Filmmaker Niobe Thompson has accomplished quite a feat. In just 18 months the Edmonton native has been to 17 countries on five continents. But this expedition was far from leisurely. In fact it was Thompson’s quest to uncover how humans ruled the planet.
“It is untested territory because we are a fairly small production company in Canada” says the anthropologist turned documentarian behind the ambitious new three-part series The Great Human Odyssey — which airs its second episode February 19 on CBC (the first can be streamed on the CBC’s website). “Because of the scale of the project we had the edit suite at work already six months before the end of shooting just to get caught up from the volume of footage we were bringing back from the field.”
An extensive exploration into the mystery of how homo sapiens adapted to eventually become the dominant global species on the planet Thompson and his small crew set out to interview the world’s leading scientists and more importantly to participate in the ancestral practices of traditional hunter-gatherers in the most remote regions on Earth.
“I’m really a proponent of taking personal risks as a communicator of science — of being a kind of bridge between the scientist and the audience” explains Thompson — who spends much of the series doing things like free-diving alongside the Badjao of the southern Philippines or witnessing first-hand the extremely rare skin-cutting initiation of the Crocodile People in Papua New Guinea.
“If you’re talking about the deep past I really do think you can work with traditional cultures and they can act as a window on our own species’ past” says Thompson. “That’s not to say the Bushmen in the Kalahari or the Badjao in the Philippines aren’t living in the modern world — of course they are — but they are living in an environment that our ancestors contended with and they’re doing it in a technologically light-handed way.”
Attempting to explain how aspects of ancient cultures “can teach us how we might have solved those problems 50000 years ago” Thompson keeps the scientific subject matter light and energetic — ensuring the cinematography is nothing short of stunning and never allowing a chat with an archeologist to turn excessively cerebral.
“I don’t think what we do dumbs the science down at all (but) audiences that already love nature and science documentary have different standards than they did a generation ago” says Thompson. He specifically credits the BBC Natural History Unit which has been producing cutting-edge documentary television series like Planet Earth and Frozen Planet for decades. “They have set a new standard for mass audiences in this genre and you have to take note of that. You can’t not be trying to operate at that level of visual storytelling.”
To accomplish such a lofty mission Thompson spent the year prior to production carrying out vast amounts of research and arranging to take the latest technology into sometimes dangerous Third World territory. His hard work has certainly paid off and The Great Human Odyssey boasts stunning sequences featuring Thompson amidst reindeer herders in the most remote region of Russia or high atop 100-metre cliffs in an isolated area of the Bering Strait thanks particularly to the use of drones (“we had that drone crew everywhere we went”) and special ultra-high definition 4K cameras.
As dazzling as the footage is however what the film uncovers is even more striking. Proving that humans have become the dominant species on Earth in spite of millenniums of unstable climate conditions The Great Human Odyssey provides a ray of environmental hope for the future.
“Understanding that our species is the single lone surviving hominid coming through an era of particular climate volatility is a really interesting thing to reflect upon” says Thompson. “It’s not that we don’t face a challenge of epic proportions now — we certainly do and we do it on an overcrowded planet — still understanding that we are the climate change specialists (and) because we’ve evolved a way of thinking about the future that no other animal has we do have the intellectual equipment to change our behaviour and change the situation that we see coming in the future.”
Steve Gow is the creator and writer of StrictlyDocs.com
