Last Human Standing

Tuesday, September 14 @ 6:00pm & 9:00pm

In “Last Human Standing,” the final program of the three-part series “Becoming Human,” NOVA examines the fate of the Neanderthals, our European cousins who died out as modern humans spread from Africa into Europe during the Ice Age. Did modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals or exterminate them? The program explores crucial evidence from the recent decoding of the Neanderthal genome.

How did modern humans take over the world? New evidence suggests that they left Africa and colonized the rest of the globe far earlier, and for different reasons, than previously thought. As for Homo sapiens, we have planet Earth to ourselves today, but that’s a very recent and unusual situation. For millions of years, many kinds of hominids co-existed. At one time Homo sapiens shared the planet with Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and the mysterious “Hobbits”–three-foot-high humans who thrived on the Indonesian island of Flores until as recently as 12,000 years ago.

“Last Human Standing” examines why “we” survived while those other ancestral cousins died out. And it explores the provocative question: In what ways are we still evolving today?

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Sundays @ 4:30pm

Scrapbook Memories is the premier television program for scrapbookers. It inspires you to collect and preserve your valuable photos. Whether you call it scrapbooking, archiving or memory crafting, let Scrapbook Memories teach you how to preserve your treasured family memories in creative ways. Each program explores the latest techniques and trends to help you with your scrapbook projects. From adhesives to albums; the program has information on products, how-to’s from layout to photography, and dozens of page ideas to inspire.

This week’s Episode: Gifts and Cards

First, we have a great gift for your favorite scrapbooker – it’s the gift of memories. Then Julie Fei-Fan Balzer has a unique and very quick gift with a binder clip photo holder. Last up it’s a party with Patti Wilkinson. What are gifts without a party – or maybe that’s a party without gifts? We have banners, bows, and favors all from paper strips and the technique is adaptable to any occasion.

Hosts: Beth Madland & Julie McGuffee

Beth Madland started scrapbooking as a child when she made end-of-year albums during junior high and high school. In fact, Beth remembers trading Mrs. Grossman’s “stickers by the yard” when she was in 6th grade. But Beth really got involved about five years ago when she walked into her first scrapbook store and discovered the wonderful world of acid free paper and stickers.

Beth spent eight years in television news as a reporter, videographer, producer and eventually hosted the number one morning news show in Lexington, Kentucky. On one of her shows, “Let’s do Lunch,” Beth started producing “Scrapbooking Tips of the Week” in conjunction with a local scrapbook store. Having more fun demonstrating crafts and scrapbooking on TV than covering the latest hard news story, Beth searched for work on a scrapbook TV show and left news behind.

When she’s not cropping and pasting photos and stickers, Beth enjoys spending time with her new husband, Will and their two big dogs. Beth lives in North Dakota.

Julie McGuffee has been scrapbooking for over 40 years. She received her own camera at age 11 and has been hooked on photography ever since. Her father served in the RAF in the early 40’s and documented the years he spent in the Middle East through the many photographs he took. Julie loved looking through the albums he put together and, following his example placed her own photos in albums. “We didn’t have the wide range of products available for today’s scrapbooker”, Julie tells us, “but my dad decorated and titled his pages and handwrote captions for his photos. To me they were, and still are, the most beautiful scrapbook pages.”

Originally from England, Julie has lived in the US for over 25 years with her husband, 2 children and a succession of dogs. She is also a very talented decorative painter and all-round crafter and has worked in the Arts & Crafts industry professionally since 1991. She has authored over 30 “How To” Arts and Crafts and Decorative Painting books and is a regular columnist for Craftworks magazine. Her monthly Creative Lettering column, which she was invited write in 1997 ran for over 4 years.

In 1996, Julie, and fellow designer, Jean Kievlan formed their own design services company. When scrapbooking started to gain momentum they worked closely with manufacturers to promote and develop innovative product for this new and exciting market. Julie was also a host of More than Memories for 4 years, a regular guest on Hands on Crafts for Kids which also airs on PBS, A.C. Moores’s Crafters Corner, QVC and the guest craft expert on “At Home Live with Chuck & Jennie” which airs on the Family Net channel. Julie is also a regular contributor to the scrapbooking section of Michaels.com.

Be sure to say hello to Julie at any of the Memory Expo shows around the United States and at the Great American Scrapbook show in Arlington, Texas, where she can be found at her booth – Jean & Julie’s Craft Club!
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Quest for Sacred Caves

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3 @ 6:00PM

In an attempt to unravel a mystery, a team of internationally renowned climbers and explorers join forces with archaeologists, anthropologists and art historians to climb into unexplored cave complexes that humans had not entered for hundreds if not thousands of years. What they find inside will rock the Himalayan world and re-write the history of this remote and mystical region. The story takes place in the legendary Kingdom of Mustang, a hidden corner of the Himalayas previously off-limits to outsiders. Hundreds of caves punctuate the sacred landscape and little is known about why they were carved out, how they have been used, and what lies inside the mysterious caves. Just a year earlier, during their scout, the team discovered a rare library of ancient Tibetan texts, thousands of hand-inked folios in dust-laden piles inside the caves. Their aim now is to return to the caves and rescue the texts from the crumbling landscape and retrieve them before looters get to them. The texts are adorned with beautiful “illuminations,” small paintings worth tens of thousands of dollars on the international art market. As they prepare to climb up into the caves, a group of youth from a nearby village try to stop them. What ensues is an intriguing set of events that involve the King of Mustang, the highest lama of the land, and indeed the divinities that reside in the nearby cliffs.

Dr. Mark Aldenderfer with skull from cave in Upper Mustang.

The texts are from the pre-Buddhist religion known as Bon. This little-understood faith is the indigenous faith of Tibet, upon which Tibetan Buddhist culture is founded. Yet the religion has suffered persecution over the years and has been nearly wiped out. To find an ancient treasure-trove of both Buddhist and Bon texts, some completely unknown, is of high value to the remaining Bon practitioners and anthropologists like Charles Ramble from Oxford University’s Oriental Institute: “These caves are probably the most reliable indicator of the continuous history of this area because they’ve always been used. The kinds of things we find in there, from the archaeological record, to perhaps the richest literary repository we’ve found means that these really are the places on which we need to focus if we want to establish as full as possible a picture of the history and culture of the Himalaya.”

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Episode 2: The Power of Ideas

Thursday, November 19 @ 8:00pm & 11:00pm

The second episode of Michael Wood’s journey through Indian history covers the last centuries BCE—the age of the Buddha, the coming of the Greeks and the rule of the emperor Ashoka, one of the greatest figures in world history.

Beginning with incredible images of a Jain festival that takes place once every twelve years, Wood sees the Buddha as India’s first protester, follows the invasion of India by Alexander the Great and ends with the birth of the first great Indian empire.

The theme of the episode is the power of ideas in Indian history, and among the people Michael Wood meets is His Holiness the Dalai Lama who explains why Buddhism is still relevant today.

Stupa at Kolhua, near Vaishali, in Bihar

The journey takes us by railway to the famous sites of the Ganges plain, Benares, Sarnath and Bodhgaya; by helicopter and army convoy through northern Iraq to the site of the greatest battle in the ancient world; by truck up the Khyber Pass, then by river to the first great Indian capital Patna. Using archaeology, living traditions, legends, and “India’s Rosetta stone”, Michael Wood tells the story of the first great Indian state, “the forerunner of today’s India”.

We hear the dramatic story of the first great emperor who renounced his kingship and starved himself to death. Finally we meet his grandson, who after a cruel and violent opening to his reign, renounced warfare and introduced the dangerous idea of non-violence, which runs down through Indian history all the way to Mahatma Gandhi and the Freedom Movement.

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JOURNEY OF TRANSFORMATION

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7 @ 8:30PM

Mustang – Journey of Transformation is a 30-minute documentary that tells the remarkable story of a Tibetan culture pulled back from the brink of extinction through the restoration of its most sacred sites. Narrated by Richard Gere, the film features interviews with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the King of Mustang, and Luigi Fieni, the chief art conservator of Mustang’s ancient Buddhist masterpieces

The Himalayan Kingdom of Mustang lies on a high and windswept plateau between northwestern Nepal and Tibet in one of the most remote regions in the world. Although Mustang is culturally and ethnically Tibetan, politically it is part of Nepal. At a time when Tibetan culture in Tibet is in danger of disappearing under China’s occupation, Mustang remains uniquely preserved. This starkly beautiful place is home to one of the last surviving repositories of Tibetan sacred art from the 15th century. To travel here is to journey into the past where one can witness ancient Tibetan ways of life.

Saturday, November 21 @ 7:00pm

In 1931 the rains stopped and the “black blizzards” began. Powerful dust storms carrying millions of tons of stinging, blinding black dirt swept across the Southern Plains—the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico. Topsoil that had taken a thousand years per inch to build suddenly blew away in only minutes. One journalist traveling through the devastated region dubbed it the “Dust Bowl.”

Surviving the Dust Bowl is the remarkable story of the determined people who clung to their homes and way of life, enduring drought, dust, disease—even death—for nearly a decade. Less well-known than those who sought refuge in California, typified by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” the Dust Bowlers who stayed overcame an almost unbelievable series of calamities and disasters.

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Collision

Sunday, November 15 @ 7:00pm & 11:00pm

Point of impact — Friday afternoon on England’s busy A12 highway. Six cars collide in a terrible spectacle leaving two dead. Detective Inspector John Tolin (Douglas Henshall, Primeval) is called in to clean up, and quiet the cries of racism coming from the family of one of the victims. But a methodical investigation only scratches the surface of the ten strangers involved, and the surprising and touching ways they are transformed after the accident. Senior Investigating Officer Ann Stallwood (Kate Ashfield, Poirot), herself entangled with Tolin, joins the inquiry as allegations of corporate crime, infidelity, shameful secrets and murder slowly rise from the wreckage. Written by Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War) and Michael A. Walker, Collision investigates human nature, fate and the intriguing ways the truths of our lives are revealed.

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Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel

November 15 @ 9:00pm

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