Walking with Cavemen

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.

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.

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.

I wanted to enjoy the "Walking With Cavemen" series and there were moments that were informative and sufficiently awe inspiring. The atmosphere of a serious look at human evolution was severely compromised, however, by the completely ridiculous insertion of the presenter, Robert Winston, into the action, as if he was traveling back in time to witness our ancestors first hand. Not only does Robert Winston have a silly looking mustache and an annoying manner, but we have to watch him racing about the prehistoric world in a variety of vehicles, as if he was the star of an action movie. In several hilarious moments, we even see Winston exchanging "meaningful" glances with our ape-like ancestors. By the time I saw Winston hovering above Africa, observing our ancestors from a hot air balloon, I was about ready to chuck the DVD out of the window in despair.

Even if you take Winston out of the equation, this documentary is sketchy and implausible at best. The "script-writers" can't seem to resist building narratives out of the lives of our ancestors, for example, in the whole situation with "Lucy" and her baby, which is presented as if it was an actual scenario that took place. Every point that is made is essentially presented as "fact", and while I am no expert on the subject, I found myself immediately questioning how they could possibly know these things. For example, Winston seemed quite insistent that the Neanderthals had "no imagination". Philosophical speculation about imagination being an essential component of consciousness aside, the discoveries of what appear to be burial grounds, complete with residues of garlanded flowers about the skulls of dead Neanderthals, was completely ignored, and would suggest that the Neanderthals did indeed have sufficient imagination to at least have some sort of concept of an afterlife. The documentary went on and on, presenting little in the way of evidence for any of the assertions it put forward or the scenarios that were constructed, which were often embarrassingly cheesy and played for comic effect.

As a work of fiction and imagination, perhaps, the "documentary" did succeed on some level, and the overwhelmingly interesting nature of the subject matter could not be completely sabotaged by the manner of presentation. But even the make-up, acting and special effects employed in the depiction of our ancestors had not progressed to any significant degree from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film made more than thirty years beforehand. Particularly laughable was a moment when several of our ancestors were confronted by a giant and angry gorilla in the prehistoric jungles of Asia, which played out like something from a fifties B-movie about Cavemen vs. the Monsters.

"Walking With Cavemen" is still a mildly entertaining and informative program, if not to be taken entirely seriously as a genuine presentation of science. The less heralded (and unfortunately still unavailable on DVD) Channel 4 presentation "Neanderthal", was a much better effort.