Looking at ourselves

Press, 26 August 1980, Page 15

Looking at ourselves

People — the compulsive communicators, the most numerous and the freest large animals on earth, the most avid explorers. Such broad qualifications marked the • beginning of David Attenborough’s final episode of “Life on Eath” (One) on Sunday night. The thirteenth episode — some might be superstitious about the numbering — finally arrived at the evolution of mankind. From the apeman to man, with a quiet, anti-sexist aside, just so that womankind wouldn’t feel left out of it, Attenborough sadly finished his superb series. Sundays . won’t be the same without it. “Life on Earth” wasn’t just a success because it traced the scientific evolution of living things. It succeeded where a lot of other nature programmes have failed because of the charisma and down-to-earth credibility of the presenter. • Whether he was in the jungles of South America, the plains of South Africa, or the cities of Europe, David Attenborough was obviously impressed by what he saw and what he was describing. Wide-eyed with amazement, he watched a gorilla family at play a week ago, and this week, breathless with excitement, he was a member of an expedition into the depths of Papua New Guinea to meet a tribe of people never before encountered by Europeans. Would they exhibit the same communication characteristics as the peoples of the rest of the world? Attenborough was obviously thrilled that they did. The tribesmen, , with their funny beehive hairdos, had their own language, their own system of counting. They laughed when they thought something was funny, and they looked puzzled, just like the rest of humanity, when they couldn’t understand something. And, although Attenborough didn’t comment on it, they could well be in for lung

cancer, like the rest of humanity, beccause they all smoked like trains.

Man’s ability to let others know how he feels, to communicate whether he was happy or sad, was suitably illustrated with a piece of film of a large group of people doing just that.

“No animal communicates more eloquently than man,” said Attenboroqgh, without any hint of irony, while masses of shouting, screaming, laughing, angry, happy and impassive people watched a wrestling match, of all things. David Attenborough’s enviable appearance of hopping about from one part of the world to another — one minute he’s in South America, the next, Europe, or Australia — cannot help but make the viewer marvel at the neat way the whole series has been put together. The budget must have been enormous.

The only country he seemed to hive missed was New Zealand. And the gap was most noticeable in the episode about birds. When discussing the largest birds to have walked the earth, there was no mention of New Zealand’s moa.

Attenborough’s final summation is worth repeating. He realised, he said that making the development of mankind the final episode in the series, gave the impression that man was the ultimate in development.

“Yet there is no reason to believe that man’s life on earth will be any longer than the dinosaur’s . . . Man has undoubted control of the earth, so what happens next is very largely up to him.”

t ' .• • <..■•it • • Review Felicity Price