Don't call me Neanderthal

If the past is another country, I wonder what human prehistory dating back two million years is called. Perhaps it is so distant that it counts as another planet.

This thought overwhelmed me like an Atlantic breaker as I watched the first few minutes of the second part of Walking With Cavemen (BBC1). During the past few years, there has been a positive flurry of programmes such as this, which utilise lots of modern technical wizardy and not a small amount of cash to show us how we were, or those who came before us were, when the earth was a younger place and life was absurdly simple.

To be completely frank with you, I am beginning to find them somewhat tiresome. This feeling is made more acute because there is some subtle blackmail at work: you're human aren't you? How can you not be interested in what your origins are? You must want to know how you came to be how you are. Well, the thing is, I'm tired of all the speculation.

Within the first few minutes already mentioned, I heard my guide to the distant past, Robert Winston, assert that one of our dim and distant ancestors was a creature "perhaps" like the one we were looking at. Since the one we were looking at looked as if it had been ejected from the make-up trailer on the set of the original Planet of the Apes for being too moth-eaten, the element of doubt in that word "perhaps" was clanging like a large warning bell.

As we looked at more creatures going through their half-man/ half-monkey routines, Winston sidled up to us with a further observation: one of these fellows "could be" our ancient ancestor. Again the element of doubt, again the clanging of the bell.

What I was looking for here was some certainty. If the Tardis had dropped Dr Who here in Africa at this moment of time, he would have known the answers. James T Kirk and Spock would have sorted it out in a jiffy if the Enterprise had come adrift in the space/time continuum. Even Bill and Ted would have taken only a peek to establish whether these creatures were distantly related to the people who later brought us heavy metal.

As the big music that always signifies critical points in the history of the world swelled around him, and buoyed as he was by all the book and computer learning available to modern man, Dr Winston was asking us to feed on maybes.

Fortunately, Walking With Cavemen improved somewhat. Winston managed to whittle his dangerously dull selection of lookalikes down to two different sorts of apes-with-potential-to-evolve-further. One lot were strictly vegetarian, and the other lot ate everything that once had moved but was now staying quite still on account of the fact it was dead.

When the latter crew forgot this basic principle, and the dominant male climbed a tree to scavenge for honey which was guarded by bees that were alive, he was stung for his pains and fell on his head.

The dominant male made a similar mistake a little later and this time was eaten by a lion. But the point was that a little drama had been added to the history lesson, and that made it go with a swing.