The story of human evolution here is really the story of the scientists who fought over it. The film traces the search for human origins from the 1856 discovery of Neanderthal bones in Germany's Neander Valley, through the Piltdown Man hoax that fooled British science for decades, to Eugene Dubois digging up Java Man in Indonesia while convinced he had found the missing link. Raymond Dart's Taung Child skull moves the search to Africa, and Louis and Mary Leakey's decades of work at Olduvai Gorge push the timeline back further still. The film builds to Donald Johanson's 1974 discovery of Lucy in Ethiopia, a skeleton complete enough to settle arguments that had run for a century. Reenactments and expert interviews carry the narrative alongside period photographs of the actual digs, and the film is honest about how often the field got it wrong before getting it right, treating the hoaxes and dead ends as part of the science rather than embarrassments to skip over.