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Documentary, Origins The Journey Of Humankind S01E01
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00:00Fire, no single tool in the human arsenal explains our existence more than fire, from
00:18an animal like any other to the dominant species on earth, because we figured out how to steal
00:25from the heavens and harness the power of the sun. It was a piece of magic so exceptional,
00:32so inexplicable, we told our children it was a gift from the gods and turned it into a myth
00:38to be handed down for thousands of years.
00:55Heat, nourishment, transportation, communication, annihilation.
01:09Fire made us warriors and builders and explorers.
01:16With each advance we paid with our blood, but still we kept going.
01:21And today, when we break through the bonds of earth and escape our cage,
01:27the only thing we see when we look back is the light of our greatest conquest.
01:33Like a flame that cannot be extinguished, the drive within us to create, expand and dominate,
01:39not just this world, but the next, the very spark of humanity starts here with fire.
01:47It's the greatest adventure story ever told. The story of humankind. We're going back in time to
02:07explore some key moments, origin moments that changed the course of our shared history. Moments that showed
02:14how we rebelled against our fate in the animal kingdom and found a way to rise up, to transcend,
02:19to forge a new future in the modern world. It is the biggest question of them all. How did we get here?
02:28How did homo sapiens go from swinging tree to tree, naked apes on a rock floating in space,
02:34to walking on the surface of the moon? There's no way it happens without fire. Fire didn't just
02:42change the course of our history, revolutionize our tools and our technology. Fire fundamentally changed
02:49our biology. As Marshall McLuhan used to say, we build the tools and the tools build us.
02:56But there is one moment in time, an origin moment, when we humans were instantly transformed from the
03:12hunted to the hunter. Imagine life in 12,000 BC. There are no societies, no protections, no guarantees,
03:24just small bands of nomads, wandering the woods of Eurasia, trying to survive in a hostile world.
03:34These people lived in very predator-rich environments. Lots of animals who regarded humans as prey.
03:41Fire was at a tavern. It protected you against predators.
03:51Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
03:57Imagine a life so fragile, so fraught with uncertainty.
04:22Only fire offers a chance at survival moment to moment.
04:27This is the moment in time when life, the homo sapiens,
04:57depends on this trick to take control of the natural world
05:01and create a weapon to fight back.
05:08Fire gave us the chance at a future.
05:12Animals hunt, animals make tools, but only humans have mastered fire.
05:23This was the first great breakthrough that enabled humans to separate ourselves from the other apes.
05:38Once we learned to walk with fire, we began to leave the animal kingdom behind.
05:49Fire became the dominant idea of our species.
05:53Its power cast a spell over us, captivating us.
05:57We were drawn like moths to a flame.
06:01Let's do it.
06:26See ya!
06:51Look up!
06:56Let's go.
07:26We began to experiment with fire, and to put it to other uses, beyond warmth and protection.
07:48The origins of cooking gave Homo sapiens a whole new future on Earth.
07:53Cooking did wonderful things for us. It gave us more energy, free time, small guts, and it enabled us to get big brains.
08:04The hearth brought everybody together. I mean, everybody gathered around it for warmth.
08:10It's around the fire that people cook their food, share stories, and become unified.
08:23THE SOUTH OF HOUSE
08:30The greatest moments in the history of Homo sapiens are in the past.
08:33The greatest moments in the history of Homo sapiens have been everywhere.
08:38The greatest moment in the history of humanity is fire, because fire transformed humanity
09:00and human beings in such a fundamental way that there is nothing else that you can compare
09:07it to.
09:09For the first time, humans were able to cook.
09:13They could heat food and consume it when it was hot or warm.
09:19So cooking with fire was wonderful because it meant that the food became soft, it was
09:24easily chewed, and instead of spending five or six or seven hours a day chewing, we spent
09:29less than an hour a day.
09:31All of a sudden, we got four or five hours free.
09:34And what do we do with it?
09:37In a small scale society, the women cook, but the men go out and hunt.
09:45And it enabled us to penetrate a new world that animals had never penetrated.
09:52When you can cook food, you can transform it.
09:56Then suddenly, you are getting all this nutrition and your brains start to grow.
10:01Why is that important?
10:02Well, when you start to grow in uterus with your bigger brain, it becomes much more difficult
10:07to give birth.
10:08It's because human beings are the only animals in the world that require assistance giving
10:20birth.
10:22You have the origins of social cooperation.
10:25That begins to differentiate the herd into a community because you need language.
10:32You need empathy.
10:34You need sharing.
10:36All these things are the building blocks of society and communication and communities.
10:48Every small scale society, every open air society nowadays, fire is a huge focus.
10:53The fire on the hearth is a part of modern life that we've carried through time.
11:03Whether you're eating around a campfire, in your kitchen, or at a restaurant, you're participating
11:08in one of the essential activities that turned us into the dominant species on Earth.
11:14Cooked food fed our brains, made us smarter, and gave us an edge over the rest of the animal
11:19kingdom.
11:20The fires of the hearth made that possible.
11:23We know 30,000 years ago, all across Europe, frankly, all around the world by this point,
11:33all of our ancestral humans had great control of fire.
11:38And they were also using it as a technology.
11:40So wherever they moved, they would have taken this knowledge with them.
11:44And we can see it even as we move forward in time to say about 10,000 years ago in Oregon.
11:49This site is potentially the oldest site in North America.
12:04All the way along this rock face, there are hearths.
12:06Now, the oldest hearths we've dated here is about 10,000 years ago.
12:13We've been able to get enough hearths to go all the way from 10,000 and maybe below all
12:20the way up to probably 3,000.
12:26And we see the changes of the plants they use for firewood.
12:29We see the changes of the seeds that are in the fire hearths.
12:33And so it looked like this probably for the last 7,000 years.
12:37The hearths is the place where people gather, the place where people cook, the place where
12:42people stay warm.
12:44It is a central feature to people's lives.
12:50You reflect on the fact that nothing has really changed over time, has it?
12:54I mean, we're humans.
12:57We're sitting around a fire.
12:59You think about what would it have been like 10,000 years ago, and maybe not a lot different
13:04than it is today.
13:06And it's the fire that gets us that connection.
13:09It's the human thread.
13:14Fire gave us a bridge to the future.
13:18Protection against predators improved our chances for survival.
13:23But as our numbers increased, so did the size of our conflicts.
13:29Small skirmishes between tribes grew into enormous battles between mighty armies.
13:35Once again, the deadly power of fire changed the world.
13:44In every age, we have been obsessed with fire.
14:01Cooking revealed the transformative power of the flame.
14:06And so we turned to the natural world and wondered, what else can fire transform?
14:13We began using fire to harden our wooden spears.
14:18But the breakthrough came 7,000 years ago.
14:22We discovered that minerals could be melted down and cast into new forms.
14:29We built bigger and hotter fires, superheating the earth in search of new discoveries.
14:37Mixing tin and copper gave us bronze, a material more potent than anything we knew before.
14:45We now had the power to create a new material world.
14:50This was the beginning of a new age.
14:53This was the beginning of a new age.
14:54The age of metal.
14:59Two and a half million years of Stone Age tools were suddenly obsolete.
15:05Out of the flames came new materials, stronger, lighter, better than their parts.
15:10From copper to bronze to iron to steel, fire transformed the natural into the extraordinary.
15:27Metal opened up the floodgates to a new world of technology.
15:30We used it to launch empires, to build industries, transformed weapons, tools, transportation, and ultimately civilization itself.
15:47Fire gave us metal, and metal gave us the modern world.
15:51You can draw a line from the dawn of humankind to the information age, and it's fire that connects the dots.
16:05Our constant companion in the march of progress.
16:08For centuries, we relied on fire for the basics. Heat, food, survival.
16:14Then we began to use flames to bend the world to our will.
16:19Until we had the power to explore other worlds, and completely destroy our own.
16:29Fire lies at the heart of the modern tools of war.
16:33On bloody display in conflicts across the globe.
16:36The great irony is, the moment it happened, the origin moment, when fire produced the first shot heard around the world,
16:48it was the product of our human desire for immortality.
16:51In 1232 AD, China's capital, Kaifeng, was at the center of the Jin Dynasty.
17:01Its soldiers fought with the high-tech weapons of the day, iron-cased bombs and fire lances.
17:08Their border was under constant attack.
17:12The Chinese needed a miracle.
17:14In a split second of ingenuity, they got one that ushered in the dawn of modern warfare.
17:19TYY WALKER
17:26imated a war.
17:28This is what we do about theкусs, one of the first shotwardинżers.
17:31Star
17:44A
17:45Star
17:47The Jin Empire had been under siege by the Mongols for nearly two decades, so the Mongols knew their enemies quite well.
17:56They had begun the war under the great Genghis Khan, who had conquered most of Eurasia before his death.
18:02The city of Kaifeng was one of the last holdouts for the Jin Dynasty.
18:17–
18:26–
18:28–
18:30–
18:32–
18:36–
18:37I'm sorry.
19:07Oh, God!
19:37Oh, God!
20:07Oh, God!
20:37Fireworks have been the hallmark of Chinese Empire since the 7th century.
20:54They were set to ward off evil spirits and chase away the ghosts.
20:57They would become the inspiration for the Jin Dynasty's most terrifying defense against the Mongol hordes.
21:06It was a simple concoction.
21:21Charcoal, a product of fire, potassium nitrate, and sulfur.
21:24The result?
21:25Black powder.
21:29This invention gave the Chinese a chance against a more powerful enemy
21:33and set the path for a new kind of war, for the ages.
21:52Are you ready?
21:53Yes.
21:54Go ahead.
21:55Go ahead.
22:04Go ahead!
22:22Go ahead.
22:52This humble mixture of saltpeter and sulfur contains one of the most disruptive innovations
23:06in the history of mankind.
23:10The irony of gunpowder is that it was first conceived as an elixir of immortality.
23:17So this elixir of immortality became, quite paradoxically, a recipe for mortality.
23:24Once this revolution started, it couldn't be stopped.
23:28Gunpowder originates in China, but it spreads, and it spreads as a tool of war.
23:35The Chinese are first using it against the Mongols, but then the Mongols are using it in the Middle East and then using it in Europe.
23:41And everyone's learning from each other how to use this new technology, how to battle with it.
23:47Charge!
23:50The transformation of warfare by the introduction of gunpowder in the early Middle Ages was nothing short of momentous.
23:59You had the replacement of bladed weapons by projectile weapons against which the armor of the medieval knight was powerless.
24:09Commoners with no training whatsoever, let alone high birth, could fire a projectile at them and kill them.
24:18When you're looking at gunpowder, you're seeing modernity.
24:28You're seeing everything from chemistry in its creation to the destructive power that it has on the battlefield, but also in terms of how it destroys old political and social structures.
24:47You move from a world of lords and knights into something new.
24:53Fire gave us life, a way to rebuild our brain and spark our imagination.
24:58And with that power, we began to harness fire's destructive potential.
25:02We turned against each other.
25:04But it's dangerous to believe you can command a force of nature.
25:08As we all know, fire can bite back.
25:11Out of its destruction, there can come a rebirth.
25:32To our ancestors, fire was a mysterious force.
25:36There was nothing like it.
25:39Each new generation was taught that it was a gift from the gods because it held a power that could not be explained.
25:46But the true history of fire is stranger than anything we could have imagined.
25:54Billions of years ago, Earth was a sea of molten rock, bombarded by meteor impacts.
26:03But fire was nowhere to be found.
26:06It was missing something that only Earth could provide.
26:12Life.
26:14Over the millennia, as the planet cooled, Earth's great oceans were formed.
26:20Out of the depths came life.
26:23The first organisms releasing billions of tons of oxygen into the atmosphere.
26:30As life evolved over eons, plants began to colonize the land.
26:35The last ingredient in the recipe for fire.
26:38Soon the Earth's surface was a tinderbox waiting to ignite.
26:42The crack of thunder and lightning would light the spark.
26:46The age of fire had begun.
26:49For 350 million years, fire swept over the planet.
26:58Life on Earth was forced to contend with the monster it had created.
27:02But to one creature, it was more than something to fear.
27:06It was the key to global domination.
27:09To tame it.
27:11To enslave it.
27:12We would sacrifice again and again.
27:15Only to create the modern world out of the ashes of our past.
27:20When we harness the great power of fire and wield it for our own purposes,
27:29it makes us feel as though immortality is within our grasp.
27:32It's intoxicating.
27:34You see it in all of our creations and our conquests.
27:37But that monster still lurks.
27:39For every advance we have made, fire still reminds us of our place on Earth.
27:43Even today, no matter how advanced we think we are,
27:46no matter how far into the future we project ourselves,
27:49we are helpless when exposed to unexpected fire.
27:52But we survive.
27:54We come back bigger, stronger, smarter.
27:56Some of the great cities, the most modern societies of their time,
27:59Rome, Constantinople, Munich, Moscow, all were ravaged by fires.
28:05The one that really changed the way we live, even to today,
28:10was the great fire of London in 1666.
28:15This is the fire that changed the world.
28:20London in the 17th century was really like a small village in many ways.
28:25It was made of wood, the houses were really close together,
28:28the streets were all windy and higgledy-piggledy.
28:31You knew everyone, you were really close to your neighbors.
28:34But it meant that it was disgusting, it was dirty, it was smelly, unsanitary.
28:39But all that was about to change, with the great fire of London.
28:44Sorry I'm late.
28:49No, you're just in time.
28:51Yeah.
28:52Hi darling.
28:55For your last night living under this roof.
28:58I've got something for you.
29:00I love it so much.
29:17I can't believe my daughter's getting married tomorrow.
29:19Should be all right.
29:20Won't you darling?
29:21Of course.
29:22Tens of thousands of families in London lived very much like this,
29:31in wooden homes, one on top of the other, with open flames to keep them warm.
29:35One of the most sophisticated cities in the world, it was also an unregulated tinderbox of urban sprawl.
29:49You think I can't.
29:55The bakery's on fire!
29:58The money's spreading!
29:59Fast!
30:00We've got to run.
30:04Grab everything you can.
30:07Come on, take your fucking life!
30:09Come on, come on, come on!
30:19You've got me.
30:20Yeah.
30:20Follow me.
30:24Come on.
30:25Come on.
30:30In 1666, there were no firefighters, only buckets.
30:49There were no civil servants with a plan to keep citizens safe.
30:54My dress!
30:56No one was coming to save you or your belongings.
30:59Let me come back!
31:01Andrew!
31:17Come on.
31:22Come on.
31:23Come on.
31:24Come on.
31:25Come on.
31:26Come on.
31:27Come on.
31:28Come on.
31:32Come on.
31:33Come on.
31:34Come on.
31:35Run.
31:37Run.
31:38The Great Fire of London was like a firecracker going off.
31:51It cleansed everything.
31:54The actual physical devastation was huge.
31:58Over 90 churches were burned, over 13,000 houses went up in flames,
32:02and 100,000 people were made homeless.
32:05The Great Fire of London was one of those opportunities to rebuild,
32:09not just physically but mentally.
32:11It coincides with the scientific revolution,
32:14and it's really an opportunity to start from scratch.
32:19It's extraordinary how a really terrible event
32:22can often lead to something wonderful.
32:27Although almost four-fifths of London were destroyed,
32:30the rebuilding of it became one of the great engines of the Enlightenment,
32:36and certainly helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution,
32:39because it gave people the confidence to rely on the things that made that revolution.
32:44Belief in science, belief in math, belief in engineering,
32:47the idea that humans can improve their surroundings
32:50and build on what they know.
32:52And all of that came out of this terrible event.
32:55London rose like a phoenix from the ashes,
33:01and with the new construction came new ideas that would be employed the world over.
33:05Urban planning, building safety codes and regulations,
33:08sanitation and civil services like fire departments.
33:11Within decades, London was the largest city in Europe,
33:14and the blueprint for a new world driven by the Industrial Revolution.
33:18This seismic change gave birth to the world we live in today.
33:24The London fire gave us a second chance.
33:26It allowed us to reimagine cities
33:28and rethink the way we live together in an urban environment.
33:31London, New York, Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai,
33:35these aren't just cities.
33:36They are symbols of our sophistication, our ingenuity, our humanity.
33:41And fire had another gift for us.
33:43By using it to release the energy trapped in fossil fuels like oil and coal,
33:48we had the means to heat our homes and create the most powerful machines.
33:52Suddenly we're creating industries, economies, modernity.
33:55But like all the gifts of fire, that magic comes with a price.
34:05Drilling into a vein of coal is extremely dangerous.
34:09Between 1870 and the present day in Pennsylvania,
34:1335,150 men and boys were killed in mining accidents.
34:19I had two uncles who were killed in collapses of the roof
34:21and were crushed to death.
34:23A lot of times they never dug you out.
34:25They just left you in here, and it became your grave.
34:32In this part of Pennsylvania,
34:34in that corridor from Scranton to Dauphin County
34:36where the anthracite coal fields lie,
34:38these are the richest coal fields in all of the world for anthracite coal.
34:43In the 1860s,
34:45we supplied all the fuel for the Union Navy during the Civil War.
34:50World War I, once again, supplying coal for the ships.
34:54We heated the country.
34:56We heated the country for 200 years.
34:58Unlike wood or waste,
35:06coal can burn for a very long time
35:08and at very high temperatures.
35:10This sparked our human imagination and ingenuity.
35:13We created machines that we could feed this power.
35:17Steam engines ushered in the Industrial Revolution,
35:20which led to the invention of the locomotive,
35:22and on and on to the modern world.
35:24Fire is a force of nature,
35:31a force we can't always contain.
35:34We can't give it up.
35:35We won't give it up,
35:37because we get so much out of it.
35:39By tapping the power of fire,
35:41we become closer as a species.
35:44It's made us smarter, safer.
35:46It's brought us together,
35:47united us around our inventions.
35:49It's allowed us to make the world smaller and smaller,
35:51and take us anywhere on Earth we can dream.
35:54and beyond.
35:56Right now, fire is fueling our dreams of a new life
35:59across the universe.
36:00It's quite the trick to take the most destructive power on Earth
36:22and turn it into a tool for reaching the heavens.
36:25But that's exactly what we've done over the course of human history.
36:28Steam engine, turbine, internal combustion.
36:31Once we get going, my friends, we don't stop.
36:34We just dream bigger than ever before.
36:38We have always used fire to push the boundaries of our human limitations,
36:43to go faster, higher, farther.
36:45Today, we routinely launch rockets into space,
36:48sending satellites into orbit,
36:50or robot explorers deeper into the unknown.
36:53But to do it the first time,
36:55to make it work in that origin moment,
36:57took serious ingenuity, imagination, persistence.
37:01It took a man named Robert Goddard,
37:04an engineer, physicist, teacher, and inventor.
37:07He put his life's work to the test in the 1920s.
37:10The American scientist, Robert Goddard,
37:15I think was truly the pioneer of rocket technology,
37:18a dreamer.
37:19Looking up into the skies,
37:21thinking of where rockets might take mankind,
37:23but overlooked in his time.
37:25Goddard filed two landmark patents on rocketry
37:41that were registered by the U.S. government in 1914.
37:45A decade later, he married his wife, Esther,
37:47and began to test his bold ideas.
37:50Hi!
37:51Sorry, I'm late.
37:53There's trouble for the camera!
37:55No problem!
38:00He had successfully tested liquid-fueled rockets over the years,
38:04but was attempting to scale up his experiment,
38:07to find out if his dreams of space were even possible.
38:16I don't know.
38:18I don't know.
38:19I don't know.
38:23Okay, here goes.
38:35No problem.
38:37No problem.
38:37No problem.
38:37No problem.
38:38Let's go.
38:45Let's go.
38:52Do you believe in that?
38:54No problem.
38:57Let's go.
38:57Damn it!
39:09Great men take knocks, Robert.
39:12Great men push through all odds to accomplish their visions.
39:18That's what makes them great.
39:21So, tell me, why didn't it work?
39:27What do you want to do with the fire?
39:33For two years, Goddard worked to answer his wife's question.
39:37The problem was getting the fuel to the fire.
39:39He'd been using piston pumps, like the automobile.
39:44His failures led him to a new path.
39:49A pressurized fuel feed system.
39:51A trick we still use in liquid propellant engines today.
39:57Are we ready?
39:59As ready as we'll ever be.
40:01He also tried a steering mechanism using veins in the exhaust flow, controlled by a gyroscope.
40:09Come on.
40:11Come on.
40:12They'll be fine.
40:13Good God.
40:15You're coming.
40:16You're coming.
40:17I've driven others down the hill.
40:18Your own красots
40:41Oh, Goddard is interested in the science of rocket technology from the pure science point of view, not to do with military applications.
41:08But the scientific papers he wrote on aspects like liquid fuel technology would be picked up by others during the Second World War to develop military rockets, notably the world's first ballistic missile, the V2 rocket.
41:31But if we hadn't had the V2 rocket, perhaps we might not have had the space program.
41:38We wouldn't have had rockets delivering astronauts into space, delivering satellites, revolutionizing our whole communication system.
41:45Goddard's experiments were some of the most high tech, sophisticated projects of their day.
41:52He took humanity another step forward.
41:55We walked with fire, then we found a way to trap it, to use its power for our own desires.
42:01Our advancement runs parallel to our relationship with fire, charcoal, gunpowder, coal, oil.
42:07The next great step may be fusion.
42:10That is, recreating how stars transform matter into energy.
42:15Mind-blowing.
42:19Fusion as an energy source is very attractive.
42:21It would be a carbon-free energy source that could power mankind forever.
42:25The challenge is, is making fusion work.
42:33At the National Ignition Facility, what we're trying to do is overcome a natural barrier that nature has set up for atoms to fuse together.
42:42The idea behind fusion is that two atoms that you try to put together, those cores have the same charge and they repel one another, just like the two parts of a magnet tend to repel each other.
42:56One of our main goals is to achieve thermonuclear fusion, to start a fusion fire in the laboratory, like the process that's going on in the sun.
43:07In order to create those conditions on earth, we have to concentrate a tremendous amount of energy in a very tiny volume.
43:13And so, we've built the world's biggest laser.
43:18So this facility is the size of three football fields.
43:21It's filled with lasers, and we concentrate all those lasers into a tiny target, you know, about the size of the tip of your pinky.
43:31So this is a NIF target.
43:32This is the thing we put at the center of the chamber in order to do an experiment.
43:36And all 192 beams hit this target.
43:40So, 96 beams come in from the top, 96 beams come in from the bottom.
43:44And all that energy ends up in this little tiny target in order to start the fusion reaction.
43:53If we do that in just the right way, we have calculations that say we should be able to get more energy out than we put into this implosion and light a fusion fire that could actually power plants and put energy on the grid.
44:08So, where we are today on the National Mission Facility with regard to ignition is we're creating a lot of fusion events where we take atoms and we force them together and we see the energy released.
44:18It's kind of like a sparking match being applied to a bonfire.
44:22You haven't yet caught the fuel on fire in such a way that the whole thing burns.
44:26What you're getting are isolated events happening within the bonfire stack.
44:29So, we see the beginnings of the sparks, but we're not there yet with the bonfire.
44:35So, if we were successful at showing fusion is feasible, from my point of view would be a defining moment, much like the demonstration of flight with the Wright Brothers plane.
44:45In a similar way, if we get ignition on NIF, we've now harnessed the same processes that power the sun.
44:51So, we will have the opportunity before us to move from the very first beginnings of fire where we hit stones together to make sparks to harnessing the power of the sun.
45:01That's an exciting possibility for humankind.
45:03We are a fire species, and these are the stories that have made us human.
45:14This is our evolution, the never ending journey.
45:18We have only our past to help us navigate and face our future.
45:23When we captured fire for the first time, we set upon a path that would redefine our species and forge the modern world.
45:31It became so central to our lives that we even began to revere it as a god.
45:42It drove the evolution of our culture, of our technology, and even of our biology.
45:50Seizing fire didn't just transform us. It gave us the power to transform reality, to create light, to create heat, to shape the earth to our own design, and rise to the top of the food chain.
46:08Fire created the world as we know it.
46:12It gave us humans the power to create, to destroy.
46:17We used that power to give ourselves superhuman strength and speed, breaking our bond with Mother Earth.
46:24No longer do we carry fire. Fire carries us.
46:54buoying power up our equipment.
46:58The power to use.
47:01The power to use, suitability.
47:03This world wanting a year is low and high.
47:05This is coming, especially hard.
47:06The grocery store will always be able to carry ours and rise.
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