Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Over a person's lifetime they are likely to be prescribed more than 14,000 pills. Antibiotics, cholesterol lowering tablets, anti-depressants, painkillers, even tablets to extend youth and improve performance in bed. These drugs perform minor miracles day after day, but how much is really known about them? Drug discovery often owes as much to serendipity as to science, and that means much is learnt about how medicines work, or even what they do, when they're taken. By investigating some of the most popular pills people pop, Horizon asks, how much can they be trusted to do what they are supposed to?

For centuries scientists have been attempting to come up with an elixir of youth. Now remarkable discoveries are suggesting that ageing is something flexible that can ultimately be manipulated. The scientists are attempting to piece together why we age and more vitally for all of us, what we can do to prevent it. But which theory will prevail? Does the real key to controlling how we age lie with a five-year-old boy with an extraordinary ageing disease or with a self-experimenting Harvard professor? Could one of these breakthroughs really see our lives extend past 120 years?

We are the only species on earth that cooks its food - and we are also the cleverest species on the planet. The question is: do we cook because we're clever and imaginative, or are we clever and imaginative because our ancestors discovered cooking? Horizon examines the evidence that our ancestors' changing diet and their mastery of fire prompted anatomical and neurological changes that resulted in taking us out of the trees and into the kitchen.

The BBC has made an extraordinary new documentary, presented by Sir David Attenborough, which will reveal the discovery of a fossilised skeleton that may be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution. The centrepiece of the programme is the unveiling of the first-ever complete skeleton of an extinct animal called an adapid

New Zealand - 850 years ago New Zealand was the last major land mass to be discovered and colonised by humans. A mere 850 years ago, Polynesian seafarers arrived in a land with no terrestrial mammals. New Zealand was a land of birds, and its avian rulers were giants: huge herbivorous moas were hunted by Haast's eagle - the largest eagle the world has ever seen. But within the space of only 100-400 years, the eagle, all the moas and over 20 other species of birds were gone. Had mankind become the monster?

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.