Episode 1 The First Eden

These are the waters of the lowest lake in the world.

They lie over 1,000 feet below the level of the oceans.

And these strange formations are not ice, but salt.

This is the Dead Sea.

It's so hot here that most of the streams,

which once in a while trickle down the surrounding hills,

dry up before they get as far as this.

Those few that DO reach this lake

bring some of the salt with them,

having dissolved it from the rocks and soils over which they flowed.

Browny springs also bubble up from the bottom of the lake.

And as the waters lie here, evaporating under this intense sun,

they become so concentrated that the salt crystallises out.

Once, very much the same sort of thing,

though on an immensely greater scale,

was happening in the basin of the Mediterranean.

20 million years ago, Africa was an island

lying well to the south of Europe and Asia.

As the millennia passed, it moved slowly northwards

and collided with Europe, sealing off an arm of the ocean,

first at its eastern end as Arabia pressed against Syria,

then in the west, where, close to Gibraltar, Africa touched Spain.

The imprisoned sea now began to evaporate.

Even the water flowing into it from the great rivers

like the Rhone and the Nile couldn't save it.

Within a few centuries the vast basin,

2,000 miles long and three miles deep, dried out.

And then, about 5½ million years ago,

at the western end, the Atlantic Ocean broke through.

The falls were probably about 50 times higher than Niagara today.

And because they stretched for many miles,

the flow over them was around 1,000 times greater.

Every 24 hours, some 40 cubic miles of water

cascaded down into the huge trench beneath.

For a century or more,

the waters poured in, and slowly the great basin filled.

The waters rose up around the coasts.

Mountains were turned into islands,

and the Mediterranean we know today was born.

The evidence for the extraordinary fact

that the Mediterranean was once dry

is direct and incontrovertible.

It comes from rock like this.

Wherever you bore in the bottom of the Mediterranean,

about 600 feet below the bottom of the sea,

the drills bring up cores like this, full of salt.

Salt which extends downwards for a further mile or more.

Salt, which, from its chemical composition

and distribution in the Mediterranean,

could only have been laid down if the Mediterranean had evaporated.

And that refilling of the basin,

around 5½ million years ago,

must surely have been the most sudden and dramatic birth

for any sea on earth.

And when it happened, fish and other animals from the Atlantic

swam in through the Straits of Gibraltar

to re-colonise this newborn sea.

Today, four different species of dolphin

regularly visit the Mediterranean,

and they often travel together.

In this shoal, there are both striped and common dolphins.

Even sperm whales, 50 feet long,

call in each year during their global cruises.

Seals took up residence here so long ago

that they have now evolved into a distinct and unique species,

the Mediterranean monk seal.

Loggerhead turtles, too, swam in,

floating lazily through the warm surface waters,

browsing on jellyfish and molluscs.

They sped right along the 2,000 mile length of the sea

and some became permanent residents,

breeding on beaches in Turkey and Greece.

And, of course, fish came too, in huge numbers.

Some, like these tunny, are still only visitors.

They found the small new sea a suitable haven for spawning.

They still do so every year,

and then swim back to the Atlantic Ocean.

But with them came vast numbers of other fish species

that quickly adopted the sea as their permanent home.

Some of the mountains that had once stood on the floor of the dry basin

and had now become islands were volcanoes.

The forces deep in the earth's crust

that had dragged the continents across the globe

had also created deep rifts and faults in the earth's rocky skin,

through which molten lava and ash erupted,

building up great peaks around the vents.

Today the power has left many of these volcanoes,

and little more than steam rises from their craters.

But some are still very active indeed.

This is Etna, in Sicily, the biggest of all.

Its huge cone has been built up over many millennia

and now stands over 10,000 feet high.

The mountain rumbles and blows cinders into the air

almost continuously.

But every century or so, it becomes catastrophically violent

and rivers of molten lava pour down its flanks.

Not all the islands were volcanoes.

Some were composed of limestone

that had formed on the floor of the sea

before the great desiccation,

and had been pushed up like rucks in a carpet

as Africa and Europe moved together.

This is one of them. Malta.

Each of these islands had living on it

its own community of animals and plants.

And in their newly found isolation,

they began evolving in their own strange way.

There are caves in the rocks of Malta.

At a time when the rainfall was very much higher than it is now,

streams trickled through the rocks

and eventually dissolved away great caverns like this one.

And they also carried with them

the remains of animals that lived on the island at the time.

Many of the smaller, more delicate bones, of course, were smashed.

But teeth are very durable.

And from teeth found here we know that hippopotamus

and elephant lived here.

But they were not like those that are living today.

This, for example, is the back grinding molar of a modern elephant.

But compare it with that of one of those ancient Maltese elephants.

The mud and the rubble under here

is full of bones of one kind or another.

And when it was first excavated,

it produced literally thousands of teeth, including this one.

The back tooth of a Maltese elephant. It was a pygmy.

And we know from such teeth as this and the rest of its bones

that it was no bigger than a small pony.

And there aren't only teeth of elephant. There are teeth of hippo.

It, too, was a dwarf.

Here on the island there was limited vegetation to feed on,

so enormous growth wasn't easy to achieve.

And neither were there any lions or other predators,

so there was no need to grow huge as a defence against them,

which is probably the reason

that elephants on the mainland are so gigantic.

Such tiny hippos and elephants

evolved on the large island of Sicily to the north,

and on several Greek islands to the east.

To the west, in Sardinia,

there were not only small hippo and pygmy elephant,

but strange pigs, dwarf deer and tiny monkeys.

Farther west still lie the Balearic Islands,

Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza.

They, at one time, were interconnected

and formed a single large landmass,

and it too had its own unique fauna.

Majorca, the biggest of the surviving fragments,

has yielded fossils showing that it once possessed

a giant dormouse, a shrew almost as big as a rabbit

and a tiny antelope, no bigger than a spaniel,

that had developed long, gnawing teeth like a rat.

It, like the tiny elephants and hippos, is now extinct.

But one animal, which we have known from fossils,

has just been discovered alive.

It lives in remote pools and streams high in the mountains.

So remote, in fact, that its main enemy, the snake,

which was only introduced into Majorca in historic times,

has not, so far, reached them.

Like here.

It's a tiny toad,

clearly related to the midwife toad of mainland Europe,

with the same habit that gives that toad its name.

The male carries the eggs entangled around its legs,

and regularly goes for a swim with them

to prevent them from drying out.

But it's sufficiently different

to be classified as a separate and unique species.

Because it evolved on an island where it had no enemies,

it's changed in certain ways.

It's lost, for example, the poison glands

which serve its mainland relative as a defence.

And its tadpoles have also changed slightly.

There's some in the pool behind me.

It's not so much their shape that is unusual, but their numbers.

The female Majorca midwife produces many fewer eggs

than the females on the mainland.

It had no need to produce great numbers

because there were no snakes here

that would eat a large proportion of the tadpoles.

So when snakes DID arrive,

the little Majorca midwife was quickly wiped out,

and it only survives today in places like this

which snakes haven't reached...yet.

These strange creatures started evolving on these islands

some 5½ million years ago.

At that time, the Mediterranean region as a whole was warm,

with plenty of rain,

and, as a consequence, thick forests were widespread.

They grew not only on the islands

but all around the mainland shores of the sea.

And they were much the same in character

on both the north shore and the south.

In them grew cedars and evergreen oak, hawthorn and yew.

All trees that still grow in Europe.

On the African shore, however, where it's very much hotter today,

they've died out. But 6,000 feet up in the Atlas mountains in Morocco,

where I am now, these forests still survive.

They may look European in character

but in them lives a very African animal.

These are monkeys. Barbary macaques.

They're very competent climbers, scrambling through the branches

collecting the tender leaves of the cedars and the oaks.

They're also expert foragers on the ground,

collecting fallen acorns, digging up bulbs and juicy roots,

and catching millipedes and earthworms.

Macaques like these once lived in the forests

of the European shore, as well as here in Africa.

And, at one time, when the climate was rather warmer than it is now,

they spread far north across Europe, even as far as Britain,

as their fossilised bones prove.

The monkeys that live today on the Rock of Gibraltar

may in fact be a relic of that ancient European population.

But during recent centuries their numbers have been boosted many times

with importations of animals caught in these cedar forests in Morocco.

The young are strikingly different in colour from the adults.

Usually, only one is born at a time. Twins are very rare.

And the baby is most carefully looked after by its parents.

The males take their share of the baby minding,

so allowing the females to go and gather food

unencumbered by an unruly baby.

In fact, all the adults clearly love playing with babies,

and are so eager to do so, that they take on passengers

whether the baby belongs to them or not.

In spring, the skies above these North African forests

suddenly fill with birds.

White storks by the hundred.

Buzzards, kites and eagles.

They are wheeling around in thermals, columns of warm air

that rise from the land, especially bare rock,

as it heats up each day in the sun,

and which can lift them thousands of feet into the sky

so that they have enough height to glide right across the sea

to the northern European shore.

They are on their spring migration,

which will take them from Africa far into northern Europe.

Why SHOULD these birds make such long and arduous journeys?

The reason seems clear enough.

In Europe, in summer, when the ground is no longer frozen,

there's a great deal to eat.

Far more than the local birds that have wintered there

can deal with by themselves.

So that's the place to build a nest and rear your young.

But how did these birds discover

that all those hundreds of miles away

there were such rich feeding grounds?

Well, the answer to that seems to be

that they weren't always so far away.

About 2½ million years ago,

the earth cooled and fell into the grip of an ice age.

Ice caps developed over Scandinavia and northern Britain

and glaciers slowly ground their way southwards.

Southern Europe became a treeless wasteland. Tundra.

But in spring, it was alive with insects, frogs and small rodents,

and many African birds began to make the short trip across the sea

to feed and nest there.

Then, some 20,000 years ago, the ice began to retreat

and the spring feeding grounds moved northwards with it.

So year after year, the birds had to make longer journeys.

As the climate continued to warm, so the Sahara Desert began to form.

Now, the journeys the spring breeders had to make

became formidable indeed.

It seems almost unbelievable

that such a tiny bird as a martin, which weighs only a few ounces,

should have the energy to fly across the Sahara,

for there is little or no food for it on the way.

Martins and swallows are not gliders like storks,

but must continually beat their wings.

They have to take regular rests,

and here, there is nothing to alight on except the hot sand.

Some are so exhausted

that they no longer have the strength to get into the air,

and die where they landed.

Oases, where a spring bubbling up from underground

provides enough water for trees to grow, are invaluable staging posts.

Warblers and redstarts, flycatchers and wagtails,

insect eaters of all kinds call in here and stay for several days,

feeding and resting, and building up their strength

for the long days and nights flying that still lie ahead.

Waders can't eat at all

until they get to the shore of the Mediterranean,

for they feed only on small creatures that live in mud.

But when they DO get to the African coast,

they stay for several days, feeding almost continuously.

And the lagoons along the coast in spring

are like restaurants on a motorway,

providing nonstop meals for travellers from all parts.

The curlew sandpiper may have come from the shores of the Indian Ocean,

and be on its way to Siberia.

The spoonbills were probably feeding only a week ago

in the mangrove swamps of West Africa.

On the European shore, spring has come.

The plants created this rapid transformation

in several different ways.

Poppies and crown daisies are annuals.

Their seeds were scattered last summer

and lay dormant throughout the winter.

Now, the warm spring rains have bought them to sudden life.

They will swiftly set seed and then they will die,

having condensed their entire active life into a few short weeks.

Others use a different technique.

The asphodel and many other species, including the wild gladiolus,

the scarlet crowfoot and 50-odd species of orchids,

have kept the surplus food they made last year

stored underground in bulbs and swollen roots.

At the first hint of spring

they use those savings to produce their flowers,

in some cases, even before they sprouted leaves.

At the same time, neatly synchronised by the warming weather,

insects are hatching.

Now they are busy collecting the bribes of nectar,

advertised by the flowers as inducements to transport pollen.

This is the banquet that the birds have come to feed on.

The roller may have travelled from Eastern Africa, Kenya or Mozambique.

Deep inside its nest hole,

its young - there may be up to five of them -

are demanding frequent meals throughout the day.

The adults have a taste for big, crunchy insects,

such as beetles, crickets and large grasshoppers.

But this pair are feeding their nestlings on LESS prickly food -

dragonflies and antlions.

The bee-eaters may also have come from Eastern Africa.

True to their name, they really do eat bees and wasps,

beating them against a perch to discharge the stings.

But they also gladly accept less-hazardous meals

and they, too, are catching dragonflies.

They have dug long tunnels in a sandy bank in which to nest.

Suitable sandbanks like these are not common,

so bee-eaters, perhaps from necessity,

habitually nest in colonies.

They dig tunnels three feet or so into the banks with their beaks,

kicking the loosened sand behind them as they go.

The trouble with tunnels as narrow as THIS one

is that there's no room to turn round.

The spoonbills have also arrived and are finding the food they need

in the warm shallow lagoons of the Coto Donana in Spain.

The storks are here too, claiming the same nest sites

that they have used each season for decades.

The exultant rituals with which the pair greet one another

reinforces the bond between them,

as does the act of adding further bits and pieces to the nest itself.

There's no structural need for these extra twigs,

but placing them in just the right position

clearly demands the most careful consideration.

The young, exposed to the hot sun, are given not only solid food

but drink, even if they don't know immediately that it's coming.

And then they get their fish.

Flamingos, in spite of their somewhat unwieldy

and laborious flight,

are also adventurous and determined travellers.

They've come north across the sea

from the southern shores of the Mediterranean,

in Morocco and Tunisia,

to spend the summer in southern Spain

Or on the lagoons around the mouth of the Rhone in the Camargue.

Here, they are at the northernmost extent of their range

and some years they seem to be in two minds

as to whether to breed or not.

They will only start their courtship displays

if a sizeable flock of them have made the trip.

Even if they get as far as laying their eggs,

they may still suddenly change their minds

and forget about the whole business.

If and when the eggs DO hatch,

the young quickly leave the nests and gather together in groups,

wading manfully through the shallows on their short legs.

The parents can recognise their chicks by their calls,

even in such great congregations as these, and will feed no others,

supplying them with a soup of microscopic creatures

filtered from the lagoon,

as well as trickles of water pumped up from their stomachs.

It will be 2½ months and high summer

before they're big enough to feed themselves

and have enough strength to accompany their parents

on the long flight back to Africa.

The blazing summer sun brings great danger to plants.

It threatens to rob them of their precious water

by evaporation through the pores in their leaves.

And Mediterranean plants have several different ways

of dealing with that.

The asphodel, which flowers during February and March, is now dead.

Its flowers gone, its leaves withered

and it survives only as a bulb deep in the ground.

Sage also loses its winter leaves,

which are these long, brown dead leaves here,

and sprouts specially small summer leaves

which curl, which have very few pores in them,

and which also produce a fragrant oil which covers the leaf in a film

and so reduces evaporation.

And that oil also serves as a protection.

Because whereas we like its taste, goats dislike it,

and so goats don't browse the sage.

This plant, poterium, in winter is a mass of green leaves.

But now, in the summer, it's lost those leaves

and grown instead these small summer leaves here.

And it protects itself against goats with this mass of spines.

The caper remains green

by generating enormous suction in its roots,

which collects the last vestiges of moisture.

It even flowers at this time

and prevents its blossoms from shrivelling

by producing them at night.

By early dawn they're fully open,

attracting bees with their powerful scent.

But by midday they are dead.

The buds of these short-lived flowers are produced in sequence,

along the length of its shoot.

One for each night of the flowering season.

Summer may be a hard and crippling time for many plants,

but for these animals, it's the easy time of the year.

Lizards, being reptiles, draw their body heat directly from the sun.

There are over 30 different species of them on the European shore alone

and they actively hunt for insects and other small creatures

throughout the hot summer months.

And there are other reptiles on these hot, sandy northern shores.

Snakes. Quite a lot of different kinds,

and one or two that are quite impressive.

This in front of me is one of the biggest of them...

..and one that is, in fact, poisonous.

Though not lethally so.

This is a Montpelier snake.

It's one of the biggest of the snakes in the western Mediterranean.

It grows to six feet, that's a couple of metres long.

And although it's poisonous,

its poisons are in fact restricted

to the fangs at the back of its mouth.

The teeth in the front have no poison in them.

So if it's going to inject its poison into its prey,

it has to get a really good bite.

And it can't do that, of course, on a human being.

And, even if it did,

the poison it has is not really lethal,

it would just put me in bed feeling pretty uncomfortable

for a couple of days.

Its prey, after all, is not human beings.

Its prey are other small creatures

which it finds around these sand dunes.

Prominent among its targets are lizards.

It's now high summer.

The flowers for the most part have disappeared

and the woods of pine and olive

are filled with the continuous, sometimes deafening calls,

of that most indefatigable of insect singers, the cicada.

REPEATED CHIRPING

It produces this insistent invitation to mate

by vibrating a membrane

in chambers that open on the underside of its abdomen.

In the withered grass,

crickets and grasshoppers are searching for their last meals.

Many will die before the summer is out,

leaving their eggs in the soil to hatch next spring.

The hunters in this grass-root jungle

are spiders, scorpions and centipedes.

They're comparatively long-lived creatures

and must get enough food now

to last them through the coming winter famine.

So they are rounding up the last survivors

of the herds of grasshoppers

and other plant-eating insects.

Drought is now the enemy of all.

Snails climb up the stems of bushes

and seal the entrance to their shells with mucus

so as to retain their body moisture no matter how hot it gets.

Many butterflies and moths have now died.

But one species manages to live in vast numbers

right through these hot months.

In one secluded wooded valley, on the island of Rhodes,

where the trees provide shade

and a permanent stream keeps the air humid,

a million Jersey tiger moths have assembled.

At the edge of the stream,

a freshwater crab gathers any moths that settle within reach.

The moths also fall prey to water boatman,

if one of them accidentally flutters into the water.

For four months they eat nothing,

but live entirely on the fuel reserves

that they built up during the winter.

And that's why I mustn't talk loudly or make any sudden gesture

that would cause them to fly into the air,

and so use up a bit more of that valuable fuel

that they MUST have if they are to last through until the autumn,

when they can lay their eggs.

So here, the only thing that disturbs them is, perhaps,

the sudden call of a bird or the fall of a leaf

and maybe the need to flutter up into the air

to escape the direct rays of the sun

and find a place that's a little cooler and a little darker.

These conditions are almost African.

And indeed, a few African animals have, over the millennia,

slowly spread up around the eastern end of the sea

to colonise the islands and the northern shores

of the Mediterranean.

This is one of them, the chameleon.

Today it's found on the island of Crete and in southern Spain.

And during the summer, at least, it finds plenty to eat.

Even chameleons aren't always 100% successful.

Tortoises are really animals of the tropics

and have little resistance to cold.

So when winter comes, they will have to take refuge below ground

and hibernate, in order not to be killed by the frosts.

The hot dry summers of the northern Mediterranean

would suit many African mammals.

It's the cold, wet winters that keep the majority of them away.

Even so, one or two species

have managed to come up north and live permanently here.

And this cave, in Cyprus, is home of one of the more surprising of them.

It's a fruit bat the size of a squirrel.

Fruit bats don't have the sophisticated echolocation technique

of the smaller, insect-eating bats,

which enable them to navigate in black caves

and so escape the colds of winter by hibernating there.

But this one species, the Rousette fruit bat,

has improvised its own version by drawing back its lips

and squeaking out of the side of its mouth.

It's nowhere near as accurate a system

as the high-frequency sonar of the insect-eaters,

but it is good enough to enable the Rousette bat

to roost in caves like this and so survive the winter,

and be the most northerly living of all fruit bats in the world.

Another African mammal also roams the European night.

The porcupine.

Like the bats, it, too, survives the chills of winter

by taking shelter underground, in dens and burrows.

It's the same species that is common over much of Africa,

though these European colonists

seldom get quite as big as the African ones.

Even so, it's a hefty animal, as big as a large spaniel.

In Europe, it's found only in Sicily and Italy.

An odd distribution and one that makes it likely

that the animal was actually taken across the Mediterranean

by the Romans 2,000 years ago.

Be that as it may, porcupines are still quite common

in these countries, though they're not often seen

since they only come out of their dens at night.

This little creature, the rock hyrax,

may be the next African mammal to reach Europe

if the climate gets any warmer.

Its headquarters are in East Africa,

but today its reign extends up the eastern end of the Mediterranean,

through Egypt and into Israel and the Middle East.

And that was one of the routes taken around a million years ago

by the most influential mammal ever to come out of Africa to Europe.

When the ice age came,

this immigrant species took refuge in caves,

including this one in eastern Spain.

When investigators started work here, the cave was full of soil.

But as they dug they discovered evidence

of a change in this creature's activities

that was to be of the greatest significance.

For every foot of soil they removed

they went back in time some thousand years.

Until, 25 feet down and some 28,000 years back in time,

they reached the bottom.

And here, in these lowest layers,

they found worked flints, like this.

These are the handiwork of that tool-using super-ape - man.

As time passed, the flint tools they produced

became more finely worked.

There was also evidence here

not only of these people's improving manual skills,

but of their developing imaginations.

Drawings scratched on pieces of rock,

as elsewhere they're found on cave walls.

A horse. And, outlined with equal accuracy and certainty, a deer.

From the remains they left strewn in the cave after their meals

we can get a detailed picture of what animals they hunted,

and what lived with them in the lands around the Mediterranean.

Bears were certainly numerous.

At this time, between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago,

the ice age was only just coming to an end,

and much of southern Europe was still tundra.

The bears, warm in their long, hairy coats,

were then living much as they do now, farther north in the Arctic

on fish from the rivers, carrion, small rodents,

but mostly succulent roots, berries and leaves.

Moose, which today still live in considerable numbers

in northern Germany, Scandinavia and the Arctic, were also common.

They waded through the bogs, munching water plants

and taking refuge in the winter in the pockets of coniferous forests

that were now beginning to spread across southern Europe

as the glaciers retreated northwards.

Bison, too, were abundant.

Herds of them wandered across the open steppes.

And they, too, as the climate warmed

moved into the spreading forests.

They survived in the wild until the early years of this century.

Today, a few live in semi-captivity

in forests on the Russian-Polish border and in the Caucasus.

There were also ibex.

It's a kind of wild goat that lives and squabbles in the mountains.

The wolf, too, was abundant.

And around this time it became the first animal to be tamed be man.

It seems likely that people regularly reared orphan wolf cubs

in their camps and, when they became fully grown,

recruited them as hunting assistants.

The wolf helped the men to track with its super-sensitive nose

and used its sharp teeth to help bring down the quarry.

In return, it took a share of the meat of the kill

and gained the protection of mankind

and a place in the warmth beside the campfire at night.

As time passed and the climate got warmer still,

forests spread right across Spain.

This valley would then have been unrecognisable

beneath a thick cover of oaks and elms and hazels.

Some 10,000 years ago,

there were still people living in caves in these valleys.

But in one way at least, their habits had changed.

They no longer painted on the cave walls.

Instead, some of the people, presumably the hunters,

came out and painted on the cliffs, like this one.

Here for example, there's a frieze of deer.

Another, with its ears pricked in alarm.

Stags, head lowered in a charge.

An ibex.

And a great wild bull,

probably the most dangerous animal in the whole forest.

And these artists also portrayed themselves.

A hunter, armed with a bow and arrow,

has killed some deer which lie prostrate in front of him.

Footprints lead to another animal,

wounded with a spear or an arrow in its belly.

Two men set off on a hunt.

Another climbs a tree.

This is his head and his arms and his legs.

And this is the tree, at the top of which is a bee's nest full of honey,

with angry insects flying out of it.

But, as these paintings make clear,

the people remained primarily hunters.

And that meant that they had to spend most of their lives

wandering in search of their prey.

But at the other, eastern end of the Mediterranean,

around the mouths of the great rivers,

people were learning new ways of living.

Ways that ultimately were to transform

these lands around the Mediterranean.

Their First Eden.