"A sublime chronicle of our planet." -Booklist, STARRED review A primer for every Earth resident, by Harvard's acclaimed geologist How well do you know the ground beneath your feet? Odds are, where you're standing was once cooking under a roiling sea of lava, crushed by a towering sheet of ice, rocked by a nearby meteor strike, or perhaps choked by poison gases, drowned beneath ocean, perched atop a mountain range, or roamed by fearsome monsters....

Information about rocks and minerals for children.

In this episode, Last Human Standing explores the origins of "us" - where modern humans and our capacities for art, invention, and survival came from, and what happened when we encountered the mysterious Neanderthals. Crucial new evidence comes from the recent decoding of the Neanderthal genome. Did modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals? Exterminate them? Becoming Human examines why "we" survived while our other ancestral cousins - including...

Four episode series exploring the beginnings of the universe, our solar system, life on Earth, and the possibility of life on other planets.

At one time, experts agreed that the first Americans walked across the Bering land bridge from Asia approximately 12,000 years ago, eventually colonizing all of North and South America. But exciting recent finds on both continents have triggered entirely new theories. In Coming to America, a part of the PBS Scientific American Frontiers series, host Alan Alda heads back to the past by exploring ancient finds alongside archeologists, like the Arlington...

Professor Richard Fortey journeys high in the Rocky Mountains to explore a 520-million-year-old fossilized seabed containing bizarre lifeforms that revolutionized our understanding about the beginnings of complex life. His discoveries include: marine creatures with five eyes and a proboscis; filter-feeders shaped like tulips; worm-like scavengers covered in spikes but with no identifiable head or anus; and a meter-long predator resembling a giant...

With the disappearance of the Neanderthal species some 25,000 years ago, Homo sapiens reigned supreme across Eurasia - but the human family was still dramatically in flux. This film depicts the cultural adaptations and far-flung migrations that continued to shape European societies from the end of the Ice Age through the development of agriculture to the invention of writing. Viewers learn about the major role of Middle Eastern diasporas in the settlement...