As promised, I tuned in to the History Channel's Ape to Man program. It wasn't bad. It did a good job of showing how interpretation of fossils can be biased by the expectations of investigators, but eventually the evidence will win out.

They took a purely historical (duh) approach to the human endeavor of searching for fossil humans. I can forgive them in part for harping on the concept of the "missing link" since that was the quest that drove a lot of the old bone-diggers…but I wish they'd explained the problems with the concept earlier in the program. For instance, when describing Eugene Dubois' discovery of Java Man, they said that searching for the missing link between ape and man meant they expected to find a skull with a cranial capacity halfway between a chimpanzee and a modern human, but Java Man didn't fit. Of course, what we would actually expect is a range of different capacities (as has been found—see the nice chart at the Thumb). They didn't get around to explaining the more complex and branching tree of human lineages until the program was two thirds over.

Although when they did get around to it, I thought it was well done. They showed how the multiple discoveries by the Leakeys prompted a re-evaluation of the evidence. In general it did a reasonable job of showing how evolutionary theory is a driven by the physical evidence.

The recreations were a little cheesy and the weakest part of the program. It bothered me when they show the putative living representative of the original Neandertal skull, and spin a story about him out hunting deer. They were intentionally blurring the line between fiction and fact, and I'd much prefer that they kept them distinct. I also didn't care for the specific claim that hairlessness evolved in Homo erectus, something we don't know right now. Doing this kind of thing is particularly annoying in a show that also talks about the Piltdown fraud.

The worst recreation to me was showing Lucy as the personification of the transition from tree- to savannah-dwelling. C'mon. That's just a little too pat, and requires minimizing the terrestrial adaptations of Australopithecus too much. Similarly, they show the original 1856 Neandertal specimen as a victim of Homo sapiens, as another important transitional event. The attempts to represent the individual as the personification of major events that involved whole populations and many generations were excessive.

And then, at the end, they bobble the story and start talking about searching for the moment when we "became human", as if "human" were some discrete binary property. That's flawed "missing link" thinking again, and was an unfortunate way to conclude the program.

Conclusion: the show was interesting when it discussed the recent history of the discoveries, and rather aggravating when it tried to portray the lives of ancient hominids. It definitely did not pander to creationists, though, so I'll give it a passing grade.