human evolution

A clip from Attenborough's Life of Mammals following a San tribesman in the Kalahari on an eight-hour persistence hunt, running down a kudu through harsh heat. It shows tracking, endurance running and the hunter's reaction after the kill.

A clip from Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants in which Richard Dawkins shows the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe during a dissection. The nerve takes a long detour down the neck and back up.

BobbyBroccoli's first of two long documentaries about Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who faked human cloning results. It tells the story of the scandal that shook a country.

Planet of the Humans, a full documentary by Jeff Gibbs presented by Michael Moore, arguing that the green movement has been co-opted by corporate and wealthy interests and that techno-fixes are not enough.

Revolution OS is a feature-length documentary on the history of free software and Linux. It covers Stallman and the GNU project, Torvalds and the kernel, and Raymond and Perens on open source, starting from the era of freely shared hobbyist code.

A documentary following Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society as they push the Mars Direct plan for sending humans to Mars using current technology and local resources. It also covers the clash with NASA's more expensive approach.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the village of Garavadi in Maharashtra, India, which took part in the Paani Foundation's Water Cup competition. It shows the water harvesting structures the villagers built in 45 days and how they restored groundwater and the local economy.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

A 2016 documentary by Igor Lopatonok that gives a historical perspective on Ukraine's divisions, the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan uprising. It argues that Western media painted Russia as the sole perpetrator.

First episode of the Norwegian documentary series Hjernevask, in which Harald Eia interviews researchers on the nature versus nurture debate. It focuses on the gender equality paradox and gender differences in career choice.

A short BBC Planet Earth clip from the Pole to Pole episode showing the courtship displays of birds of paradise.

Feature-length documentary following DeepMind's AlphaGo program as it prepares for and plays the 2016 match against Go champion Lee Sedol. It covers the team, the games, and the emotional reaction of the Go world to an AI beating a top human.

Machine Thinking argues the 1751 machine, a metal-cutting lathe associated with Vaucanson, triggered the biggest explosion of wealth in history by enabling precise manufacturing of other machines.

A short documentary clip of Japanese railway workers and Toyota staff using pointing-and-calling, a safety practice of physically pointing at and naming things while working. It includes examples from several railway companies.

Short BBC Earth clip from Life of Mammals in which David Attenborough shows orangutans imitating human behaviors like washing clothes with soap and using tools.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

A 2007 Channel 4 documentary by Martin Durkin arguing that human-caused global warming is overstated or a scam. It features contrarian scientists such as Richard Lindzen and promotes sunspot and cosmic-ray explanations for temperature change. Its claims are rejected by mainstream climate science.

NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts. It presents the history of the world's writing systems as a story.

Neil Halloran's animated, data-driven documentary visualizes the human cost of World War II and compares it with other wars and the trend toward fewer war deaths in recent decades.

A 2001 VPRO Noorderlicht documentary episode, filmed in Austin in 2000, visiting Edsger Dijkstra and his views on thinking as a discipline. It is in Dutch with English subtitles.

A Pitchfork TV documentary following Dan Deacon in Montana as he finishes his album Bromst. It shows the experimentation behind it, including pieces written for MIDI-driven player pianos.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

A BBC Weird Nature clip about vervet monkeys in the Caribbean that drink alcohol, and how they split into heavy drinkers, social drinkers and teetotalers.

Official trailer for the documentary Into Eternity, about Finland's Onkalo repository, built to store high-level nuclear waste safely for 100,000 years. It raises how to warn and communicate with far-future humans.

A Motherboard documentary episode from Nebraska about farmers and mechanics fighting manufacturers like John Deere over access to the diagnostic software needed to repair modern tractors. It shows how software locks have taken away farmers' traditional self-reliance.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.