Eons: Surviving Deep Time

Deep in the Rising Star Cave system lies a mystery of paleoanthropology: a chamber filled with the bones of Homo naledi. How this species evolved, how it’s related to us and other human relatives, and how it got so deep in the caves are among the many open questions researchers are trying to answer, and what they’re starting to uncover might mean changing our minds about what behaviors we think of as uniquely human.

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time is produced by Complexly for PBS.

© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.

Exactly where and when dinosaurs first evolved are still open questions in paleontology; it’s hard to even say what the first dinosaur was. In this episode, we dig into the evidence for dinosaur origins in the Triassic Period (between 252 and 201 million years ago) and try to understand the world they lived in. Being able to point to the first dinosaur might tell us something about how the biggest mass extinction of all time influenced the course of life on our planet.

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time is produced by Complexly for PBS.

© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.

This episode is a mystery in the most classic literary sense of the word. It’s a whodunit detective story that spans more than a century - the saga of the Piltdown Man Hoax. From a gravel pit in Sussex, we follow the faked fossils through history, to what’s now the Natural History Museum in London, where scientists are using new technologies to try to unravel the identity of the fraudster, and explore how this hoax impacted the study of human origins.

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time is produced by Complexly for PBS.

© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.

While the famous La Brea Tar Pits are well-known for charismatic Ice Age megafauna, like sabertooth cats and dire wolves, a lesser-known discovery from the Pits is the partial skeleton of a human woman. In this episode, we walk through what the Tar Pits can tell us about the ecosystem of Los Angeles over the last 50,000 years and why La Brea Woman remains such a mystery.

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time is produced by Complexly for PBS.

© 2022 PBS. All rights reserved.

Dig into the past and explore the greatest mysteries of natural history with the team behind the hit YouTube series PBS Eons. From the dawn of the dinosaurs to downtown Los Angeles, we’re covering what we know — and what we still don’t know — about the history of life on Earth.

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time is produced by Complexly for PBS.