Completed Projects

Search for the Ultimate Survivor

2005 National Geographic Channel

On the remote Indonesian island of Flores, scientists have excavated something remarkable—a miniature arm bone belonging to a close relative. This startling discovery of a new and not-so-early human, dubbed the “Hobbit,” is the biggest and most unsettling find in paleoanthropology in the last half-century. It will utterly change how we think about ourselves, how we became human, and how we rewrite the story of human evolution.

The astonishing discovery of the Hobbit is only the latest bend in a trail of bones seven million years long. Follow it and you end up with the only walking ape left standing. Us. Are we a case of survival of the fittest, survival of luckiest … or survival of the most brutal? Who … or what … is responsible for wiping out the others? In a global investigation to find the ultimate perpetrator, the ultimate survivor, fresh clues appear almost every week. We are not the biggest walking ape. We are not the strongest. We are not the most ruthless. But we are capable of solving the greatest cold case of all time.

Old theories about the case are now being tossed out. Human evolution was long seen as a kind of relay race that starts with an ape who passes the baton to a more upright and less hairy species, and so on, until we cross the finish line. The new view is that our lineage is not very linear. Think mosh pit, not relay race. But only in the past few years have discoveries revealed the astonishing truth: throughout our past, at almost every stage, wildly different kinds of humans have lived right alongside each other, even as recently as only 13,000 years ago, as the remarkable new Indonesian discovery reveals. What did we have to do to end up as the last surviving human species?