This Europe: French scientists bring the great-aunt of humanity to life

French television viewers were treated last night to the most elaborate, cinematic re-creation yet attempted of the way our pre-human ancestors may have looked and behaved. A 90-minute documentary put flesh on the fragments of hominid bones, going back more than six million years, which have been dug up in central and eastern Africa.

The film, called L'Odyssée de L'Espèce or Species Odyssey, shows human-like creatures descending from the trees, discovering fire and weapons and (this being a French movie) courting and making love.

The early hominids, including "Lucy", the Ethiopian ape-woman whose remains were discovered in 1974, are re-created, with startling realism, by computer imaging of the kind used in Jurassic Park. The later human types are played by actors in masks and skins.

The scientific adviser for the film, to be shown in Britain this year, was Yves Coppens, the French palaeontologist who led the team which discovered Lucy, once hailed as the grandmother of humankind, but now regarded as probably one of our ancient great-aunts.

Mr Coppens, 78, admitted he nearly shed a tear when he saw the €3m (£1.9m) film before its first public showing on television. "I was sincerely moved," he said. "I was especially touched to see my little Lucy come alive."

Palaeontology is a competitive, even cut-throat, business and the film is bound to be controversial. It adopts the "French" interpretation of pre-human history, developed by Mr Coppens and his colleagues at the Collège de France. The opening scenes show the human-type behaviour – and death at the claws of a sabre-toothed tiger – of Orrorin tugenensis or Millennium Ancestor, a six-million-year-old hominid discovered by a Collège de France team in Kenya in 2000. Other palaeontologists put forward the competing claims of other hominid bones found last year in Chad. The French team says the remains are those of an ancient, female gorilla.

But the broad story told by Species Odyssey – how a small number of apes left the jungle and became more human-like as they had to defend themselves in open grassland – is accepted by most palaeontologists.

"The film should help us to understand there are not several forms of humanity, but only one," Mr Coppens said. "The 200,000 generations since have descended from the same small population. It is a message of fraternity."