A vast number of statements and materials presented in the ancient Vedic literatures can be shown to agree with modern scientific findings and they also reveal a highly developed scientific content in these literatures. The great cultural wealth of this knowledge is highly relevant in the modern world.Techniques used to show this agreement include: – Marine Archaeology of underwater sites (such as Dvaraka) – Satellite imagery of the Indus-Sarasvata River system – Carbon and Thermoluminiscence Dating of archaeological artifacts – Scientific Verification of Scriptural statements – Linguistic analysis of scripts found on archaeological artifacts – A Study of cultural continuity in all these categories.
It has long been considered the most compelling question in our history: Where do human beings come from? Although life has existed for millions of years, only in the past century-and-a-half have we begun to use science to explore the ancestral roots of our own species.
The search for the ultimate answer has taken a number of twists and turns, with careers made and broken along the way. Ape to Man is the story of the quest to find the origins of the human race – a quest that spanned more than 150 years of obsessive searching The search for the origins of humanity is a story of bones and the tales they tell.
It was in 1856 that the first bones of an extinct human ancestor were encountered, unearthed by a crew of unskilled laborers digging for limestone in Western Europe. The find, which would be known as Neanderthal Man, was seeing the light of day for the first time in more than 40,000 years.
At the time, the concept of a previous human species was virtually unthinkable. Yet just a few years later, Charles Darwin’s work The Origin of Species first broached the subject of evolution, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it had become the hottest topic of the age.
Adventurers had embarked on the search for the Missing Link, the single creature that represented the evolutionary leap from apes to humans. Ape to Man examines the major discoveries that have led us to the understanding we have today, including theories that never gained full acceptance in their time, an elaborate hoax that confused the scientific community for years, and the ultimate understanding of the key elements that separate man from apes.
In this documentary Nobel Prize recipient Sir Harry Kroto attempts to answer one of world’s most puzzling question: how did life on earth come to be?
The chemistry has amazing power to explain the world around us. But this documentary is pushing its limits. Seek an answer for the deepest question the human beings asked themselves with Nobel Prize winner chemist Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto: How did life begin?
How did life actually begin in Earth? How are lives linked to the fate of the stars? Take a look at the recent scientific research in the field and learn about the ancient world of RNA and DNA.
There are of course no definitive answers offered by this documentary, but we get the feeling that we are closer than ever to discovering the answer to the age old question of how life began.
In 2001, scientists announced an amazing discovery: the oldest skull of a human ancestor ever found. The 3½ million year old fossil was remarkably complete, and unlike any previous fossil find. Its discovery – by a team led by Meave Leakey of the famous Leakey fossil-hunting family – has revolutionized our understanding of how humans evolved.
The great mystery of our evolution is how an ape could have evolved into the extraordinary creature that is a human being. There has never been another animal like us on the planet. And yet ten million years ago there was no sign that humans would take over the world. Instead the Earth was dominated by the apes. More than 50 different species of ape roamed the world – ten million years ago Earth really was the planet of the apes. Three million years later, most had vanished. In their place came something clearly related to the apes, but also completely different: human beings!
Brainy or bipedal? For years scientists searched for the first key characteristic which had allowed us to make the huge leap from ape to amazing human. At first they thought the development of our big brains was decisive. They even found the fossil that seemed to prove it, until along came the famous three million year old fossilized skeleton Lucy. This quashed the big brain theory, because here was a human ancestor which clearly walked on two legs, just as we do, but had the tiny brain of an ape. It seemed that the development of walking on two legs (bipedalism) was the first key human characteristic, the thing that set us on the road to becoming human.
Lucy soon became even more important. She seemed to defy the laws of evolution. Normally a major evolutionary adaptation like walking on two legs is followed by what scientists call an adaptive radiation. Many related species quickly evolve from an initial evolutionary innovation. It gives a very bushy evolutionary family tree, with many different but related species. Scientists knew that the human branch of the family tree had begun about six or seven million years ago, when the planet of the apes ended. And yet there was no sign of an adaptive radiation. The family tree showed just a straight line leading from the planet of the apes through to Lucy.
In 2002, the discovery of a beautiful and bizarre fossil astonished scientists and reignited the debate over the origin of flight. With four wings and superbly preserved feathers, the 130 million-year-old creature was like nothing paleontologists had ever seen before. In this program, NOVA travels to the Chinese stone quarry where the fossil was discovered (a famed fossil treasure trove) and teams up with the world’s leading figures in paleontology, biomechanics, aerodynamics, animation, and scientific reconstruction to perform an unorthodox experiment: a wind tunnel flight test of a scientific replica of the ancient oddity. Dubbed Microraptor, the crow-sized fossil is one of the smallest dinosaurs ever found and one of the most controversial, challenging conventional theories and assumptions about the evolution of flight. But how did Microraptor use its wings? Did it array its arm- and leg-mounted wings in the style of an early 20th-century biplane to produce high lift at low speed? Did it use them to create a single lifting surface for efficient, swift gliding? Did it employ some combination of these two methods? Or were the extra wings useless for flight and likely to have been for some other purpose, such as attracting a mate?
To answer these questions, NOVA interviews Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing, who first recognized the importance of Microraptor and gave it its name; paleontologist Mark Norell and artist Mick Ellison of the American Museum of Natural History; paleontologist Larry Martin of the University of Kansas; anatomist Farish Jenkins of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University; and aerodynamicist Kenny Breuer of Brown University. In addition, NOVA commissions a “flight-ready” wind tunnel model of Microraptor complete with feathers and articulating joints. Artists have historically played an important role in paleontology by helping to reconstruct the appearance and behavior of ancient animals. In the case of Microraptor, two completely different reconstructions were made, one at the American Museum of Natural History, and the other at the University of Kansas, based on different specimens and different techniques. The two markedly different reconstructions play into a long-running scientific controversy over the origin of flight in birds. For years the debate has been a standoff between two camps—those who believe dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, and those who do not.
In spite of the risks, people are lining up to solve their weight problems in the operating room. And if the latest device – an implantable stomach “pacer” – works out, millions more will be taking the surgical way out.
Part 2: Cars that Think.
The fully automatic car may be down the road a ways, but cars that do your thinking for you are just around the corner – they watch out for hazards, they listen to you, they read your lips, they even know when you’re distracted.
Part 3: Going Deep.
A look back at the decades of effort that culminated in the deep sub Alvin reaching the ocean floor, and a look forward to what’s next now Alvin’s retiring.
Part 4: Chimp Minds.
A visit with an engaging if unruly bunch of cousins that we formally broke up with about 6 or 7 million years ago – with whom we share almost all of our genes but not a lot of our lifestyle. Why the difference? Maybe it’s in how we learn.
Part 5: Hot Planet – Cold Comfort.
So you think global warming won’t affect you? Wait until the great Atlantic Conveyor shuts down. And find out what’s already happening in Alaska.
Part 6: Hydrogen Hopes.
Hydrogen may be the fuel of the future, but what will it take to safely and efficiently make the transition from today’s fossil fuels?
Part 7: Hidden Motives.
If you think you know why you do things, you’re probably wrong. How does the unconscious mind determine human behavior?
Part 8: The Secret Canyon.
The best kept secret of American archeology is now revealed – an entire canyon of perfectly preserved 1,000-year-old remains.
Part 9: Cybersenses.
Replacement synthetic senses for people are now a reality. Children as young as 12 months are already getting artificial hearing – while the first trials of electronic retinas for the blind are just beginning.
Part 10: Robot Pals.
To be really useful, robots need to behave as cooperative partners rather than mindless machines. We’ll meet three robots – including a future member of an astronaut team – that are trying to better understand us.
For years scientists have been trying to find the mysterious evolutionary master key responsible for transforming the dinosaurs into world-beaters. In the early Jurassic, 200 million years ago, they were a relatively small group of primitive creatures. By the late Jurassic, 50 million years later, they had become the magnificent array of carnivores and giant plant eaters that would dominate the planet for millions of years. In between lies the mysterious period of the middle Jurassic in which all these changes must have happened. But what were they? What was it that transformed the dinosaurs?
Was there some terrible mass extinction? Had there been an amazing change in the environment? All this was speculation and theory. How and where would evidence come to light? Fossils from the middle Jurassic are incredibly rare. All anyone had to go on were a few small outcrops of rock dotted around the world.
Then a treasure trove of fossils emerged from the midst of an Argentinian wilderness in the 1990s; thousands of square miles of mid-Jurassic rocks. On their first season in the field, paleontologist Oliver Rauhut and his team unearthed two giant meat-eating dinosaurs and six huge long-necked dinosaurs. And there was much more: early mammals, crocodiles, fish and even plant life. They had uncovered a complete mid-Jurassic eco-system, a wonderful snapshot of life from this dark age of dinosaurs.
“It’s as if someone has unearthed a holy grail of dinosaur palaeontology,” says British geologist, Dr Phil Manning. Oliver Rauhut describes the site as, “an extraordinary window on the mid-Jurassic.” Above all, the hope is that this site may contain all the information they need to find the mysterious evolutionary forces that have eluded palaeontologists for so long.
This seven-part documentary explains why Charles Darwin’s “dangerous idea” is so important today, and how it explains the past and predicts the future.
What underlies the incredible diversity of life on Earth? How have complex life forms evolved?
The journey from water to land, the return of land mammals to the sea, and the emergence of humans all suggest that creatures past and present are members of a single tree of life
Could a pterodactyl as large as a light aircraft have flown? Did millipedes once grow to six feet long? How did insects become preserved in amber for over 50 million years?
All these questions and more are answered through the study of fossils. In his journeys to the most famous fossil sites in the world, David Attenborough discovers a pre-historic world teeming with life and full of enticing clues as to how life evolved.
They reveal how dinosaurs hunted, lived in groups and cared for their young. And they offer glimpses of the most bizarre creatures that ever lived, such as tiny horses and an animal that is half bird and half reptile.
With the help of expert palaeontologists, fossil enthusiasts from around the world and sophisticated modeling. Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives breathes life into Earth’s distant past.
Ötzi the Iceman is the modern nickname of a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC, found in 1991 in a glacier of the Otztal Alps, near the border between Austria and Italy.
The nickname comes from the valley of discovery. He rivals the Egyptian “Ginger” as the oldest known human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view on the habits of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans.
Ötzi was found by two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, on September 19, 1991. The body was at first thought to be a modern corpse, like several others which had been recently found in the region. It was roughly recovered by the Austrian authorities and taken to Innsbruck, where its true age was finally discovered.
Subsequent surveys showed that the body had been located a few meters inside Italian territory. It is now on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
the documentary film vault 