Stunning Graphics Make Evolution Unforgettable

Evolution (BBC 2)

Rating: Four stars out of five  

Our very earliest ancestor, according to Chris Packham, had a familiar name: Luca. Ever since I learned that, the song's been running through my head — 'I live on the second floor... Yes, I think you've seen me before.'

There are lots of Lucas now, apart from the boy in the hit by Suzanne Vega. According to a fascinating chart published by the Daily Mail last week, Luca is now the fourth most popular name for male British babies, after Leo, Noah and, at No 1, Muhammad.

Mr Packham and I used to be at the top of that chart. Christopher was among the leading boy's names of the 1960s. Now we're languishing in 203rd place. It's a bit ignominious, really.

Evolutionary scientists who devised the acronym LUCA for our single-cell forebear must have been quite pleased with themselves. Like the song, it's catchy. 

DNA analysis proves that all of us are descended from that one speck of organic matter, nearly four billion years ago: our Last Universal Common Ancestor.

In the first episode of his ambitious, five-part series explaining the history of Evolution, Chris did his best to make us care about Luca. He called it 'plucky and lucky', and 'the little cell who could,' as though Luca were a character in a Thomas The Tank Engine story.

The truth is, Luca didn't have a very interesting backstory or narrative arc. It simply split in half. And then those halves split into two more halves, and so on... for thousands of millennia.

It wasn't until three billion years later, we were told, that these cells started to clump together. 

There are no fossils of Luca and its descendants, and Chris didn't say how we can be sure it took three billion years, so we'll just have to take his word for it.

That's the problem with science. When it doesn't know something, it leaves a gap and hopes we won't notice.

 As a distraction, scientists come up with catchy names. They called the first cluster of cells a 'Death Star', which tells us nothing except that researchers in laboratories are usually Star Wars obsessives.

Thanks to spectacular graphics, the story was absorbingly beautiful to watch even if it did gloss over the details. 

We traced the evolution of elephant relatives, including a shy, big-eyed fur bundle called a tree hyrax, as well as a collection of prehistoric proboscideans (or big-nosed beasts).

Chris injected plenty of dry humour to keep the tone from becoming too didactic. Explaining how some elephancestors had gills, he noted, 'Elephants aren't famed for their deep-sea diving capabilities.'

All this, though the show aired after the watershed, made it entirely suitable for all ages. 

If there are inquisitive children in your family asking difficult questions about how life on Earth began, the whole series is available on BBC iPlayer.