In The Ape That Got Lucky, Chris Addison - the thinking idiot's pretend anthropologist - takes us on a journey through the vast and rich subject of human evolution in four comic lectures, and asks the listener if they're a man or a monkey (or a woman or a womonkey, if you're going to be like that about it.)
01. Language And Communication. We begin with a look at the development of the first human language, and why were lucky that it happened in Africa rather than England. We also look at the number of languages now in use (5,000 or so) and why the people of Lewisham don't seem to have chosen one as yet. Amongst other things, Professor Herring demonstrates his valve-based translation machine, and we meet a man who thinks his bees are telling him about unsolved crimes.
02. Social Development. Humans' biggest help in becoming Top Species has been, with one or two notable exceptions, the size of our brains. According to scientists, these have developed for us to cope with our unpleasantly complicated social lives. The team look at that idea and the implication that there must have been some other species almost exactly like us which died out because it was incapable of coping with gossip.
03. Science And Technology. Humans like to think that even if evolution has dealt them a neat hand, they have at least made their own luck through their mastery of science and technology. This episode looks at how many things have been discovered accidentally: from penicillin and the light bulb, to Benjamin Franklin's experiments in electrical storms leading to the discovery of 'Jackass'.
04. Man Or Monkey. Are so many of the things we imagine to be human characteristics really just animal ones? Man is the only species to get excited over a 2 for 1 compost offer.
