The Big Bang
How expansion and cooling transformed the early universe from a hot plasma into a transparent cosmos of atoms—and what its oldest light can tell us.
THE SERIES COMPANION
From Cosmos
to Civilization.
The sources behind the story.
Research, visual credits, and how each film is made.
55 films · Episodes and full chapters
CHAPTER 01
The universe
20 min
The First Stars
How the first stars formed from primordial gas, ended the cosmic dark ages, and began changing the universe around them.
Dark Matter
Rotation curves, gravitational lensing, galaxy clusters, and the cosmic web reveal the effects of dark matter, while its identity remains unknown.
How the Atoms Were Made
How stars and stellar explosions build the chemical elements, and why the heaviest nuclei require processes beyond ordinary fusion.
The Origin of the Universe
The complete first chapter brings together the early universe, the first stars, dark matter, and the stellar origins of the elements.
CHAPTER 02
A planet takes shape
How the Solar System Was Made
From a collapsing cloud to a young Sun and a disk of forming planets, with meteorites preserving the chronology of the Solar System’s birth.
How the Moon Was Made
What lunar samples and the Earth–Moon system reveal about the giant impact that most likely formed the Moon—and which details remain unsettled.
The Early Earth
How the early Earth cooled, developed a crust and oceans, and left fragments of its first 500 million years in ancient zircon crystals.
Plate Tectonics
How seafloor spreading, magnetic stripes, earthquakes, and subduction revealed a planet whose surface is continually rebuilt.
How Earth Was Made
The complete second chapter follows the formation of the Solar System, the Moon-forming impact, the early Earth, and plate tectonics.
CHAPTER 03
The origins of life
The Origin of Life
The early Earth’s chemical ingredients, energy gradients, membranes, and catalysts—and the settings in which nonliving chemistry could begin to acquire life’s capabilities.
RNA Before Cells
RNA copying, chemical cycles, metabolism, and dividing compartments illuminate possible routes toward the first cells, along with the gaps experiments have yet to close.
The Genetic Code
How cells translate genetic information into proteins, why RNA sits at the heart of the ribosome, and what today’s shared genetic code reveals about its origins.
The Ancestor of All Cells
What the shared machinery of living cells reveals about LUCA, the last universal common ancestral population, and the deep split between bacteria and archaea.
The Origin of Life
The complete third chapter follows the chemistry of the early Earth through RNA, the genetic code, and the common ancestry of cellular life.
CHAPTER 04
Life changes Earth
Earth’s First Ecosystems
How microbes built Earth’s first ecosystems by using chemical energy and sunlight, cycling nutrients, and changing the chemistry of rock, water, and air.
How Earth Got Oxygen
Why oxygen accumulated long after oxygen-producing photosynthesis began, and how the Great Oxidation Event transformed the atmosphere, oceans, climate, and life.
Where Mitochondria Came From
The ancient partnership between an archaeon and a bacterium that gave rise to mitochondria, explored through living relatives, genomes, and competing models of the merger.
Why Sex Persists
How meiosis reshuffles inheritance, what sexual reproduction costs, and the leading explanations for why sex persists across complex life.
How Plants Got Chloroplasts
How a cyanobacterium became a chloroplast, how photosynthetic partnerships spread through other cells, and how cells began forming multicellular bodies.
Snowball Earth
The evidence for the Cryogenian ice ages, the feedbacks that froze and thawed Earth, and the refuges where life may have endured.
Early Life: How Cells Changed Earth
The complete fourth chapter connects microbial ecosystems, oxygenation, mitochondria, sex, chloroplasts, multicellularity, and Snowball Earth.
CHAPTER 05
Animal worlds
The First Animals: Life in the Ediacaran
The Ediacaran seafloor, from the fronds of Mistaken Point to mobile grazers, early reefs, and burrows, records the emergence of large and increasingly active organisms.
The Cambrian Explosion
The Cambrian transformation of marine ecosystems: deeper burrows, skeletons, jointed legs, eyes, and predators, seen through Chengjiang and Burgess Shale fossils.
The Rise of Jawed Fishes
Changing Ordovician seas, mass extinction, and the fossil evidence for the rise of jawed fishes through the Silurian and Early Devonian.
How Plants Transformed the Earth
How the first plants and forests colonized the land-and changed Earth's soils, rivers and climate-begins with a solution to life in air: waterproof cuticles, closable pores, durable spores, internal pipes, roots, wood and eventually seeds. From freshwater green-algal relatives and 471-million-year-old cryptospores to Cooksonia, the Rhynie wetland and the first forests, the episode follows the evidence while showing why early plants still needed water for swimming sperm. As roots and fungal partners deepened soils, forests stabilized rivers, buried carbon as coal and may have raised oxygen above modern levels, though the scale of that oxygen increase remains disputed. The story ends around 360 million years ago at the weedy late-Devonian water's edge, with plants already reshaping the land and its climate.
how fishes in Devonian shallows became the first animals with limbs and digits
How fishes in Devonian shallows became the first animals with limbs and digits reveals how a fin's internal bones could be reshaped into a weight-bearing limb, opening the evolutionary path to tetrapods-including us. The episode follows the warm, oxygen-poor shallows where lobe-finned fishes used lungs, sturdy fins and changing body structures to prop, paddle and push along the bottom. Evidence from Tiktaalik, found on Ellesmere Island after a geological-map search, shows a fish with a neck, broad ribs and fin joints resembling a shoulder, elbow and wrist, while still carrying scales, gills and fin rays. Tiktaalik was a close relative of the first limbed animals, not their ancestor, and the story is a branching experiment rather than a straight ladder from fish to humans.
CHAPTER 06
Amniotes, extinction, and mammal origins
The Egg That Freed Animals From Water
How could a four-limbed animal reproduce far from ponds and swamps? This episode follows the amniotic egg and its membranes, which kept an embryo wet and fed, exchanged gases, and stored waste, then traces how the first amniotes split into the synapsid line leading to mammals and the sauropsid line leading to reptiles and birds as Carboniferous forests shrank and Pangaea dried.
Our Ancestors and the Great Dying
How did Permian therapsids begin acquiring features that mammals would later inherit—and how did any survive the Great Dying? This episode follows their changing teeth, jaws, mouths and limbs through the Karoo, then traces how the Siberian Traps helped trigger heat, oxygen loss and acidification that erased most marine species and devastated life on land.
How Dinosaurs Took Over
How did dinosaurs rise from small, rare animals to the largest creatures on land? This episode follows their sixty-million-year struggle through the Triassic, when crocodile-line predators, armored herbivores, rhynchosaurs, and mammal-line giants held the dominant roles. After volcanic eruptions split Pangaea and triggered the end-Triassic extinction, most rivals vanished—and the surviving dinosaurs expanded into the open niches of the Jurassic.
the Jurassic and early Cretaceous world of dinosaurs, the origin of birds, and the breakup of Pangae
How did dinosaurs come to dominate the land, diversify into radically different bodies, and give rise to birds while Pangaea broke apart? From the early Jurassic to the early Cretaceous, this episode follows long-necked giants, theropods, and beaked plant-eaters through changing landscapes, revealing how feathers preceded flight, why Archaeopteryx links birds to theropods, and how separating continents helped create distinct dinosaur communities.
how mammals arose and diversified under the dinosaurs
How did a feeding jaw become a hearing system, and what could small mammals do while dinosaurs dominated the land? The story follows Morganucodon and its new jaw hinge through Jurassic swimmers, gliders, and diggers to Cretaceous Repenomamus, while tracing the early separation of the branches leading to egg-laying mammals, marsupials, and placental mammals before the impact.
the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs and what survived it
How could an impact lasting minutes starve a Triceratops thousands of kilometres away months later? This episode follows the Chicxulub asteroid strike from a thriving late Cretaceous world through the dust, soot and sulfuric-acid haze that dimmed sunlight, collapsed photosynthesis and food webs, and ended the age of non-bird dinosaurs. It also traces the selective survival and uneven recovery of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
how mammals, birds, climate and continents reshaped the world in the 64 million years after the dino
How did the world change after the dinosaurs vanished—and why did no single future become inevitable? Over the next 64 million years, mammals and birds diversified, some grew enormous, bats took to the air, and land mammals became whales, while carbon release, cooling, grass expansion, shifting continents and spreading ice repeatedly reorganized habitats. Primates were already part of this branching history, ready for the next chapter.
CHAPTER 07
The Primate Inheritance
How Primates and Apes Evolved
How did the primate body—and eventually the ape body—come together after the dinosaurs disappeared? This episode follows the family from Purgatorius in Montana through gripping feet, forward-facing eyes, colour vision, tailless apes and slow lives, showing how these traits appeared on different branches before the population that would divide into chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.
How We Came to Walk Upright
How did apes that still climbed trees begin walking on two legs? Follow the evidence from Toumaï, Ardi, Lucy, and the Laetoli footprints to see how upright walking assembled piece by piece over millions of years in wooded Africa—long before big brains or stone tools—and why footprints reveal behavior that bones can only suggest.
the first stone tools, the first members of our genus Homo, and the big-toothed Paranthropus
Who made the first stone tools—and what did stone change for our early relatives? From Kenya’s 3.3-million-year-old cores and flakes to hippo butchery at Nyayanga, this episode follows the uncertain beginnings of deliberate tool use, the emergence of Homo, and Paranthropus’s very different answer to changing foods: enormous chewing teeth. By two million years ago, several branches still overlapped, as a taller Homo approached.
Why Humans Sweat So Much
How did Homo erectus become so well suited to moving through Africa’s heat? Following evidence from the Turkana Boy, fossil bones and ancient footprints, this episode traces the rise of a taller, long-legged body built for efficient walking and better running, then asks how sweating, fine short hair and dark skin may have helped it lose heat while the costs and uncertainties remain.
the first spread of early humans beyond Africa, from the oldest traces in China and the
How did small-brained people reach Asia without a single great departure? This episode follows the gradual widening of early human populations from Africa, from the oldest stone tools in China and disputed cut marks in Romania to the small people of Dmanisi, Georgia, who made simple tools and lived among giant animals without handaxes or secure fire. It also shows how one Dmanisi youngster's teeth reveal that growing up was already changing before brains became large.
how early humans went from using fire to keeping it, cooking with it and finally making it, while
How did early humans move from finding fire to keeping it, cooking with it, and perhaps making it themselves? Following evidence from a South African cave, an Israeli lakeshore, and Barnham in England, this episode shows why those abilities were separate breakthroughs rather than a neat staircase. It also traces how lengthening ice-age cycles shaped human movement into and out of Europe.
CHAPTER 08
The Other Humans and the Ice Age
Neanderthals, Denisovans and the other humans who shared the Ice Age world with our ancestors
Who were the other humans who shared the Ice Age world with our ancestors—and what can their bones, tools and DNA still tell us? This episode follows Neanderthals from Spain to Siberia, meets the Denisovans and Denny, the girl with a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father, and traces a world that also included the people of Java, Flores, Luzon and Africa. These were not steps toward us, but peoples with their own long histories, abilities and unanswered questions.
Where Did Homo sapiens Really Come From?
Where did Homo sapiens come from—and was there ever a single birthplace? From Jebel Irhoud in Morocco to Omo and Herto in Ethiopia, this episode follows the scattered fossils, braided ancestry, coastal foods, shell ornaments, ochre, and poisoned hunting arrows that reveal a species taking shape across Africa. The evidence points not to one sudden beginning, but to populations that separated, met, and changed over hundreds of thousands of years.
Did Fire and Stories Make Us Human?
How did an ape become a human being who could shape tools, control fire, teach, talk, share power and make symbols? This episode follows that transformation across several kinds of human, from early hands and hunting to long childhoods, family ties, storytelling and ritual, while keeping the biggest questions open. It ends in Africa about 60,000 years ago, just before Homo sapiens entered a world already inhabited by other humans.
why Homo sapiens is the only human species left, and the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA living people
Why are we the only human species left when our ancestors had children with Neanderthals and Denisovans? This episode follows those encounters from western Asia across Ice Age Europe and Asia, revealing how early pioneers vanished, how Denisovan DNA still helps many Tibetans live at high altitude, and how pieces of the Neanderthal genome remain in living people.
how the first people reached Australia and the Americas during the Ice Age
How did people cross open sea to reach Sahul, then find a way through the Ice Age world into the Americas? This episode follows those extraordinary journeys, from planned voyages toward Australia and New Guinea to life on Beringia, the White Sands footprints, and the spread of people across two continents. It also asks what happened to the giant animals they encountered—and what remains uncertain about who arrived first.
How We Survived The Ice Age
How did people survive the coldest stretch of the last Ice Age, on a nearly treeless mammoth steppe beneath vast ice sheets? This episode follows the clothing, shelters, fire, fat, hunting, movement, and connections that carried some communities through the deep cold, while some populations left no known descendants—and traces how wolves living alongside people gradually became dogs before the thaw transformed their world.
CHAPTER 09
The First Farmers
why people settled down and began to farm, from the Natufians and Göbekli Tepe to the first crops
Why did people settle down and begin farming when wild food still sustained them? This episode follows the Natufians and the builders of Göbekli Tepe as warmer, steadier conditions, rich harvests, storage, and generations of tending turned wild wheat, lentils, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs into crops and herds. It also traces farming’s independent beginnings elsewhere, and why the transition was gradual.
what farming did to the first farmers: their numbers, health, towns, power and families
Farming fed more people—but did it make their lives better? At Çatalhöyük, houses rose over buried generations as stored food and larger families came with tooth decay, infection, hard labour and healed injuries; DNA reveals changing family ties, while Çatalhöyük and the Trypillia settlements show that communities could grow vast and organise collectively without automatic kings or inequality.
how farming and village life began in what is now China, from millet and rice to the first villages
How did farming and village life begin in what is now China—not in one place or moment, but through several regional experiments? This episode follows the slow domestication of millet in the north and rice in the south, then visits Jiahu, where people combined cultivation with hunting, fishing, pigs, pottery, brewing, burial traditions, and crane-bone music as increasingly connected village worlds took shape.
the green Sahara: its lakes, its fishers and herders, its drying, and Africa's own crops
How did the world’s largest hot desert become a land of lakes, rivers, grassland, and hippos—and what happened when the rains moved south? This episode follows the people who fished vanished waters, made pottery, adopted herding, and eventually moved toward the Nile and Sahel, where sorghum and pearl millet became crops of Africa’s own.
how people learned to make copper and what metal, the plough and the wheel changed in the Copper
How did people turn green rock into copper—and what did that new material change? Following Ötzi’s copper axe from its ore in central Italy to the frozen Alpine pass where he died, this episode traces the separate skills of hammering, smelting and casting, then shows how metal joined older networks of farming, wheeled transport, trade, wealth and violence, before bronze and distant tin changed the scale.
Who Built Stonehenge—and Why Did 90% of Them Vanish?
Who built Stonehenge—and how did their descendants become a small minority in Britain? This episode follows farming families from the Aegean to Britain, the people who hauled bluestones and sarsens across astonishing distances, and the Beaker newcomers whose ancestry became dominant in sampled burials within centuries. The evidence reveals migration, feasting, monument-building and a dramatic population change whose causes remain uncertain.
when people first rode and drove horses, and the grassland herders whose wagons, milk, horses and
When did people first ride horses—and what carried the grassland herders of the Black and Caspian Seas across Europe and Asia? This episode follows the evidence from Botai horse management, Yamnaya cattle-drawn wagons and milk to the later spread of the modern horse lineage, rider images and chariots, separating what the clues show from the myth of a mounted conquest of Europe.
CHAPTER 10
The First Cities
how the first cities of Mesopotamia began, and who came to rule them
How did villages on the river plains of southern Mesopotamia become cities—and who gained control of the people who lived in them? From Eridu and Uruk’s crowded institutions to clay tablets, rationed labor, rival city-states, Sargon’s empire, the royal graves of Ur, and the kingdom’s fall to Elam in 2004 BCE, this episode traces how urban life and organized power took shape.
how the Indus Valley cities worked, traded and slowly emptied
How did the Indus cities function without a known king, readable writing, or grand royal tombs? This episode follows the Harappan world from Mehrgarh’s early farmers to Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Dholavira, tracing the shared standards, wells, drains and trading networks that connected it to Mesopotamia—and the weakening monsoon and changing trade that helped draw its great cities into villages without making their people disappear.
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BEHIND THE SERIES
Human editorial direction.
A custom production system.
Developed and directed by Anders Lunde, with AI-assisted research and production, text-to-speech narration, and custom scientific animation.
How the films are made →