Origins of Us: Guts (BBC 4 Tuesday 18 July 2023)

Origins of Us: Guts airs Tuesday 18 July 2023 on BBC 4.

What can we expect from this episode

In this second episode, Dr. Alice Roberts explores how our forebears’ pursuit of food has shaped our modern appearance and behaviour, from facial structure to visual acuity to our propensity to attract members of the opposite sex.

There are hints about our ancestors’ diet in some unexpected places. Alice looks for a lion kill because she’s heard that tapeworms found in lions’ prey indicate that our ancestors also subsisted on a diet heavy in big game about 1.7 million years ago. She demonstrates how our teeth have been adapted over time to shear through meat by biting into an apple. However, she demonstrates that the human body is just as well adapted to digest starch as it is meat by drawing parallels between her saliva and that of chimpanzees. When meat is scarce, starchy tubers are essential to survival, as Alice found out when she visited a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who still gather food in the same way our ancestors did.

New evidence suggests that the ways in which men and women have historically hunted and gathered for sustenance have influenced the way we interact with one another today. The Hadza tribe is often cited as the cultural ancestor of love and marriage due to the way its members share meals and form lifelong partnerships. It seems men are built to brag in order to attract a mate, as evidenced by a fun experiment with Britain’s best skateboarders.

Season 1 Episode 2

When can we see the episode

Origins of Us: Guts airs Tuesday 18 July 2023 at 11.00pm on BBC 4

Featured Image Credit: BBC 4