photos it was ages ago?
Well, it's interesting you reference the photos
because it's the first war that photography really played a part.
It was something where photographs were part of the conflict
and documenting the violence.
It must have been quite exciting going to Snappy Snaps afterwards
and seeing which ones had turned out and which ones hadn't.
After four long years of war-related violence, the North came out on top,
which North is anyway.
It was a victory for the undisputed King of the North -
Abraham Lincoln.
Who was Abraham Lincoln,
and why did he have all those weird tattoos on his tummy?
I have no idea what you're referring to with the tattoos,
but he is a US president, revered as probably the best US president.
Apparently he had, like, a snowman and a robin tattooed on his tummy,
and the robin had a moustache.
I genuinely have no idea what you're referring to.
Now Lincoln was president, at long last slavery was abolished
and replaced with simple racial prejudice.
But Abraham Lincoln's story didn't have a happy ending.
Five days after the North won, a terrible fate befell him.
He was forced to go to the theatre to watch a play.
He was put out of his misery by a kindly gunman
but, cruelly, not until the third act.
Abraham Lincoln was shot in the theatre box, wasn't he?
Where is that on the body?
Oh, I think you're referring to the physical location
he was in when he was shot,
which was in the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC.
And why was he shot? Was it because he wouldn't take his hat off?
Because that's quite annoying in the theatre, isn't it,
when someone is in front of you with a hat on?
Well, he was in the presidential box, so there wasn't anyone
behind him, as far as I know.
But he was shot by a man named John Wilkes Booth,
who was a believer in the Confederacy.
How did being shot in the head affect Lincoln's ability to lead?
Well, it ended it, because he died about 12 hours after he was shot.
So, he couldn't carry on?
He couldn't, no. Not as a corpse, unfortunately.
Lincoln's light may have been snuffed out,
but America's was about to do the opposite.
Americans had been toying with electricity ever since
Benjamin Franklin put a key on a kite string
to unlock lightning from the sky.
Then in 1878, Thomas Edison worked out how to use that power
to make something extraordinary.
It's hard to imagine a world where Edison
didn't invent the light bulb, and even if you did imagine it,
it would be too dark to see what was in it.
How did people see during the day before Edison invented light?
Light comes from the sun,
so people could see during the day because of the sun.
What they needed the light bulb for
was during the night, when there isn't any sun
and when you can't see.
So, what did people use before light bulbs?
Well, they used candles or they used oil.
So, we had daylight during the day and we had candles at night.
Yes. So, we didn't need light bulbs.
His life's work was meaningless.
Another of Edison's incredible inventions was the phonograph.
SCRATCHY RECORDING PLAYS
# To my honey I'll croon love's tune
# Honeymoon
# Keep a-shining in June
# Your silv'ry beams... #
Can you make it stop?
Yes, of course.
It's incredible, isn't it, that we're here now,
but that voice came from years ago?
If I speak into this trumpet bit, can I ask the person a question
about what it's like where they are?
No, you can't, because the recording was made over 100 years ago.
But it's a phonograph. Doesn't it work like a phone?
Phonograph means "sound writing" in Greek,
so it doesn't mean telephone.
So, they can hear us but they can't reply.
Erm, I don't... I wouldn't say they...
They can't hear us. We hear them. We hear their recording.
They can't hear us and they can't reply to us.
I would say they can't, no.
So, what's the point of it?
Well, it's so we can hear music and voice and sounds.
So, can it record sounds that haven't happened yet?
Erm...
..no. What about sounds that happened earlier?
If those sounds were recorded at the time.
It can't capture something that's been in the past.
It seems quite limited, to be honest.
Thanks to Edison's pornograph,
classical music could now bore an audience of millions.
You have to play classical music on an orchestra.
How do you play an orchestra?
Do you blow into it,
or is it one of those ones where you rub a stick on the strings?
Yeah. So, the orchestra is not one particular instrument.
Yeah. So, an orchestra is the coming together of lots of different types
of instruments. Right. More than one instrument.
So, you need both hands and your mouth to play an orchestra?
Well, the conductor would need all of those things...
Yeah. ..but the orchestra itself is an entity that is made up of
lots of different instruments.
So, you couldn't blow a whole orchestra?
Thanks to Edison, the worlds of light and sound
had been beaten into submission,
but another frontier remained stubbornly unconquered -
the world of sky.
People tried for years to build flying machines,
but most early pioneers found it hard to progress
beyond their first experimental death plunge.
But all that changed when Orville and Wilbur Wright brothers
mounted the first successful legal challenge
against the law of gravity.
So, how far was the first flight?
Well, on that day when the Wright brothers carried out
several flights, they were typically of the order
of just a few hundred feet.
Well, they could have walked that.
Well, they could, but that wasn't the point.
When was the first flight that was long enough to need a toilet?
Once commercial flights developed, those flights became longer distance
and the passengers would have then needed some comforts,
like having a toilet on board.
That must have been a real moment,
the first time someone realised a plane needed a toilet.
That's more impressive than the Wright brothers.
I've never thought of that as a particularly dramatic
or exciting development, I'm afraid.
Why don't bicycles have toilets?
You know, it would save you having to get off.
I might write that down and copyright it.
Even without a toilet, the Wright brothers' historic flight
changed transportation forever,
in ways that still aren't fully understood.
The Wright brothers did the first proper flight over 100 years ago.
How come we're still not any closer to working out
how aeroplanes actually work?
But we are. We know how they work today.
But in reality, how do they work?
Well, it's... We have mathematical equations
that describe the way the air flows over the wings of the aircraft.
Can you explain how they work without resorting to science?
It's difficult not to explain the science behind it,
but because of the shape of its wings,
the force upwards is bigger than the force downwards
so that pushes the plane up into the air.
That's your theory. Do you want to hear my theory?
OK. I think they run on belief.
It's just because we believe planes can fly that they do.
So, the media has to keep up the pretence
or they're just going to start dropping out of the sky.
Same with Wi-Fi. There's no way that's real.
We just have to go along with this pantomime
or everything grinds to a halt.
The sky had been tamed.
Next it was the roads' turn.
It's hard to say who invented the first automobile.
Because so many people had a go,
the Wikipedia page is too long to bother reading.
But luckily it doesn't matter, because in the end only one man
became synonymous with cars -
the man who made the first blockbuster automobile.
He was named Henry Model T Ford,
and in a stunning coincidence, so was his car.
ROCK MUSIC PLAYS
With its four-cylinder, 2.9-litre engine
pumping out 20 horsepower and a top speed of 45mph,
the Model T Ford was a truly terrible car,
even worse than whatever it is your mum drives.
ENGINE RUMBLES
There's nowhere to plug in your phone,
no sat nav or music system.
It doesn't even have a cup holder.
Nonetheless, it was marginally better than a horse,
because it didn't kick you in the head if you went behind it.
And unlike on a train, you weren't likely to find yourself
seated next to a psychopath.
Unless you stopped to pick up a hitchhiker
with a screwdriver in their pocket.
But Henry Model T Ford's biggest masterstroke wasn't his car itself,
but the way it was made.
Instead of employing one person to slowly make a whole car
on their own, Ford employed lots of people
to do just one tiny bit of the car each, over and over again.
It was a revolution in workplace tedium and human meaninglessness.
Mass production needed a mass human workforce.
Millions flocked to the USA for a go on the American dream.
The need for bigger vessels led to the invention of the Titan 1C,
the world's first single-use submarine.
For years, man had stared at the ocean,
longing to sink like a stone,
and the Titan 1C would make that dream come true.
It was a huge success.
On her maiden voyage, the Titan 1C sailed straight from Southampton
to the bottom of the sea,
where the brave explorers could live in the lap of luxury
for the few moments it took for them to discover
that the atmosphere on the ocean floor was nonbreathable.
Having conquered light, sound, the sky, the road
and the bottom of the ocean,
humankind was about to discover something
it hadn't even heard of before,
courtesy of female scientist and woman
Mary Curry, lady-father of radiation.
How did Marie Curie realise that she'd discovered
radioactivity, if it's invisible?
Marie Curie invented the word radioactivity.
And radioactivity is when substance like radium, polonium, plutonium
gives off lots of energy and disintegrate naturally.
So, it's a real thing, even though it's invisible.
Lots of real things are invisible, yes.
So, it's like chakras and energy fields.
You know, like the ones you get on the inside of your face
that connect to your star signs and affect the way you digest gluten.
They're real, aren't they?
Well, I don't think that they are real.
I think they are real.
Lots of... My Aunt Carol realigns people's chakras.
She charges 80 quid an hour.
I think, if she was earning that kind of money,
it's not nonsense, is it?
Tragically, Curie's curiosity was fatal.
Long-term exposure to radiation
is thought to have contributed to her death.
It's not fair, is it?
When a male scientist like Bruce Banner gets exposed
to gamma radiation, he gets to be, like, a superhero, doesn't he?
He gets his own comic book and movie franchise.
Marie Curie just gets killed.
You know, he got to be the Hulk.
That's not fair, is it? You know, is it the fault of the patriarchy?
Also, what is a patriarchy?
Meanwhile, other less female scientists
were working on theories of their own.
Physicist and professional tongue model Albert Einstein
came up with his theory of relativity - E equals McTwo -
which, to this day, nobody understands,
and I'm only mentioning it because it turns out
to be important later.
Einstein reckoned nothing is faster than the speed of light.
But shadows go faster than light.
Like, if I shine a light from a torch against that wall,
but I hold the torch behind my head... Yeah.
..my shadow gets there before the light does.
How would Einstein explain that?
I think he'd say that it's all happening so quickly
that you can't see it properly.
He's always got an answer, hasn't he?
The 20th century had got off to a cracking start,
with science shitting out innovation after innovation so quickly
we can barely edit them together.
But some of these new inventions had a dark side.
They could be used to kill people,
and not in a good way.
The First World War was known as the war to end all wars,
although some historians now argue it didn't.
But it was the first high-tech war, with aeroplanes, machine guns
and tanks all rising up to fight the human beings that made them.
Despite having no beliefs or ideology or hearts or souls,
the killing machines were victorious.
The final score was Weaponry 20 million, Mankind 0.
When humans go to war, it always looks quite chaotic.
Is there a lot of shouting involved?
Well, there tends to be an awful lot of shouting.
I mean, it can either be sort of commands being shouted,
it could also be, you know, the screams of people dying.
So, probably a risk of tinnitus for anyone standing nearby.
It's a real pity we keep doing it.
I'm not trying to be controversial,
but generally speaking, war does seem a bit of a shame.
Well, it does seem to be a particularly popular human activity.
Mm. Maybe it's just in our nature.
What makes us, as creatures, turn on each other like that?
And could you keep the answer to one short sentence?
Because otherwise they get really pissed off in the edit.
Fear, honour and interest.
Really? Those are the three...?
That's it in a nutshell.
Right.
I don't know who edits this, but that's going to have to do.
The barbarism of World War I inspired a wide range
of harrowing war poems and pacifist literature,
published decades before the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem
Pump Up The Jam.
# Pump up the jam, pump it up
# While your feet are stompin' And the jam is pumpin'
# Look ahead, the crowd is jumpin'
# Pump it up a little more
# Get the party going on the dance floor
# See, cos that's where the party's at
# And you'll find out if you do that
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor tonight
# Make my day
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor tonight
# Make my day... #
Millions of young men died during the war, but fortunately,
humankind had discovered a new kind of man -
the woman.
Women had always existed in the background of history,
largely being used as human pets for men,
tolerated for their magical ability to excrete fresh humans
through their front holes.
But in the early 20th century, social scientists discovered
something incredible -
that a woman could do anything a man could do
without the need to talk about it.
They also got the vote.
Finally, women could choose which man would tell them what to do.
Women began to escape their traditional uniforms,
dressing less like haunted furniture and more like camp young boys.
They drank, smoked and danced at high speed,
at an appalling frame rate.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, a whole new kind of entertainment
was being invented - movies.
Unlike with a book, you didn't have to concentrate
or use your imagination to enjoy a movie.
Anyone, even very lazy or stupid people, could enjoy themselves
by simply sitting down and staring at a screen,
like you're doing now.
Nonetheless, early movies were
completely shit, as you can see.
But it's thanks to early films
like this that we can see what life
was really like in the olden days.
Everyone moved very quickly
and fell over a lot.
Why do people in old films move so fast?
Is it because it was their first time on camera so they were nervous,
or because it was a silent film so they couldn't hear the director
yelling at them to slow down?
It's to do with the frame rate of the cameras
So, it's our fault. We're playing it back too fast
and the actors are having to speed up to make sure
they can get all the story in before the end credits.
They must be panicking. What happens if they can't keep up?
Would the film cut to a room the actors aren't in yet?
Just footage of an empty room.
The actors are going at a regular speed. It's just...
It's just the speed of the playback that makes them look like
they're moving very quickly. Oh.
Could we communicate with the actors in the film
and tell them that it's all right, that they can calm down?
No, they'd all be dead by now.
Oh.
Early films had subtitles so people could still watch them
on their phones with the sound off,
but before too long they figured out how to do sounds too.
What was more satisfactory to you?
Reading was redundant at last.
The written word's centuries-long era of tyranny
was finally at an end.
But any sense humankind was embarking on
a hopeful new era was about to be shat through a binbag.
Dark clouds were gathering over Europe,
with a reboot of the World War franchise about to be unleashed.
Soon, the world was plunged into another global war.
And since this war ran on even more terrible machinery
than the previous one, it seemed there would be no end
to the carnage.
Then the Americans had an idea.
Instead of dropping thousands of little bombs on Japan,
like they did to Germany,
what if they dropped just one big one?
Using Einstein's theories, which I cleverly mentioned earlier,
they began the Manhattan Project, run by men with hats on,
who came up with something fearsome -
an atomic bomb called Little Boy,
the most powerful and inaccurately named weapon ever used.
How powerful was Little Boy?
Put it this way - if that bomb had been dropped on
my ex-boyfriend Sean's house in Westhoughton,
everything from the Chequerbent roundabout on the A58
to the florist next to the Hart Common Golf Club
would have been totally destroyed.
The initial blast would have vaporised Sean,
while the vintage Pac-Man arcade cabinet he once spent
my entire birthday weekend restoring
would have almost certainly been rendered unplayable
by the raging firestorm that followed.
Everything from Wigan to Bolton would be burnt to a crisp.
I'm talking Middlebrook - gone.
Bickershaw - gone.
Hindley Green? Forget it.
The unspeakable horror of the atomic bomb ended World War II.
Everyone had had enough, and the world agreed
for the second time in this episode to never have a war again,
a promise it wouldn't break
for a full 52 seconds into episode five.
It's comforting, isn't it, to realise
we don't have nuclear weapons these days?
Well, it depends who you mean by "we".
The British have got nuclear weapons and have recently indeed decided
to increase their...the number of warheads that they possess.
Yeah, but they're blanks, aren't they? They're full of blanks.
No, not at all. No, no. These are fully capable missile systems
with nuclear warheads. Many other states have them.
I'm afraid that nuclear war and the threat of nuclear destruction
remains very much with us.
All right. Can we talk about something a bit more cheerful?
Anything you like.
Do you like Abba?
I love Abba.
Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.
What's your favourite Abba song?
Dancing Queen. Dancing Queen, yeah.
Yeah, it's great, isn't it?
Next time, we see how a Cold War between East and West
paved the way for rock and roll,
which paved the way for countercultural hippies,
who paved the way for Steve Jobs to pave the way for computers
and smartphones, which paved the way for social media,
which would pave the way for undoing all the progress
humankind had made so far.
Social media has been polarising people, hasn't it?
Like what's already happened to the bears.
What bears?
Polar bears.
Last time, in 29 informative yet accessible minutes, we saw how a
string of breakthroughs led humankind to build the modern world
and create a weapon powerful enough to turn it all to
white-hot, boiling shit. But that was only part of the story.
The part after that starts now.
It's 1945.
The atomic bomb's just gone off.
The world lies in ruins.
Cloning of Hitler has already begun.
The future looked uncertain,
and it was getting closer every minute, like it always does.
But this was going to be a future unlike any the world
had seen before -
a future of moon men and rock stars,
big business and free love,
computers and the internet.
And a killer robot sent through time to kill Sarah Connor.
Although that bit was just in a film.
Modern civilisation had arrived, but a clash of worldviews meant
that the threat of all-out conflict was never far away.
Could new forms of mass communication help us all to
get along or totally not do that?
Should there be two social medias? You know, one for people who are
right, and one for people who are wrong?
I mean, I know a lot of people I'd put on the wrong one.
Wankers.
So join me now in the last part of human existence as I find out
how we got where I am now and where we'll be tomorrow,
which at the time of filming is Wednesday.
Whenever the future arrives, it'll happen here, on a fragile bauble
I've come to know as Earth.
But my hair looks fucking shit.
Russia, a vast land to the east.
It's the first time we've mentioned it in this series,
but it's been there all along.
At the start of the 20th century, Russia was a vast empire,
just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe is today.
The average Russian was a pheasant, but he dreamt of being a man,
preferably a wealthy one, because while the Russian pheasants
lived in poverty, the rich lived in St Petersburg.
The top Russian was called t'Sar Nicholas,
which is Russian for t'King Nicholas.
He was allowed to rule the country like a dictator,
which I've been advised to say isn't how Russia works today.
A world like this, where the masses toil for pennies
while a tiny elite grow rich, seems so obviously unfair and
unthinkable to us today.
We can scarcely imagine what it must have been like.
One man who thought it was ein load of scheisse
was German thinker Karl Marx.
It's hard to tell, but if you look closely at this photograph,
you might notice he had a beard.
Marx also had a vision which he wrote down in a book called
The Commonist Maninfesto.
Today, it's one of those books that boffins talk about but no-one
actually reads, like all books.
But back then it was a hit, particularly popular amongst the
18-to-35 anti-capitalist revolutionary demographic.
One Russian who read the book was the man currently starring
in this photograph, Vladimir Ilyich John Lennon.
Lennon imagined a world with no possessions.
I wonder if you can.
Nothing to kill or die for, a brotherhood of man.
And he chose to bring it about with a violent uprising.
In 1917, he got his chance.
Thanks to food shortages,
people started rioting for bread, like ducks do.
Lennon and his followers hacked into the Winter Palace and uploaded
a communist government.
Russia changed its name to Usser,
or sometimes Ccccccccpp!
What was the Soviet Onion?
Well, I think you're labouring under a misapprehension
and you probably mean the Soviet Union.
No, it's Onion. I saw it on a bit of paper earlier.
Well, it's probably been misspelt or you can't read very well,
but I think that you mean in historical terms the Soviet Union,
or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Well, I don't want to be rude, but I think you're mansplaining a bit.
Can we stick to the topic of the Soviet Onion, please? OK.
What exactly was it?
If you don't know, it's OK to say. You know, I won't judge you.
Well, if you want to talk about, sort of,
Russian Soviet vegetables, we can.
I mean, it was a deeply agrarian country.
And so there were lots of onions, lots of potatoes,
lots of other things. Did they have turnips? I think so.
Cheap, easy to grow, hardy - great in a stew.
So how come you know so much about vegetables?
Have you got an allotment?
In 1924, Lennon left the band to concentrate on existing only
in an afterlife he didn't believe in.
Lennon's place was taken by Joseph Stalin, who presided
over a ruthless crackdown that killed, starved or exiled
millions of people.
Although, on the plus side, he had a friendly moustache.
Communism and capitalism are natural enemies, like men and women,
and cats and dogs.
But Russia and America had put aside their differences, thanks
to a mutual interest in winning the Second World War.
The end of WWII led to loads of celebrations in black-and-white
as people put years of conflict and misery behind them.
But behind these outdated-looking celebrations, trouble was brewing.
Now they'd run out of baddies to blow up or shoot,
East and West grew suspicious of each other.
It was the beginning of a whole new conflict -
World War Cold.
The Cold War is quite complicated, isn't it?
Should we definitely bother mentioning it in this,
or could we just give it a miss?
It defines most of the second half of the 20th century, so I think
you should probably include it.
Oh, right, OK.
As the Soviet Union expanded, the animosity between
East and West deepened.
The division was symbolised by the construction
of the Berlin Wall, a sort of divorce made of bricks.
There was a terrible atmosphere of mistrust, like I had with my ex
when I saw he had 28 missed calls from a contact he'd labelled
"Claudia Tits" on his phone.
He claims she was just a rep from Fitness First
and that that was her real name.
Well, I'm sorry, Sean.
I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.
I hope your mum's well.
Soon there was so much paranoia between East and West,
they started spying on each other, stockpiled nuclear weapons
and fought a series of proxy wars.
So Russia and America had proxy wars where they'd use other countries
to fight with.
Is that a bit like picking a character to do your fighting
with in Street Fighter II?
Well, I think throughout human history, there's been a tendency to
try and use other forces, fighters from other lands
to help do the fighting. Right.
So exactly like Street Fighter, then.
If this was Street Fighter II
and the Americans chose the character Ken, would the Russians
pick Zangief because he's from the Soviet Union?
Or would they go for someone like Dhalsim?
Obviously he'd be a better choice because he can dive-kick
over Ken's fireballs.
Well, I don't know. I mean, you'd have to ask, I think President Putin
for the definitive answer on that.
I suppose they'd go for the ones that had the most chance
of beating Ken.
Meanwhile, East and West were also competing to be the first
to explore the stars.
The rivalry became known as the Space Race
because that rhymes, although probably not in Russian.
We don't know what they called it, and to be honest, we probably
should have found out before recording this bit.
The first launches were considered complete disasters
at the time, but we now know they make for soothing viewing
when cut to light jazz.
LIGHT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
ARCHIVE: Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed
in orbit by a Russian rocket.
Finally, in 1957, the Russians became the first to pull off a
successful launch.
Why did the Russians launch Spunk into orbit?
Well, first of all, when you're looking at Russian words,
the name of the world's first satellite was Sputnik 1,
and the Russians launched... Is that Russian for "Spunk"?
No, it's Russian for "Traveller".
I suppose spunk in orbit would just sort of float
around in globules, like it does in a bath. Sorry.
Should I change the subject?
Hot on Sputnik's heels was this Soviet space dog,
known on Earth as Laika, who blasted into space in November 1957.
What happened to Laika?
I expect they gave her a bone and a rub on the tummy when she got back.
Well, Laika, unfortunately, never made it back to Earth
because shortly after launching, she overheated and she tragically
passed away just a few hours after being launched.
You're fucking joking!
I wish I was. No, this was... She was launched on
a flight that was pretty much one-way.
There's a dead dog in space?!
So there's a dead dog somewhere in the back of a frame of every film
shot in space, like Star Wars?
I wouldn't say... There are dead dogs in Star Wars?!
Uh... That is unacceptable!
Well, Laika's satellite eventually burned up in the Earth's atmosphere,
but this was well after she'd passed away.
As I say, it was just a few hours after launch
that she died, I think, of heat stress. Sorry, can we just
have a minute's silence for Laika?
OK.
SHE EXHALES
There's a dead dog in space.
Away from the Space Race, everyday Russians often had
hard lives, while Americans, in contrast,
appeared to enjoy a life of carefree luxury and hats.
Was the 1950s real?
Yes, it was certainly real. Are we sure?
Because it looks like it was made up when you see it.
It's all men in hats, and housewives smiling in kitchens.
Were those people real and was all that really happening?
Well, a lot of that is what you see in advertising.
ARCHIVE: The '55 Chevrolet is lower,
lighter and longer-looking.
The most popular drama on 1950s television
was a show called Adverts.
Adverts told the story of a man or woman who wanted a thing
and then bought it and then was happy -
the first-ever example of a three-act narrative structure.
Why, that's amazing! Right.
Adverts was so influential
it made viewers at home
want to be the sort of person
who bought things too.
They'd work hard to get money to buy a car
so they could drive to the shops
and buy more things, which they'd have to pay
for by going back to work, which made them miserable.
So they'd cheer themselves up by going out and buying more things
which they'd have to work to pay for.
Why, that's amazing! Right.
The only time they weren't working or buying was when they were
watching TV, and it was on these airwaves that a new kind
of culture was born - popular culture.
Unlike normal culture, which was paintings and Beethoven, this was
stuff people actually enjoyed.
For decades, pioneering black artists had steadily built on each
other's work to develop an exciting new musical form for white people
to pass off as their own.
Why do people say Elvis Presley appropriated white music?
They don't say that.
What they do say is that he appropriated black music.
He was...he was a white man that sang music of black origin.
Did he have to apologise on social media?
No, because there was no social media then.
Why doesn't Elvis apologise now?
Because Elvis is dead.
So he's appropriated dead people's lifestyles now?
What a fucking thief!
Having overcome childhood poverty and a hip impediment, Elvis
benefited from mass media, which broadcast him to an audience
of millions in sanitised form.
Why was it so dangerous to show Elvis from the waist down?
Was he naked underneath, like a pervert on a Zoom call?
He wasn't naked.
He moved his hips around a lot in a...in a very, sort of,
sexual manner,
and there was a lot of anxiety that young women
might be...might be a little bit too turned on by Elvis.
People were prudish back then, weren't they?
If they saw his penis, they'd probably
have a stroke, wouldn't they?
Probably. I don't think that would have made it onto the media...!
LAUGHS Oh, God.
That's not a joke.
What's funny about that?
If they saw his penis, they'd have a stroke.
That's no laughing matter.
We're talking about people's lives here.
Elvis was so dangerously explosive, he was requisitioned by the US Army
for military use.
And little wonder, considering what was going on.
Both Russia and America were building up huge stockpiles
of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the entire planet several
times over, in case they missed the first time.
It seemed the planet was headed for World War III, and in the early
'60s it teetered up to the edge of the brink of the precipice
and gazed straight into an abyss of no return.
ARCHIVE: Crisis.
The word suddenly springs alive ominously in the newspapers
across America...
In the Cube And Missile Crisis, which was more dangerous -
the cubes or the missiles?
You're thinking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which refers
to Cuba, which is a country off the coast of the United States,
near Florida. Isn't a cube a terrible shape for a missile?
It'd be more like a brick.
In 1959, there had been a Communist revolution in Cuba.
A man called Fido Castrol rose to power and immediately made
friends with Russia.
Then, in 1962, America discovered the Soviets were going to use Cuba
as a base for nuclear missiles, and those missiles could make
it to Florida in just 20 minutes,
if the wind was fair and they could find somewhere to park.
American president and pin-up John Effing Kennedy demanded
the Russians remove the missiles.
Otherwise, war was inevitable,
or worse still, possible.
For six days, the world held its breath, meaning it might die
from asphyxiation before the bombs even went off.
In the end, Soviet Emperor Nikita Khrushchev backed down like a
shameful fucking chicken, and his missiles went home
with their tails between their legs.
Kennedy was victorious.
John F Kennedy won the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Why did he shoot himself afterwards?
Well, he didn't.
He negotiated a settlement to the Cuban Missile Crisis
with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.
And then after that, he ended up being assassinated
in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, unfortunately.
But he didn't fire the bullet. Right.
It's ironic that he was so concerned about Cuban missiles
when it was a gun in Texas he should have been worried about.
I bet he was kicking himself after he was shot.
Having dodged Armageddon,
the world was hungry for change, and a young generation who wanted
to give peace a chance rose up.
Their heroes weren't politicians but countercultural musicians whose
works defined the era.
The Rolling Stones were huge in the 1960s.
Would it be fair to say they were the Beatles of their day?
Well, I thought... They were contemporary.
So there was always a jostle between the Stones
and the Beatles. Right, but the Beatles were already
the Elvis of their day.
So there's a spare Beatles.
Can we give that to the Rolling Stones, even though
they're happening at the same time?
Well, I think people had their...have their preferences
between the style of the Beatles and the style of the Stones. OK.
So which of the Beatles of their day was best?
Beatles 1 or Beatles 2?
I think Beatles 1 is the preferred. Beatles 1? Or Beatles, the first...
The Beatles. Next question.
Of all the bands of the 1960s, which ones was The Kinks?
Meanwhile, the Space Race was still being run.
Nasa had spent billions of dollars developing a rocket powerful enough
to reach the moon, but not so powerful it'd blow up
when it got there.
Onboard were Neil Armstrong, Alan Alda and another man who asked
to remain anonymous.
On July 20th, 1969, the whole world was watching on television to see
if the moon would blow up,
and also because there was nothing else on.
The global audience must have been genuinely astounded
by the appalling picture quality,
which was terrible even for the time.
I mean, just look at it.
Looks like they've flown to the blur dimension
to intercept a smudge.
That's one small step for man...
..one giant leap for mankind.
The sound quality was terrible, too,
but what he said was, "That's one small step for man, one bionic leap
"for mankind," thereby declaring the moon for men.
Which is why, to this day, women have been denied entry to the moon.
With the moon landings,
man had achieved greatness, transcending earthly limits
and exploring the heavens themselves -
assuming any of this actually happened.
A lot of people on the internet say the moon landings were faked.
How right are they?
They are completely wrong.
No historian has ever questioned the reality of Project Apollo
because not one piece of so-called evidence that the
conspiracy theorists put forward has
ever stood up to peer-review scrutiny.
Right, but obviously it is fake because how could they have landed
on the moon if the moon isn't real?
What makes you think the moon isn't real, though, Philomena?
It isn't.
I don't know if you've done your own research, but my mate Paul sent me
a video that exposes the whole thing.
Can you prove the moon exists?
You can't, can you?
We see it in the sky.
We have sent spacecraft to the moon.
We've brought samples back to Earth.
No, watch the video.
It'll open your eyes.
You probably believe in night-time, too, don't you?
I experience it, as do billions of people around the world,
so, yes, I believe in night-time.
I believe that when the Earth rotates, then we have a period
of dark that we call night-time. Wake up. It's all in the video.
They just make us think the moon is real and that night is real,
just to keep us obedient.
Think about it.
Babies haven't been indoctrinated yet, so they know there's no such
thing as night. That's why they wake up screaming.
Right, let's move on.
The Space Race was over,
America had won, and the prize had turned out to be
the worst holiday destination in history, which they couldn't even
warn people about because TripAdvisor didn't exist.
But there was a consolation prize - the best holiday snap in history,
taken on Apollo 8 and known as Earthrise.
Today, it's too boring to hold your attention in a landmark
documentary for more than eight seconds,
but back then, this photograph made people think.
And not just a small thought like, "That looks nice,"
but a big thought.
It made us realise our planet is fragile.
The ecological movement had always been popular with hippies,
but people ignored them because of the way they were dressed
and because they were too stoned to make their point coherently.
But now scientists began to worry about the state of the planet,
and so no-one would mistake them for hippies
they wore clean white coats and glasses
to deliver their warnings.
But we ignored them, too, because they looked like nerds.
The problem was progress.
All the modern gadgets we'd got so hooked on ran on electricity,
which came from power stations, which burn fossil fuels,
which creates a gas called CO-2,
which flies out of chimneys
and stops the sky working properly.
One solution to all this environmental damage was to build
nuclear power stations, which don't emit anywhere
near as much harmful material, unless they blow up,
which never happens.
Until it did in 1986 at Chernobyl.
The radiation from Chernobyl turned a huge area into
a deadly no-go zone, even worse than Reigate town centre.
The fallout wafted across thousands of miles and had one
unforeseen side-effect.
It made the bricks of the Berlin Wall extremely brittle -
so brittle, it began to collapse.
Desperate locals rushed to the wall's assistance and tried
to make it better with hammers and fists,
but it was no use.
As the wall died, so did communism.
Capitalism had won, with financial markets embracing globalisation
to the toe-tapping sound of Belgian techno anthem Pump Up The Jam.
MUSIC: Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic
# Pump up the jam, pump it up while your feet are stompin'
# And the jam is pumpin' Look ahead, the crowd is jumpin'
# Pump it up a little more
# Get the party goin' on the dance floor
# See, cos that's where the party's at
# And you'll find out if you do that
# I don't want a place to stay
# Get your booty on the floor tonight
# Make my day I don't want... #
Suddenly, everybody, apart from poor people, was making so much
money that there wasn't room to store it all in coins.
Instead, it had to be stored in numbers on a screen, surrounded
by men shouting at it to keep it inside.
To keep track of all this money,
the world needed a special kind of mega abacus, and luckily
it had one - the computer.
Today, computers are everywhere but they used
to be a cumbersome rarity.
In the '50s and '60s, one computer would take up a whole room.
But in the 1970s, engineers made a startling discovery.
If they got rid of all those pointless flashing lights
and spinning tape reels, they could make computers much smaller -
small enough, in fact, to fit on the tip of your finger.
This was the microchip and it was amazing.
Thank you.
Give you the little fella back now.
The microchip couldn't actually do anything until you shoved it
into a big machine like this.
But in terms of floor space alone,
it was still a big improvement.
Now computers were small enough to share a house with,
loads more people wanted one.
Silicon Valley was born - a computer heartland that would be defined
by the rivalry between two men, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Their names might have been boring, but the things they said
were more boring.
Gates founded Microsoft and hit the big time with a baffling,
unofficial sequel to Ms Pac-Man, called Ms Dos.
Meanwhile, Jobs created the Apple Macintosh, the world's
first inherently smug computer.
While their rival systems kept computer users apart,
something else was trying to bring them all together -
WWW - the Web Wide World.
The internet was so modern and interesting, it seemed humankind
might never get up from its desk again.
Then, in a dramatic and momentous keynote presentation, Steve Jobs
revealed he'd discovered how to put the internet
inside a portable rectangle,
changing history forever.
And we are calling it iPhone. APPLAUSE, CHEERING
Its success inspired tons of imitators, like that one your
mum uses, and soon smartphones were so ubiquitous, you're probably
looking at one now instead of me while I'm saying this.
Smartphones revolutionised the way humans interact
by providing a socially acceptable way to ignore everyone around us.
But we're not lonely.
Thanks to social media, it's quicker and easier than ever to bond
with millions of others over something as simple as a cat photo
or the ritual shaming of a stranger.
It's easy to see why the smartphone has become the most popular
invention this century.
It's incredibly advanced,
yet at the same time so simple a child can make one.
In fact, not just one, but about 50 of these an hour,
if it wants to avoid another night in the punishment block.
Sadly, Steve Jobs died before he could witness Apple's success,
apart from the first few hundred billion dollars.
On his deathbed, he made Apple engineers promise to change
the iPhone's headphone jack every three years,
then uploaded himself to the cloud.
Meanwhile, Gates wasted his fortune eradicating malaria
in the Third World.
But despite Apple and Microsoft's total failure, computers continue
to go from strength to strength.
Some believe we're heading for an event known
as the singularity, where artificial intelligence becomes too clever
for our own good.
While others believe this has already happened
and that all of human civilisation exists only
inside a computer simulation.
How do we know we're not in a simulation?
We don't know.
There are lots of smart people who think it is possible that we live
in a simulation.
If this is a simulation,
why is the computer making me ask you this?
Well...from my perspective, you are asking a question,
so I could imagine that you are being controlled by a computer,
but you may well feel that you have free will and you're asking
those questions yourself.
Why do I have to actually come and film this?
Couldn't a computer just show it on the telly in the simulation?
Or is that where I am? You know, do I exist at all?
Why is this happening?
Why isn't it just me eating a chocolate eclair in a loop,
like in a gif? I'd swap for that.
Actually, are people in looping gifs caught in a simulation?
Is that what's happened to them?
Where do wasps fit into the simulation?
I'm not quite sure how...
Sorry, there's a lot to unpick, isn't there?
In this series, we've taken you from our primitive beginnings
through spiritual awakenings, cultural explosions
and major scientific breakthroughs.
Now, in the present moment, humankind sits impaled
on a crossroads, facing an uncertain future.
Will we rise to the challenge of climate change...
Or the opposite of that?
Will computers learn to delete us?
And if they do, how will we get ourselves out of the recycle bin?
Can humankind learn to exist at peace with itself?
Or are all of us right now living through the final hours, minutes
and seconds of civilisation?
Or not?
I don't know.
And nor do you.
But whatever happens, it'll happen right here on Earth.
OK. That was great. We've got that, Philomena. Yeah? Yeah, all done.
Thank you. Is that it? Yeah, that's it. Nice one. Is that me done? Yeah.
Great work. Oh, great. So, are you sure you can actually make it look
like I've been to these places?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't worry about that. What, really?
We do all that on computers afterwards. Oh, OK. All right.
It's amazing these days. Brilliant. See you, then. Bye.
Cut there, guys. Thank you. Well done.
That was pretty good, I think.
Great. OK.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
SHUFFLING, RUSTLING
SOUND DROPS