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Archaeologist Richard Miles presents a series charting the history of the breakthroughs and watersheds in our long quest to understand our ancient past. He begins by going back 2,000 years to explore how archaeology began by trying to prove a biblical truth - a quest that soon got archaeologists into dangerous water.

Archaeologist Richard Miles shows how discoveries in the 18th and 19th centuries overturned ideas of when and where civilisation began, as empires competed to `own' the past.

Richard Miles shows how 20th-century attention turned from civilisation and kings to the search for the common man against a background of science and competing political ideologies.

Dr Iain Stewart looks at how earthquakes and faults have shaped human history by bringing both life and death.

Dr Iain Stewart looks at how rocks have influenced the architecture of the Mediterranean, from the pyramids of Egypt to the squares of ancient Greece.

Tracing the history of cave paintings.

Dr Iain Stewart examines how the rocks beneath our feet played a crucial role in determining the beliefs of ancient civilisations.

Dr Iain Stewart looks at how ancient civilisations learned to exploit the water around them, from the flooding of our Stone Age ancestors' hunting grounds to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Dr Iain Stewart looks at how salt has played a crucial role in the history of the Mediterranean, from the ice ages to the preservation of food and dead bodies in ancient Egypt.

Veteran archaeologist Ned Kelly and a team of scientists investigate the find of a mummified body in the boglands of Cashel, Ireland.

A dig hopes to excavate the 2000-year-old tomb of Qin Shihuang, China's First Emperor.

Part 1/4. David Attenborough shows us how ancient creatures have come to be preserved as fossils and how those fossils can shed light on characteristics of these creatures' lives, and even their death.

Part 2/4. Could pterodactyls fly? And why did trilobites have such good eyes? David Attenborough investigates the secret lives of animals from the past, as told in the fossil record.

Part 3/4. David Attenborough uncovers dinosaur bones in the Sahara desert and visits the biggest, most spectacular dinosaur displays in the world.

Part 4/4. David Attenborough uncovers bizarre creatures of the earliest seas, tiny horses the size of spaniels and an animal that's half bird and half reptile - the rarest of them all.

Part 1/3. As life starts evolving in the oceans, our bizarre earliest ancestors battle against 3m long sea scorpions and giant carniverous fish. Their ability to survive will determine the shape of life on Earth and whether humans will exist at all. As our amphibian ancestors struggle onto land the monsters they face are even more deadly.

Part 2/3. Millions of years before the dinosaurs, a world full of giant sabretooth reptiles and huge armoured herbivores was obliterated when global temperatures soared and vast deserts blanketed the land. As the environment recovered, populations of one species of tough reptile exploded until it alone dominated the planet, but its reign was short-lived.

Part 3/3. The struggle for survival moves onto land in the shape of early reptiles such as Petrolacosaurus. In the carboniferous swamps, insects and arthropods have taken over and grown into giants, from the giant spider Mesothelae to millipede-like monsters. As the swamps dry up, the world becomes dominated by the first ever giant reptiles - the huge, sail-backed Edaphosaurus.

Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and we have hardly ever found a complete skeleton. So how do we turn a pile of broken bones into a dinosaur exhibit? Dr Alice Roberts finds out how the experts put skeletons back together, with muscles, accurate postures, and even - in some cases - the correct skin colour.

This episode explains how the 120-million-year reign of the dinosaurs ended when mammals became the fastest and fiercest creatures on the planet.

A look at the science that has proved Darwin's idea that intelligent, sophisticated humans have an ancestral connection with the ape.

It is only in recent years that experts have unearthed the biggest dinosaurs that ever lived. One monster eclipsed all others, more than seven times as heavy as diplodocus was the immense argentinosaurus.

A new generation of carnivores was about to take killing to the next level. At the end of the Cretaceous period, these new hunter killers had spread throughout the globe.

A look at bizarre dinosaurs such as the curious buck-toothed Exipdexipteryx, the amazing four-winged Microraptor and the pot-bellied Nothronychus.

A journey to discover the legendary lost city of Piramesse, a magnificent ancient capital built 3,000 years ago by the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses the Great. When it was finally rediscovered by early archaeologists, it opened up a bizarre puzzle because it was in the wrong place.

In the Lambeyeque valley in northern Peru lies a strange lost world, the forgotten ruins of 250 mysterious pyramids, including some of the biggest on the planet, colossal structures made out of mud bricks.

This is the story of the formidable Hittites and their long-lost capital, Hattusha, which has recently been rediscovered. Buried in this lost city is one of the greatest libraries of the ancient world, and all the secrets of this mysterious civilisation were written in two codes - one a unique form of hieroglyphs with which we can recreate the lost world of the Hittites.