8 /10 1 Votes8
Theme music composer Robert Neufeld Original language(s) English First episode date 16 September 2015 Music director Robert Neufeld Executive producer Graham Townsley | 7.9/10 IMDb Directed by Graham Townsley Country of origin United States Director Graham Townsley Language English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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No. of episodes One episode of two hours Similar Making North America, Inside Einstein's Mind, Vaccines — Calling the Shots, Why Planes Vanish, Building the Great Cathedrals | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dawn of Humanity is a 2015 American documentary film that was released online on September 10, 2015, and aired nationwide in the United States on September 16, 2015. The PBS NOVA National Geographic film, in one episode of two hours, was directed and produced by Graham Townsley. The film describes the 2013 discovery, and later excavation, of the fossil remains of Homo naledi, an extinct species of hominin assigned to the genus Homo, found within the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system, located in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. Additionally, the National Geographic Society has multiple videos on its website covering different phases of the discovery and excavation of the fossils during a two-year period. As of September 2015, fossils of at least fifteen individuals, amounting to 1550 specimens, have been excavated from the cave.
Contents
Participants
The documentary film is narrated by Jay O. Sanders and includes the following participants (alphabetized by last name):
Critical reception
Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times notes that, "Documentaries about prehistory and paleoanthropology are usually interesting, sometimes even thought-provoking. But you don’t often encounter one that’s thrilling. Yet that is a fitting adjective for “Dawn of Humanity,” a program ... that brings an aura of breaking news to a field that can often seem musty." Brooke Cain of the Charlotte Observer reports that the documentary features "exclusive footage of the hair-raising descent deep into a nearly inaccessible cave to retrieve more than 1,500 hominid fossils."
According to archaeologist K. Kris Hirst, Dawn of Humanity provides "a rich context for the discovery [of the fossils of Homo naledi], setting the historical and evolutionary background so that viewers can understand the significance of the discovery ... [Lee] Berger's charming personality and the hordes of other paleontologists in this video make this contextual effort easily and visually accessible to the public." In addition, according to Hirst, the behavior of apes in the "Dawn of Man" sequence of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, largely influenced by the notions of Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey, have been "proven false", since such violent apes have now been shown to be "vegetarians" instead.