Humans are a strange species. We stand up, we cook our food, we talk and we remember.

Our bodies aren’t covered in thick fur, and we don’t have sharp teeth or claws. And yet we aren’t extinct. We live on every continent.

How come we’re alive when stronger hominids aren’t? How did a tropical species come to dominate cold climates? What kept us alive for 200,000 years in this Great Human Odyssey?

The Great Human Odyssey is also the name of a spectacular new three-part series from Clearwater Documentary that explores our species Homo sapiens and what sets us apart.

The series was written, directed and narrated by Canadian anthropologist-turned-filmmaker Niobe Thompson. Thompson grew up in Wabasca, northern Alberta, where he worked fighting forest fires. Later, he travelled the world, getting his PhD in social anthropology at Cambridge. He went on to make Gemini Award-wining documentaries, and The Great Human Odyssey is the most recent. It premiered on CBC’s the Nature of Things.

I spoke to Niobe by telephone from Edmonton, Alberta about hominids, disease, reindeer, Neanderthal sex, evolution, coexistence, Papua New Guinea, Siberia, the Kalahari desert, genetic legacies… and more!