First Life

David Attenborough travels back half a billion years to find the very first animals on Earth.

In more than 50 years of broadcasting, David Attenborough has travelled the globe to document the living world in all its wonder. In this series, he travels back to its very beginning — half a billion years ago, when the first animals appeared in the oceans and life on Earth changed forever.

From the fog-bound cliffs of Newfoundland to the deserts of North Africa and the rainforests of Queensland, Attenborough uncovers evidence of this extraordinary period in fossil sites whose recent discoveries had transformed scientific understanding of early life — a story that could only be told because the science to tell it had only just arrived.

Premiering on BBC Two, the series pairs remarkable fossil finds with pioneering photo-realistic CGI to bring the planet’s first creatures back to life with a precision and vividness never previously achieved — from the earliest complex organisms clinging together in the aftermath of a devastating Ice Age, to the arrival of predators, sensory abilities, and the first stirrings of sexual reproduction that accelerated the explosion of life on Earth. On its release, the series swept the Emmy Awards across multiple categories — recognition of the ambition brought to every dimension of the filmmaking.