Walking with Cavemen

As a child I grew up watching and loving the BBC's "Walking With..." series, however Walking With Cavemen was the one entry I never got to watch on TV. I didn't even know the show existed until I saw the official book in a museum gift shop. Almost 20 years later I finally decided to check it out.

Walking With Cavemen is very different to the other shows in the series.

To begin with the show isn't narrated by Kenneth Branagh but is instead presented by Robert Winston who also appears in person to interact with the prehistoric humans, similar to the Nigel Marven specials Chased by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters. Winston does an okay job but he lacks the adventurous energy of Nigel Marven. Photos have surfaced showing that Marven was actually originally intended to present the American version of the show which makes me wonder why he was not used to begin with.

The second big difference is that the show does not use CGI animation (aside from a few reused shots from Walking With Beasts) but instead uses actors in make-up to portray the primitive humans. This works fine for the more humanoid hominids but for the more apelike hominids the costumes look cheesy and ridiculous at best and unsettling and creepy at worst. As a result many of the early hominids have incorrect proportions and are a bit too humanlike in their movements.

Also notably missing is Benjamin Bartlett's trademark score which gave the other shows in the series their epic feel. Cavemen's score is fine enough and does it's job but lacks the same emotional punch as those of the other series.

Overall Walking With Cavemen is a decent series that's very informative but lacks the same level of production quality and feeling as the rest of the series. It feels more like a low budget spin-off than it does an official entry in the series but it's still worth checking out.

The good is easy to describe. There's some great content here. Winston is a decent narrator. The episodes are well paced and there's plenty of educational content.

However, of the "walking with..." series, this is the one I enjoy the least. The reasons are (1) the acting of the primates is frequently weak and the makeup (eg. The ears) are always wrong. This is quite distracting and the illusion is frequently broken. (2) The facts are often speculative, eg. Primates started to walk upright for "sex"? Maybe, we walked upright to climb steep terrain + navigating through deep water with children + an increased ability to reach more food in the tree tops? Also, we have buried our dead for probably 500,000 years or more.

Overall, it's a good series. There are some interesting moments and some great theories. It's definitely worth the watch.

This show could have been great, since human evolution is a very interesting topic. This series should have followed the style and storytelling of the other Walking with... series, like the title promised (though I know it wasn't made by the original team, but it surely follows some elements of those series - the same CG models for example). Every other entry in the series shows the ecosystem around the "protagonist" of the episode. With this narrative, we can dive into the prehistoric world in more detail. This series could have featured great moments with our ancestors and other creatures interacting. Fighting off sabre-tooth cats, coming face-to face with Deinotheriums, cave bears etc. Without the ecosystem, the series feels dry. Instead, we got a ridiculous Gigantopithecus and a few shots of Megaloceros and mammonths. I almost hate this series, it's just feels so uncanny and unpleasant to watch.

Like a lot of people I was impressed with the previous "walking with" achievements. This one mostly uses real people and has a whole different feel to it. The acting is superb and you'll forget you're watching people in makeup and hairy suits. That said, there seems to be a constant problem with productions that portray early human ancestors. I guess there's a tendency to think ancient means crude and sloppy, and that's the way these beings are shown. Think brutish as in "Quest for Fire". Somehow I think smashing an egg in your hand and getting only a bit of it, stumbling around and wasting energy or wearing furs in the cold that look like they''ll fall off in a slight breeze isn't the way these guys survived to become you and me. Probably it's meant to show how different thay were from us, but I hope future attempts might use a little more imagination. Worth a look though.

Walking with Cavemen is a spin-off of shorts of the Walking With series and its central story is the evolution of homo sapiens, the humans or more simply us. I was amazed when I first saw it ,because I lucked any idea how we came in to being apart of what it is written in the bible. To add, the producers here made a very clever choice: unlike the previous Walking the main creatures are made by actors in suits ,which makes perfect sense considering that they are either our ancestor or close relatives. This documentary has quit engaging stories and you are going to feel that in the end, we are them and Humans have practically zero differences with the rest of the animal kingdom. One other great think is that ,though a spin-off it does not try to copy the rest Walkings, but be a being in its own right, unlike what is usually the case. The only reason why I have not give it a 10/10 is that the science is a bit inaccurate when it comes to who we start to walking up right and the first of its four episodes it is bit slow ,but apart from this nit picks it is perfect. In the end not hear those who say that it is awful or that we are the chosen ones of God, because that is rubbish and we are as part of this planet as we are the creature that create civilization. Go watch and if your liked the previous Walking ,you are going to like this one also.