{"id":685413,"date":"2026-07-11T03:57:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T03:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/685413\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T03:57:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T03:57:13","slug":"we-didnt-develop-heads-until-wed-evolved-an-arse-i-like-that-chris-packhams-epic-ode-to-evolution-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/685413\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We didn\u2019t develop heads until we\u2019d evolved an arse. I like that\u2019: Chris Packham\u2019s epic ode to evolution | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s impossible to meet Chris Packham<\/a> without getting into a good mood. This is largely down to his contagious enthusiasm for the natural world, but on this occasion may also be his canary yellow polo shirt and stand-up-as-if-electrocuted hair. His new five-parter, Evolution, tells the story of the single cell that is all living things\u2019 first common ancestor. Known as Luca, it is the indivisible connection between you and your cat, me and an elephant. (That\u2019s an acronym, not poetry, by the way \u2013 Last Universal Common Ancestor, the single-celled organism from 4.2bn years ago that branched into everything that now lives.) \u201cThere is still a physical connection between me and you, and a cell that existed billions of years ago,\u201d he says. \u201cI find that absolutely brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show seeks to shake up all our preconceptions: \u201cWe tend to stop at GCSE and are left with a legacy of thinking that evolution is laboriously slow, we are its be all and end all, and its story is over.\u201d I mean, these aren\u2019t all misconceptions \u2013 it is pretty slow, no? \u201cThere would have been billions of years when we just had cells floating in a broth in the sea,\u201d he concedes. \u201cWe looked at it more as the turning points in evolution\u2019s life, the periods when it moved very rapidly.\u201d Evolution tells the story of different processes via specific animals. It explains breathing through the elephant, reproducing through the ostrich, eating through the bat, thinking through the dolphin, and running through the horse. \u201cI don\u2019t like to use the C word,\u201d Packham says in the opener, watching a tree hyrax that is the improbably close genetic relative of the elephant, \u201cbut they are incredibly cute.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is what strikes you first about Packham\u2019s storytelling: whenever he has a choice between a cute thing and a slimy thing, he will invariably and unashamedly go slimy. \u201cI\u2019m not averse to cute,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I prefer dogs to puppies.\u201d This is nonsensical. \u201cI don\u2019t dislike puppies! I just don\u2019t get the big eye, big ear thing. For me, that\u2019s a developmental stage, leading to where it\u2019s meant to get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Packham with a replica skull of Dorudon atrox, an ancient relative of Dolphins. Photograph: Freddie Claire\/BBC Studios<\/p>\n

At one point, I\u2019m surprised by Packham\u2019s choices in the show. Partway between the hyrax, which descended from an ancestor who dodged the asteroid strike by being small, and the elephant comes the long-extinct palaeomastodon, depicted via CGI, which is extremely dinky, like a pocket-size hippo. I didn\u2019t expect him to bring in computers, to tell a story of evolution that outsmarts tech and predates it by a few billion years, but he\u2019s pragmatic. \u201cI can get very romantically excited about a fossil, and some of them are exquisitely beautiful, but I think that for the audience, there\u2019s a limit to how many times I can hold up a piece of rock and say \u2018truly remarkable\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides, he\u2019s not a luddite. \u201cHuman evolution is not just about the physiology. ur cultural evolution \u2013 whether the invention of the combustion engine or AI \u2013 will have a profound effect on our\u00a0species.\u201d<\/p>\n

Packham wants us to ask questions that are childish, not childlike. \u201cWe get lazy, we stop seeing things with wonder, and it reduces our capacity to ask the fundamental questions. How did an elephant get a trunk? Why has it got a trunk? Why haven\u2019t I got a trunk?\u201d<\/p>\n

The story of sustenance focuses on the bat as it\u2019s the animal that, weight-for-weight, is the hungriest \u2013 it needs to consume its own bodyweight in insects every day. But it starts at the earliest mode of feeding, when there was \u201cjust a chamber, food went in, got digested, animals had to egest it through the same hole, highly inefficient\u201d. (I actually knew this from the delightful story of the echinoid, as my first husband is a geologist \u2013 a disc-shaped creature that started off with mouth\/anus adjacent, then they separated over centuries, so you can date your geological record from how far the echinoid\u2019s mouth is from its butthole.)<\/p>\n

To grasp the complexity of this, though, you\u2019ll need a bat: \u201cas soon as you\u2019ve got a mouth and an anus, you want your sensory organs near your mouth, and if you want your sensory organs to be optimally operating, you want the brain as close as possible to those, so basically you get a head. We didn\u2019t evolve heads until we\u2019d evolved an\u00a0arse. I quite like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I can get very romantically excited about a fossil\u2019 \u2026 Packham with a trace fossil. Photograph: Freddie Claire\/BBC Studios\/<\/p>\n

Packham\u2019s own evolution as a broadcaster has been fascinating. He has that classic Attenborough mix of wanting to disappear into the majesty of nature, while communicating with the rest of us. But over the years, his instinctive straightforwardness has led him to sound ever more radical. Whether talking broadly about the climate crisis, or specifically about hen harriers, he has refused to make his passion palatable by watering down its political implications. If there\u2019s a conceptual throughline from Springwatch to Evolution, it\u2019s that every creature, every organism, is smarter than you thought possible. \u201cSwallows choose white feathers to put in their nests because a type of bacteria breaks them down, which produces a substance which impacts negatively on microbes in the nest, and they have a higher hatching and fledging rate. I mean, it\u2019s just astonishing that those little birds flitting around making those nests are actively choosing white feathers over coloured feathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evolution (the show, not the phenomenon) is not on a mission to put humankind back in its place, but that\u2019s the inevitable result when you really stop to think about an ostrich egg. If we were the logical endpoint of the evolutionary journey, how did we land upon a mode of reproduction so much riskier and less elegant than laying an egg? \u201cWe\u2019ve always put ourselves on the pedestal of being the brightest. But we\u2019ve learned so much recently. Even some reef fish have theory of mind: they can recognise themselves as individuals, and therefore they know others as individuals. Think of the mirror test \u2013 being able to recognise yourself in a mirror. We knew that elephants could do it, that chimpanzees could do it and dolphins. But now we\u2019re beginning to see that other animals can. Spiders can dream. So obviously they have a subconscious, and they\u2019re activating that subconscious based upon the input\u00a0of their conscious mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of last year, a National Emergency Briefing saw 10 experts explain to 1,200 MPs and business leaders what climate breakdown would mean for health, food, national security and the economy in the UK. The resulting film, The People\u2019s Emergency Briefing<\/a>, hosted by Packham and filmed Gogglebox-style with national treasures such as Jennifer Saunders responding, has been showing since<\/a>, but only in-person; it isn\u2019t online. Some of the facts have a grim familiarity \u2013 one in six species in the UK is at risk of extinction \u2013 and some examine familiar terms, such as ecosystem collapse, in granular, literal ways (what would that mean for growing food?), that give it the pace of the disaster movie it is. This is part of Packham\u2019s long-term advocacy for the natural world against anthropogenic threat, but his outlook is always hopeful.<\/p>\n

\u201cNinety-nine per cent of all the things that have ever lived on Earth are extinct \u2013 it\u2019s a very important part of evolution. If they were all still here, there wouldn\u2019t be space for us. Evolution is ongoing, a rollercoaster, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Whatever we throw at the world, life\u2019s tenacity is profound, and no matter how badly we think we might be able to damage this planet, we will not exterminate life. It will re-evolve to be every bit as diverse and as beautiful as it was before we started mixing it up. It\u2019s humbling, but it\u2019s reassuring.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean he lets anyone off the hook. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is not a mass extinction event, it\u2019s a mass extermination event. We are consciously aware of the fact that we are destroying life. Given our creativity, our imagination, our intelligence and so forth, do we want that extermination on our conscience? I don\u2019t think that we do.\u201d What he won\u2019t subscribe to is the idea of humans as a scourge on Earth: \u201cI\u00a0hear environmentalists say if we were all wiped out by a pandemic, life would be so beautiful. It\u2019s such an unrealistic and improbable and slightly degrading thing to say. Yes, we\u2019ve had an impact on the planet, but we\u2019ve done remarkable things. We are a remarkable organism. We\u2019ve invented things and practices which are damaging, but we have to consider that as much a part of the evolutionary process as everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

The series ends with a soliloquy he wrote which calls for \u201can evolution of human hope. It\u2019s not a physiological thing, it\u2019s a way that we think about ourselves so we can live more harmoniously on this planet. And all of that is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking for himself, all it takes is a yew tree near his house. \u201cIt\u2019s 2,000 years old. I go and sit under it and, within minutes, I feel totally inconsequential. Chris Packham is not an important organism. And maybe there\u2019s a semblance of that in this series. It says that it\u2019s not all about us, it\u2019s about life. Humans are just a part of it and, collectively, it\u2019s\u00a0extraordinarily beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evolution begins on 13 July at 9pm\u00a0on BBC Two.<\/p>\n

This article was amended on 10 July 2026. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the image of the palaeomastodon in the show was created via AI; in fact, it is a CGI creation. Also, it was the hyrax\u2019s ancestors that survived an asteroid strike, not the mammal itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s impossible to meet Chris Packham without getting into a good mood. This is largely down to his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-685413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}