The series marked the debut as a television presenter of Charlotte Uhlenbroek, a 32-year-old primatologist who had worked with Jane Goodall at Gombe Stream studying chimpanzee behaviour.

Featured prosimian species: Uhlenbroek begins the series in Africa, observing a group of chimpanzees in the West African forest.

Like the chimps, they are descended from a common ancestor, similar to the pygmy mouse lemur found today in Madagascar's dry forests.

It is a prosimian, a group of primates which are largely nocturnal, forced to hunt and feed at night by the more successful monkeys and apes.

Uhlenbroek watches Verreaux's sifakas feeding in didierea trees, then travels to the reed beds around Madagascar's largest lake to track the rare and elusive bandro.

In South East Asia, the proboscis monkey eats tough mangrove leaves which it digests by fermentation.

The final episode begins in the rainforest canopy of South East Asia, home to the smallest of the apes, the gibbons.

Humans share many other attributes with the great apes; strong family ties, intelligence, curiosity, reflection and the ability to manipulate our environment.

In Gombe, chimpanzees are filmed using sticks as tools, and in Guinea another group has learned how to crack nuts with stones.

Their human characteristics extend to affectionate hugs and kisses, but they have a dark side too, attacking and killing their own kind.

Humans as the most successful apes have left our primate cousins far behind: we have language, technology, religion and a thirst for knowledge.