For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation. However, since the 1970s we have been facing exactly the opposite problem: people having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The author explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the globe -- Provided by publisher.

"In March 1946, scientists began to track thousands of children born in one cold week. No one imagined that this would become the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass five generations of children. Today they are some of the best-studied people on the planet, and the simple act of observing human life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parent, and die. This is the tale of these studies and the remarkable...

Link-Up Diary explores the consequences of the New South Wales governments long-term practice of taking Aboriginal children away from their parents and raising them in “white” environments. The film takes the form of a personal journey by the filmmaker, David MacDougall, as he spends a week on the road with three workers from Link-Up. Link-Up is an Aboriginal organisation founded in 1980 by Oomera (Coral) Edwards, herself taken away from her...

How did the human race populate the world? A group of geneticists have worked on the question for a decade, arriving at a startling conclusion: the "global family tree" can be traced to one African man who lived 60,000 years ago. Dr. Spencer Wells hosts this innovative series, featuring commentary by expert scientists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists.

This film examines the Egyptian rural craft of making a sieve called ghurbal (from the Arabic ghurbal meaning “to winnow” which is used to both “winnow” babies on their seventh day of life and to winnow grains for making ceremonial dishes, particularly kouskousi. Embedded in this material culture artifact are layered meanings of creative regeneration of the cosmic and human worlds. We visually follow the material process from tree log cutting...

In the Footsteps of Taytacha follows a group of Quechua-speaking musicians and dancers as they leave their remote villages high in the Andes Mountains of Peru and join thousands of other highlanders on the annual religious pilgrimage to the sacred peaks of Qoyllur-Rití. Quollur-Rití, the largest and most important religious ritual in the southern Andes, occurs only five days out of the year and involves walking both day and night in terrain over...