History of the World, BBC One, review It would have taken, well, a Neanderthal to have missed any point Andrew Marr was making in the opening salvo of his not-unambitious History of the World (BBC One) on Sunday. This programme - which Marr had scripted well, although it did contain the summary statement, "It was all a shaggy dog story of unintended consequences" - was ruined by dramatic reconstructions. OK, so when you're talking about stuff that happened between 70 (the birth of Homo sapiens) and 17 (the invention of the needle) thousand years ago there isn't much source material to be shown. But did we still need to spend minutes watching scantily clad extras, standing in for prehistoric African nomads, pretending to get vertigo over a CGI ravine? How much more potent was the time spent in the Gargas caves in the Pyrenees, where Marr pointed to hand prints stencilled onto the walls 27,000 years ago. It was these stubby fingered shapes that brought history to life last night; not the rotten-toothed woman "inventing agriculture" as she peered repeatedly at an ear of wheat, or the poor beggar getting his throat slit to remind us that human sacrifice involved a lot of blood.