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Great Transitions: The Origin of Humans – Rob Whittlesey – HHMI (2014)

February 11, 2015 at 11:25 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

What did the common ancestor of Humans and chimpanzees looked like? This is not something we can triangulate simply by looking at a modern chimpanzee and Human. All the evidence points that Africa is the home continent for primates. Paleontologists are working hard to find the fossils that help us understand the key stages in Human evolution. Molecular genetic analysis of modern Human and chimpanzee revealed a very high degree of similarity. Through DNA hybridization experiments it was estimated that […]

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Slow TV: Bergen-Oslo Train Real Time – Thomas Hellum – NRK (2009)

December 21, 2014 at 11:22 pm / Human Nature, Video

It’s all relative. Slow-TV is not “slow” at all. Events are in real-time. It is perceived as “slow” compared to highly edited conventional TV programs. Why it’s in Nature Documentaries? Slow-TV concept is a paradigm invented by real-time uninterrupted nature observers. The idea was there for quite a while. For years there were live cameras showing bears hunt fish in rivers, birds nesting and rearing their chicks with viewers in the millions. A Discovery Channel series called “Earth Sunrise” recorded […]

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Hi-SEAS Mars Mission Simulations

November 17, 2014 at 9:38 pm / Human Nature, Video

Onwards Earthlings! Onwards to Mars! Hi-SEAS stands for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. The project is funded by NASA. It is an exploration of Human nature. How will a small group of space travelers cooperate and solve problems external and internal inside a confined habitat? A return mission to the red planet will be long. It will take about six months to Mars, 500 days on the planet, and then another six months home. An interplenatary mission that […]

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Aquarius the Reef Base

November 11, 2014 at 2:29 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Video

Aquarius is an underwater laboratory and home to scientists for missions up to 10 days long. Aquarius is made to withstand the pressure of ocean depths to 120 feet deep. The idea is not new. The world celebrity diver who developed the Aqualung SCUBA system Jacques Yves Cousteau turned the idea into a reality by the Conself underwater habitation experiment documented in the award winning documentary World Without Sun in 1964. Cousteau captured activities of six crew members living in […]

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Göbekli Tepe – National Geographic (2012)

July 31, 2014 at 9:43 pm / Human Nature, Video

Discovered by renowned German archeologist Klaus Schmidt (sadly passed away in 2014), Göbekli Tepe changed our view on how recent cultural evolution of humanity migh have unfolded. Civilization as we hypothesized was a sequential progression in the following manner: Agriculture > Sedentary societies > Religion Early documentaries such as The Ascent of Man by Charles Bronowski is an example of the way our thinking was organized. Göbekli Tepe now suggests the order of religion and agriculture may need a swap: […]

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The Hidden Life of the Cell – BBC (2012)

May 16, 2014 at 11:33 pm / BBC documentaries, Evolution, Human Nature, Molecular Nature, Video

Ebola virus is threatening to spread out of Africa. Zika virus is evolving and circulating in more than 50 countries. At this stage we must inform ourselves and others about viruses. The Hidden Life of the Cell does just that by illustrating a real scenario of adenovirus infection and while doing that introduces major cellular components. The documentary is quite successful in explaining the biology behind events. However, you might also want to see Inner Life of Cell and the […]

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International Space Station – ESA (2012)

March 2, 2014 at 11:43 pm / Human Nature, Video

As part of the Human Nature series Nature Documentaries would like to draw your attention to the International Space Station. At 350 km (240 miles) above the earth International Space Station is the farthest outpost of humanity. We humans like to experiment on ourselves. That is how we spread all over the world and even reached most isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific ocean. As we discovered new places We invented new ways to live and reproduce. One […]

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Damocracy – Todd Southgate (2013)

December 31, 2013 at 5:43 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Video

Damocracy is produced by Doğa Derneği, in collaboration with other founding members of the Damocracy movement: Amazon Watch, International Rivers, RiverWatch, Gota D’água (Drop of Water) Movement, Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVPS). Director is a Canadian environmental documentarist Todd Southgate. Current state of the Xingu River after construction of the Belo Monte Dam. Although one of the main focus of the documentary is the famous historical human settlement Hasankeyf threatened to be destroyed by dam […]

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Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond (2005) episode 1

August 18, 2013 at 1:15 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Guns, Germs and Steel is a landmark Pulitzer prize winning book by Jared Diamond published in 1997. It is a very successful non-racist whirlwind tour of human history. Throughout the book historical and geographical roots of global inequality and resource distribution is explored. This first episode is dedicated to plant and animal domestication in different geographical settings. You can find a great encapsulation of this episode published in Nature Magazine in 2002. There’s also a simplified narrative of the book […]

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Harvest of the Seasons – Jacob Bronowski (1973)

August 17, 2013 at 12:26 pm / BBC documentaries, Evolution, Human Nature, Molecular Nature, Video

Harvest of the Seasons is the second episode of a thirteen-part documentary series called The Ascent of Man written and presented by Jacob Bronowski. The series reached wide audiences for Bronowski’s highly intellectual but simple and convincing analysis. Much of his long monologues were unscripted and were a source of inspiration for creating a template for Carl Sagan’s hugely sucessful Cosmos series. The motto used by Bronowski “A personal view” became “A personal voyage” in Sagan’s. The episode provides an […]

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A Tour of a Section of Human Chromosome 11

July 21, 2013 at 8:17 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Molecular Nature, Video

This video produced by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories takes us on a tour of about 650,000 nucleotides from the tip of the short arm of human chromosome 11. From a distance we can discern 28 genes, denoted by red and yellow blocks. The red exons carry the DNA code for protein, while the yellow introns are noncoding. Also prominent are more than 500 transposons, or jumping genes, denoted by blue and purple blocks. If we zoom in, we can take […]

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Nanook of the North – Robert Flaherty (1922)

March 20, 2013 at 3:45 pm / Human Nature, Technical Notes, Video

In the days long before the term “documentary” had even been coined this full feature movie did it all. The filmmaker Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) had an early exposure to people of the Arctic. Born in Michigan, he spent quite a bit of time traveling with his father in northern Canada. He developed an ethnographic eye and casually filmed many short sequences of the daily lives of Inuit people. He later decided to put all these clips together to create a […]

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World Without Sun – Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1964)

May 15, 2012 at 9:50 pm / Human Nature, Video

World Without Sun is perhaps the most progressive documentary in Cousteau’s filmmaking career. Produced in 1964 it captures activities of six crew members living in Continental Shelf Station II at 10m depth for 30 days in Red Sea. The undersea colony was the forerunner of other human habitation experiments such as Biosphere2 or Mars500 and even the International Space Station ISS. It also inspired other film makers like James Cameron. The film must be watched considering the context of its […]

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A Glimpse of Human Ecology Through the Nomadic Life of Netsilik Inuit – Quentin Brown & Asen Balıkçı (1967)

March 28, 2012 at 4:13 pm / Human Nature, Video

The Netsilik Series is very successful in documenting the lives of Netsilik Dr. Asen Balikci of the University of Montréal it became one of the ethnographical masterpieces belonging to a genre called course material for school children. Dr. Balikci has since produced many high quality documentaries. In the beginning, we are reminded of the fact that although it is an accurate depiction of Inuit way of life some parts had to be enacted. It has no narration or subtitles. Hearing […]

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When and Why We Lost Hair?

March 9, 2012 at 1:16 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Nova Documentaries, Video

When and why our ancestors began to wear clothing is a curious story. Clothing may have emerged for insulation of body heat. Similarly it also have provided a means to carry things and improve mobility. Cold snaps engulfed the earth many times. Using ice cores from Antarctica scientists identified 8 glacial cycles within the last 800 thousand years alone. An archaelogical site from Israel provides the earliest evidence of controlled fire by humans spanning the same time period. We know […]

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