Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World

From the earliest of times,

we humans have been driven to explore.

This innate instinct mobilized humanity...

And it changed the world...

And it's about to transform us again.

The story of how we got here is

full of astonishing twists and unlikely turns.

It would take an alliance with a dangerous predator...

Devastating floods...

A 19th-century publicity stunt...

An avalanche of horse manure,

exploding cannons,

and a trip to the slaughterhouse...

To get the ultimate freedom machine...

The car.

These are the inventions that have defined our age

and changed our world forever,

that allowed us to move both on the ground

and in the air,

to connect and to explore

the furthest regions of the universe,

each a story of ingenuity,

of wonder...

Of breakthrough.

The first modern humans walked out

of Africa around 180,000 years ago.

And, step by agonizing step, they moved across the world.

Today, around 1.2 billion automobiles transport us

from place to place

on some 20 billion miles of road.

Landscapes that would have taken our ancestors

many months to cross, we can now cover in hours...

But the car is much more than a means of transport.

I think, as humans, we're always looking to get

to the other side of the mountain,

and the quickest way to get there is driving.

Cars represent freedom.

Cars have become symbols

that define an entire society or country.

With the automobile came a complete terraforming

around this technology.

What's more,

the car is on the cusp of a new revolution;

autonomous vehicles may soon remove the need

for a driver altogether,

making the car the ultimate freedom machine

for all.

Automated vehicles could offer everyone mobility,

regardless of their abilities to actually drive a car.

So how did we go from two legs to 4 wheels?

It's a story that began thousands of years ago,

here in the frozen arctic,

with a battle for survival...

And an unlikely alliance between man and beast.

I'm an osteoarcheologist.

I study skeletal remains to see what they can tell us

about life in the past.

And it's ancient bones that hold the clue

to the first revolution in overland transport.

The earliest evidence of humans here

dates back 45,000 years.

With temperatures as cold as -58 degrees Fahrenheit

and the land permanently locked under ice,

every day was a battle for survival

in this knife-edged world.

Our ancestors were completely reliant

on taking the world as they found it...

On wild plants, wild animals.

Reindeer were a major source of food

and provided fur for clothing.

But they were permanently on the move,

traveling up to 20 miles a day.

This presented a mortal problem

for those early arctic settlers.

Our early ancestors could only go as far

and as fast as their own legs would carry them.

If they were to try following a herd of reindeer,

they simply couldn't keep up.

300 miles north of mainland Russia,

on the bleak Zhokhov island, archaeologists recently

uncovered a 9,000-year-old settlement.

It holds the clue to how

those early humans survived in the frozen north.

Among the evidence of human activity

were the remains of what could be mistaken for wolves.

But these were not the bones of wild predators.

Instead, these animals had developed striking adaptations.

They were much lighter and stronger

than their ancestor the wolf,

better adapted to run and pull.

They were, in fact, the bones of primitive dogs.

The very first species that became tamed

was the European Grey wolf, the ancestor

of all of our domesticated dogs today.

What's more, it's clear these primitive dogs

were being bred for a particular purpose.

The final piece of the puzzle came

from the fragments of shaped wood.

These were the runners from sleds.

Whoo!

9,000 years ago,

the reindeer herders of Zhokhov island

were using dog sleds.

These ancient people were among the first humans

to put animals to work,

and in doing so,

they evolved a new sub-species.

Long before there was horse power, there was dog power.

It was a revolutionary idea that would

spread right across the frozen lands of the north.

Now humans could keep up with the reindeer

and thrive in one of earth's most hostile environments,

starting a cooperative relationship that has shaped

our destiny and that of our furry friends.

It's quite incredible to think,

thousands of years ago, humans had harnessed

powered transport for the very first time.

Dogs were humankind's first engine...

Domesticated thousands of years before the ox and the horse...

But dog sleds had a major problem.

Unless you're moving over ice or snow,

they're practically useless.

To mobilize humankind

would take one of our greatest inventions,

and not just that, it would take the wheel, too.

It's funny, we think of the wheel

as a fairly ancient invention.

I have this image of Barney rubble and the Flintstones

rolling a stone wheel across some prehistoric landscape.

That's not actually the case.

The wheel actually came relatively late

in the grand scheme of human innovation,

around 3500 or 4000 BC.

Before the wheel,

objects were transported over tree trunks.

At Stonehenge, archaeologists recently discovered,

with the help of a few dozen volunteers...

That its stone monoliths were probably transported here

on the trunks of sycamore trees.

The ancient Britons could transport the 22-ton stones

10 miles a day using this method.

Stop!

And we now know that other cultures

were transporting heavy objects using similar means.

For many years, people had chopped down trees,

lined up logs, and rolled items along them.

In a sense, that's a form of a wheel.

A sort of extruded wheel is a cylinder, right?

Pull!

But that doesn't change history.

For a wheel to become productive, to change society...

You need accoutrement, you need other elements

that will actually make it operative.

The stroke of brilliance that gave us

wheeled transportation

was not so much the invention of the wheel

as the breakthrough that allowed us to connect it

to a stationary platform...

The axle.

The axle enables you to affix a wheel to a platform

in order to carry weight and travel a distance.

The trick is, in order to produce those two things,

you had to do it precisely and accurately,

otherwise it didn't work.

If the axle isn't round,

and the hole which the axle is sitting in isn't round,

then it will jam at certain points.

If you make the axle too big, then the whole thing

runs a risk of jamming solid.

And if the gap between the axle

and the inside of the wheel is too big,

then the wheel will wobble about.

And in an extreme case, it could lead

to the thing knocking itself to pieces.

And you cannot achieve that level of precision

without metal.

Around 7,000 years ago,

the Mesopotamians discovered

that certain rocks contained metals.

By 3,000 years ago, they had worked out how

to extract the metal by a process called smelting

and discovered that by combining two metals...

Copper and tin... they could make

a much stronger alloy called bronze.

This gave us our first precision tool.

It may not look state-of-the-art today,

but this early bronze chisel was, for its time,

one of the most advanced pieces of technology

humans had ever made.

Durable and sharp, it was the bronze chisel that

ultimately made the circular wheel-and-axle possible,

and together, they mobilized humankind.

The wheel and the axle changed the game,

'cause you can now move more items

over longer distances with less effort.

The wheel-and-axle's invention coincided

with the domestication of the horse and ox.

For the first time, ordinary people could travel

outside their settlements, and it triggered social revolution

across the ancient world.