BBC Documentary Films

Collection of documentaries exploring the ancient world's most mysterious secrets, monuments and myths. Featuring digital recontructions and dramatisations, as well as expert interviews and testimony.

Collection of documentaries exploring the ancient world's most mysterious secrets, monuments and myths. Featuring digital recontructions and dramatisations, as well as expert interviews and testimony.

In search of the earliest animals

In more than fifty years of broadcasting, Sir David Attenborough has travelled the globe to document the living world in all its wonder. Now, in the landmark series First Life, he goes back in time in search of the very first animals.

In the final episode of the series we go back 30,000 years to the middle of an ice age. The landscape is dominated by the mighty mammoths, living side by side with woolly rhinos, giant deer and two separate species of human. This programme follows the fate of a herd of mammoths in their annual struggle against the harsh ice age conditions. They spend every summer on the grassy plains of what will one day become the bottom of the North Sea.

One million years ago, South America was a continent of exotic oversized creatures found nowhere else on earth; nine foot terror birds, giant ground sloths and spiky-tailed relatives of the armadillo as big as cars. But the deadliest animal of them all was Smilodon, the largest of all the sabre tooth cats, with canines like carving knives. This programme follows the fortunes of an individual male - Half Tooth. Ousted from his clan by a pair of rival males, his life suddenly becomes a struggle to survive in this alien world.

This episode travels back in time to Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago to witness the beginnings of mankind. It follows a group of Australopithecus, a type of ape which, just like us, walks upright on two legs. But unlike us, these early members of the human family were not predators, they were prey. Things get worse and worse for the group as they are hunted by a sabre tooth cat called Dinofelis and fall victim to other dangers such as malaria, rival Australopithecus and a rampaging fourteen tonne Deinotherium.

This third instalment of Walking with Beasts goes back 25 million years ago to meet the biggest land mammals of all time - the Indricotheres. Up to 7 metres tall and weighing 15 tonnes, adults were too big to be eaten by any predator of the time. In fact it is only in the first few years of life that Indricotheres are vulnerable. This programme follows the fate of a calf from his traumatic birth to see whether he can survive droughts, six foot tall killer hogs and Hyaenodon - a predator the size of a rhino, with jaws that could crush a rock.

It is 36 million years ago, and mammals have taken over the world. They are no longer small furry animals living under the shadow of dinosaurs or killer birds, they have grown enormous and dominate the planet. This is an era of animals like Andrewsarchus, the biggest mammal carnivore ever to walk on land, and the Brontotheres, small brained bulldozing herbivores. It is in the sea, however, that the most monstrous mammals of all can be found.

The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, but what on earth happened next? This first episode of the sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs, drops in on our planet 49 million years ago to find it has fully recovered from the extinction and is covered in a mysterious forest. This is a time that the world has almost forgotten: Germany was a hot, sweaty jungle, birds ruled the Earth and preyed on miniature horses, and the ancestors of the whales walked on land.

The city of Pavlopetri, underwater off the coast of southern Laconia in Peloponnese, Greece, is about 5,000 years old, and is the oldest submerged archeological town site. Pavlopetri submerged town is located between the Pavlopetri islet across the Elafonisos village and the Pounta coast. The coast, the archeological site as well as the islet and the surrounding sea area are within the region of the Elafonisos Municipality, the old "Onou Gnathos" peninsula (according to Pausanias). It is unique in having an almost complete town plan, including streets, buildings, and tombs.

This summer, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is getting ready to feast. 

A gas cloud three times the size of our planet has strayed within the gravitational reach of our nearest supermassive black hole. And across the globe, telescopes are being trained on the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, some 27,000 light years from Earth, in the expectation of observing this unique cosmic spectacle.

The Secret Life of the Sun BBC full documentary 2013 solar scientists, Kate Humble and Helen Czersk
90 million miles away from us is the power that shapes our world - the Sun. We see it shine in the sky above us, but beyond our sight something dramatic is happening - the Sun is going into overdrive.

Six months on from one of the world's most devastating tsunamis, Panorama returns to Japan to hear remarkable tales of survival amid the epic destruction.

Piecing together new footage of the wave, reporter Paul Kenyon tells the dramatic stories of those who managed to escape when so many didn't.

Snowball Earth describes a theory that for millions of years the Earth was entirely smothered in ice, stretching from the poles to the tropics. This freezing happened over 650 million years ago in the Pre-Cambrian, though it's now thought that there may have been more than one of these global glaciations. They varied in duration and extent but during a full-on snowball event, life could only cling on in ice-free refuges, or where sunlight managed to penetrate through the ice to allow photosynthesis.