Walking with Cavemen

Walking with Cavemen is a four-part television documentary series about human evolution produced by the BBC in the United Kingdom. It was originally released in March 2003. It was subsequently presented in the United States as a two-part series by the Discovery Channel and its affiliates. There was an accompanying book of the same title. The documentary was also published by BBC in 2004 as a two part documentary of 50 minutes each and was narrated by Andrew Sachs.
Like previous "Walking with..." documentaries, "Walking with Cavemen" is produced in the style of a nature documentary, featuring a voice-over narrator (Robert Winston in the original version, with Alec Baldwin in the North American release) who describes the recreations of the prehistoric past as if they were real. As with the predecessors, this approach necessitated the presentation of speculation as if it were fact, and some of the statements made about the behaviour of the creatures are more open to question than the documentary may indicate. The style is different in original and US versions, as Robert Winston travels through time to the location of drama taking place, while Alec Baldwin remains ever in the present day in a lit room with skulls representative of ancestral hominid species highlighted in each drama.
Each segment takes the form of a short drama featuring a group of the particular hominid in question going about their daily lives including the search for food, protecting territory, and caring for the sick and injured. The intent is to get the human viewer to feel for the creatures being examined, almost to imagine being one of them (a trait that the documentary links to the modern human brain).
Production.
In the previous "Walking with..." documentaries, extinct animals were recreated with CGI and animatronics. For "Walking with Cavemen", a slightly different approach was taken. While most of the animals depicted were still computer generated or animatronic, the human ancestors were portrayed by actors wearing makeup and prosthetics, giving them a more realistic look and permitting the actors to give the creatures a humanistic quality.