And the fossils are extraordinary.

And these fossils still breathe.

I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth.

So it's almost like fossils for the future.

Up to now, the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because the fossils, the baby fossils, were missing.

I am almost extinct I'm a paleontologist who collects fossils.

You don't have to think about some exotic examples, or fossils.

And there'd also be an extinction event like fossils would suddenly disappear.

And the rest is up to you. You've got to find fossils.

The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago.

Here's some reconstructions of some of the fossils that have been found from Lake Turkana.

And we were able to dig up, when we got old enough, fossils such as this, a slender snouted crocodile.

And that's an example of what we may do as we walk across the landscape in Northern Kenya, looking for fossils.

This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America a nice clean band here and this part of Africa.

Looking at fossils dating back several millions of years it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here.

In that complex record of fossils, there were times when lots of stuff seemed to be dying out very quickly, and the father mother geologists called these mass extinctions.

There are no Neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we've ever found, and the average age of most of these hunter gatherer tribes is 20 to 30.

Well, shortly afterwards, members of his species started to move northwards out of Africa, and you start to see fossils of Homo erectus in Georgia, China and also in parts of Indonesia.

And you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils, from the shape of the muscle attachments, something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them.

I'd like to call for this little video clip to give you some idea of, sort of, what we face. Normally, we get asked a lot of questions Well, how do you find fossils in areas that look like this?

BERKELEY Imagine that, as a young scientist, you spent years collecting information about the foundations of how nature works. You built your reputation by collecting plants, animals, fossils, and geological samples from around the world, and sending back letters that tracked your development into a first rate scientist.

BERKELEY Imagine that, as a young scientist, you spent years collecting information about the foundations of how nature works. You built your reputation by collecting plants, animals, fossils, and geological samples from around the world, and sending back letters that tracked your development into a first rate scientist.

Darwin believed that present day organisms are descendants of much simpler ancestors they are the products of unbroken lines of heredity that stretch back to the origin of life. Today, we have a mass of evidence, ranging from studies of ancient fossils to the latest discoveries of molecular biology, that supports this theory.amp 160

Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking living descendants of the dinosaur and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits including teeth, tails, and even hands to make a Chickenosaurus .

All along it was thought to be either an act of God or perhaps long, slow climate change, and that really changed in 1980, in this rocky outcrop near Gubbio, where Walter Alvarez, trying to figure out what was the time difference between these white rocks, which held creatures of the Cretaceous period, and the pink rocks above, which held Tertiary fossils.

The biological answer is simple a member of the species Homo sapiens that is characterized by such features as a relatively large brain set in a globular braincase, small brow ridges over the eyes, a small retracted face, a chin on the lower jaw, and a lightly built skeleton. Many of modern humans biological traits at least those that can be preserved as fossils were already present in Africa and Israel more than 100,000 years ago.