'Journey to 10,000 BC' - A Review (Heavy Heavy Monster Edit)

The story this dvd is attempting to tell is the origins, dates and life-ways of hunter-gatherers, or foragers, in the New World of 12,000 years ago, and how supposedly at around this time, humans were for the first time entering the new and perilous world of America, as if the world these intrepid humans were entering was any different from where they had originally come.

I read somewhere that the graphics were stunning - technically, a sharp blow to the head with a blunt instrument can also be thought of as stunning, so I guess it just depends on interpretation, but this is one documentary that wastes too much time on irrelevant detail, almost all of which is contained within these 'stunning' graphics, which if truth be told, range from the truly awful to ok in places. I wasn't too keen on the eerie lighting effects, which gave an other-worldly effect when it wasn't needed.

We open with a grrrrr, a feline face and a baleful eye, along with a herd of mammoth so laughably fake you're wondering if this was an accidentally included scene. We're then told that intrepid humans are entering a deadly and terrifying new world, and we see a group of said humans, surveying a landscape, seemingly devoid of all animal life - even the mammoth and smilodon are nowhere to be seen - disappointingly, neither is there any sign of 'that' pyramid.

What the makers signally failed to do was portray the New World as it would have been viewed and experienced by its first human visitors - who arrived considerably earlier than is at first suggested - and the bewildering array of exotic wildlife that would have inhabited the landscape, prior to the megafaunal extinction event. When attempting to relate events and episodes of times past, it's of vital importance to ensure the correct background and characters are established from the outset, because without those, the entire exercise is inevitably doomed to eternal pointlessness.

So for my opening scenes, rather than go for some supposedly high end computer generated images, I'd have gone for something a lot simpler, in this case hiring an artist who has portrayed floral and faunal suites of now vanished worlds - for example as this book cover by illustrator J. Agusti, to name but one of many illustrators of a similar ilk. It's easy to see how a much more convincing sketch of the era could be realised very effectively just by use of some still images - if the budget was big enough, animation based on such illustrations could equally convey the message.

The other point about the frequent use of mammoth and smilodon/sabre-toothed cats is the repeated implication that humans entering Pleistocene America suddenly found themselves facing previously unencountered fearsome creatures - whereas the mammoth and sabre-tooth cat species were beasts that humans had already been running into - and away from - across the length and breadth of Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, and in the case of the latter, Africa too - so why America should have been any more or less dangerous than the rest of the world, I'm not too sure.

It would also have been good to see a reasonably detailed description of the geology of the American continents, how they came to be configured in their current setting, how that had affected speciation and evolution of life in general, why it would have been difficult for humans to get there - all this could have been done in the opening 10 minutes of this documentary, and would have laid a much firmer foundation for what was to follow.

The more interesting parts of this documentary included Dennis Stanford making his case for a Solutrean incursion from Europe, with the contention that the fluted aspect of Clovis lithics was a modification of the Solutrean technology which had come from afar. Many disagree with this idea, saying there is a missing gap of several thousand years between the end of Euro-Solutreanism and the beginnings of American Clovis. However as Stanford points out, stone tool technology in Siberia from around the same time was so radically different from Clovis, that there seems to be no connection between the two - he further opines that as Clovis seems to originate in northeastern America, the location would have marked where people arriving from southwestern Europe would have made landfall and eventually settled.

However, that doesn't mean that Clovis couldn't have been invented locally by early Americans already in situ, and more data gathered in future years should help to prove or disprove the Solutrean theory; even if this turns out to be true though, there are indications from Mexico and Baja California that humans could have been in the New World some 20,000 years before the Solutreans, and it may well be that we never discover the identity of those first - and probably very few - humans, who first set foot there.

But so far, almost all the lithic evidence comes from land-based sites, and coastal regions that may have been occupied by early Americans are now submerged by seas that rose as the climate warmed. It is only in the present day, and with the advent of the necessary technology, that archaeologists are beginning to explore what are now off-shore locations, and which would have been dry land before sea-levels began to rise, so it will be interesting to see what the current expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, led by C. Andrew Hemmings and James Adovasio will reveal.

And sticking with the maritime environment, the documentary gives a good account of what happens when the North Atlantic Conveyor shuts down, helping to lower temperatures further as more cold fresh water gets dumped in the ocean. It has been reported in recent years that this process has been occurring spasmodically, and should it shut down permanently, places like Britain will find winters suddenly become more Scandinavian in nature, as temperatures plummet and snowfall increases dramatically.

The Younger Dryas had a profoundly negative effect on a human population that was a great deal smaller than that of the present day, and we can only imagine how many millions of people would suffer from a similar thousand-year plus episode of global cooling - the current lack of sun-spot activity already has one or two people nervously predicting that despite the current global warming we are experiencing, the net result could be for us all to be plunged into an Ice Age, through which our agricultural-reliant communities and economies would surely not survive. I'd have included some mention of the fact that we modern humans are just as liable to fall prey to natural disasters, global climate change and so on, rather than the triumphalist tones at the end of the dvd, announcing how we humans were shaping our destiny as if we were some kind of demi-gods, immune from mortal dangers like incoming comets etc.

As David Meltzer tells us, some 80% of America's large animals disappeared when the Younger Dryas hit - today we are heavily reliant on grazing animals and fields full of growing crops, and it seems to be a toss-up whether global warming will drown our coastal communities, or wherher we'll all freeze and starve to death in an Ice Age - either prospect is daunting, and there seems little we can do to prevent either situation. If past disasters are anything to go by, chances are we'll have to deal with both scenarios in rapid succession, and that's not even considering the dangers posed by incoming comets and asteroids, which seem to hit us a bit more regularly than we might once have supposed.

Which leads us to another interesting segment which features Drs. Allen West and Al Goodyear at work on the Topper site, with Dr. West searching for nano-diamonds, in his quest to prove that the Clovis culture really was obliterated by a comet that is thought to have exploded over the diamond fields of Canada - too bad we couldn't have spent longer at Topper, and I'm still not sure why there appears to be no mention of the Gault site, surely one of the most important Clovis sites in all of North America.

Critics of the Clovis comet theory, such as David Meltzer, claim that as there is no impact crater, the theory has yet to be proved, but Dr. Luann Becker points out that samples from the Topper site contain fullerenes, essentially stardust from outer space, though to be carried to Earth in comets - and presumably asteroids, depending on their point of origin. Dr West believes that the comet may have impacted the Laurentide ice sheet, since melted, and taking with it any evidence for a crater. Another theory holds that the comet could have exploded in mid-air, but either way, the evidence that appears in the stratigraphy across a range of sites, the onset of the Younger Dryas and the disappearance of so many large beasts indicates to many that that a comet was indeed the trigger for the Clovis collapse. I'd be very surprised if some other cause of the Younger Dryas and extinction event made a better fit than the comet - time will tell.

There's a brief visit to the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, and the contents thereof, discovered in 1969, the story of which is related by Dr. Christopher Shaw. But I couldn't help feeling that the amount of carnivores found there might have unduly skewed the creative input of this dvd, but who knows. In my capacity as armchair director, I would have put this part nearer the beginning, as it gives us a clearer view of the huge variety of fauna that inhabited Late Pleistocene America.

Rather than watch some computer generated mammoth duking it out, along with a host of other rendered scenes, which between them must account for at least a third of this presentation, I'd have preferred to see much more of the actual archaeology that has been done - in a story as compelling as the early peopling of the Americas, the details of the real story are far more interesting and revealing when related based on what is already known and recently discovered, whereas trying to embellish it with what I assume are meant to be exciting 'action' scenes just detracts from the real story.

Furthermore, there is almost no reference to the 'outside' world in this documentary - at 12,000bp, one of the most extraordinary episodes of human cultural evolution was happening in the Near East for example, as evidenced by the Epi-Palaeolithic/Natufian/Pre-pottery Neolithic, early monumentalism, the first -co-resident communities/villages and the strange settlements in which people at that time and place, lived and/or worshiped.

My point being that it should be possible to make a much better documentary than this on the same budget, just by sticking to what's known, referencing the state of ongoing archaeological and palaeo-anthropological research, not just in the New World, but across the globe as a whole - humankind was branching out in many directions, abstract as well as geographical, and to understand one part it's necessary to stand back and consider the big picture, rather than merely watching cgi-enhanced snapshots that could have been taken anywhere, and at any time in the past few hundreds of thousands of years, featuring as they do, humans pitting their wits against big scary beasties.

I'd also have the humans walking around in real locations - it's not as if the North American continent is short of its own stunning scenery, far more convincing than anything on view here - about the only time we see anything of America itself is as background to the various doctors and professors talking us through the more interesting parts of the documentary, although I'd also like to have seen them discussing some of the topics with each other, rather than each individual putting forward his or her own ideas in isolation from everyone else. If the producers wanted to introduce an element of conflict to this dvd, I'm sure the combined might of American academia could have provided a suitably rich source of material, judging by some of the widely differing views of the peopling of the New World extant within it.

There hardly seemed to be any mention of coastal migration either, which given the land-based slant of this documentary wasn't altogether surprising, and once again, a chance was missed to paint a clearer picture. I was wondering if the film-makers had decided to dispense with as much complexity as possible, in order to better portray the peopling of the New World as a pitched battle between man, beast, comet and polar desert; dramatic maybe, but in this case, a little overstated.

So if you want to watch this dvd, my advice would be to skip the cgi scenes altogether, listen to what the various interviewees have to say, and keep abreast of current news releases from the various archaeological sites and people working there, either online or through the journals etc. There is no advice on the dvd regarding further reading, good websites or blogs to check, which in this day and age, is something that really should have been included.

Other commentators as listed by Kris Hirst