Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

This edition features a spectacular journey along the Andes, the world's longest mountain range, stretching from the equator almost to Antarctica. In this harsh and unforgiving landscape, wildlife such as bears, pumas, condors and flamingos fight for survival in the numbing cold, ferocious winds and thin air.

The third episode looks at anxiety and explores why it is so common. It talks to neuroscientists who explain the physiological and evolutionary basis of anxiety. Although it can help animals escape predators, anxiety can cause serious problems for human beings. It talks to sufferers of anxiety and examines the different types of anxiety people can feel. It also looks at how social media can cause anxiety.

The great apes which include chimps, orangutans, gorillas and bonobos, seem to have rich emotional lives similar to our own. But just how smart are these animals? A new generation of investigators are converging on an explanation for why the non-human great apes never made the breakthrough into an accelerating human-style culture that builds on the achievements of previous generations.

After eight grueling years of hunting in the hot, wind-scoured desert of central Africa, an international team of researchers has uncovered one of the most sensational fossil finds in living memory: the well-preserved 7 million years old skull of a chimp-size animal, probably a male, that doesn't fit any known species. According to paleontologist Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France, whose team reported the find in Nature last week, there is no way it could have been an ape of any kind. It was almost certainly a hominid — a member of a subdivision of the primate family whose only living representative is modern man.

Professor Brian Cox examines how it was that in a universe made of stars, rocks and endless space, a conscious civilisation was born. His latest adventure takes him from a submerged space station in Star City on the outskirts of Moscow, to Ethiopia, high above in the Great Rift Valley, where he encounters the geladas, mankind's distant ancestors. Despite once being Africa's most successful primate, a species who at one time roamed across the entire continent, these days they are found in one just place in the remote Ethiopian Highlands. Cox investigates why these ancestors retreated, yet modern mankind has expanded across the planet.

Dr Alice Roberts asks one of the great questions about our species: are we still evolving? There's no doubt that we're a product of millions of years of evolution. But thanks to modern technology and medicine, did we escape Darwin's law of the survival of the fittest? Alice follows a trail of clues from ancient human bones to studies of remarkable people living in the most inhospitable parts of the planet and the frontiers of genetic research, to discover if we are still evolving - and where we might be heading.