Unlocking the mystery of humankind's migration into the Americas took the scientific mind of an anthropologist and the creative vision of a veteran filmmaker. As it happens, both are from Edmonton.
Niobe Thompson and Tom Radford - anthropologist and filmmaker, respectively - are co-founders of Clearwater, an international production company based in Edmonton. The pair co-produced, co-wrote and co-directed Code Breakers, an ambitious documentary that took them and their crew on a months-long trek to locations in Brazil, Siberia, Alaska and Oregon. The finished product took more than a year to complete, and makes its television premiere Thursday on CBC's The Nature of Things.
As projects go, says Radford, this one was, well, a doozy.
"We realized when we took on this story that we were biting off a pretty big chunk, because you can't really simplify a story like this when you're trying to recreate life from 14,000 years ago. All the locations play an important role in understanding this bigger theory on how the Americas were first peopled."
Radford says the idea for the series arose as a result of research done by another Edmontonian, University of Alberta anthropologist Andrzej Weber. For years, Weber headed up a team of researchers who spent summers studying the human remains of ancient hunter-gatherers near Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake. They unearthed the largest collection of prehistoric human skeletons ever found, their 8,000-year-old bones still intact.
"The skeletons he recovered around the lake, and the DNA work being done at the University of Alberta, was the seed that led us on this kind of epic journey," says Radford. "It's a pre-historic version of The Iliad or The Odyssey. From a filmmaking point of view, you couldn't have more exciting material to work with."
The program challenges a long-held theory by scientists around the globe that a mammoth-hunting people called Clovis first settled the Americas 12,000 or so years go, sweeping across the Bering Land Bridge and down an ice-free corridor following the Ice Age. But fossilized human feces some 14,000 years old, found by an American archaeologist on the now-dry shores of a lake in Oregon, stunned many in the scientific community by disproving that.
Radford and Thompson (who is the host and narrator of the program) use the global locations to unravel the story, interviewing scientists and scholars along the way. In Siberia, they enlisted the help of local peoples to illustrate, often graphically, day-to-day life of ancient civilizations, who relied on hunting for their existence.
"We knew it was really critical to do recreations of this great journey, but you just can't hire actors to do it," says Radford. "Recreating that life of thousands of years ago was one of the greatest challenges of the film, in terms of the research and preparations of the weapons and costumes and that way of life."
All the props and costumes were made locally and taken along on location. The appearance of a woolly mammoth during the program is also courtesy of an Edmonton company, Plastic Thought, which provided the computer-generated animation.
"We have a wonderful team of filmmakers and technicians who work from Edmonton," says Radford.
Clearwater has already been commissioned to do another documentary for The Nature of Things called Perfect Runner, about human migration out of Africa. Code Breakers grew out of its first project for The Nature of Things called Inuit Odyssey, about the great migration across the Arctic 1,000 years ago when the Inuit came to Canada.
"That's when we came upon the trail of this earlier migration 14,000 years ago," says Radford, "and now we want to keep going back in time. Perfect Runner will take us back nearly a million years ago.
"We're doing a trilogy of migration films, but kind of in reverse; each one goes further and further back."
Author: Jamie Hall | Source: Telegraph Journal [January 12, 2011]