Human Planet

From lush cloud forests to bare summits that take your breath away, the higher you climb the tougher life gets on a mountain. Human Planet explores the extraordinary ways in which people survive at extremealtitudes where nature becomes utterly unforgiving.

In the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia, the vast open spaces make hunting for animals almost impossible, so the locals have forged an astonishing partnership with golden eagles which can do the hunting for them.

On the precipitous cliffs of the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia we join a young boy locked in a dramatic battle with fearsome gelada monkeys which are hellbent on raiding his family's meagre grain harvest.

In the Himalayan state of Nepal we witness a rarely seen ceremony - a sky burial. In a land where there is little wood to burn for cremation and where burying the dead is virtually impossible, the dead are fed to vultures in the ultimate reverence of nature.

Grasslands feed the world. Over thousands of years, we humans have learned to grow grains on the grasslands and domesticate the creatures that live there. Our success has propelled our population to almost seven billion people.

But this episode reveals that, even today, life in the 'Garden of Eden' is not always rosy. We walk with the Dorobo people of Kenya as they bravely attempt to scare off a pride of hungry lions from their freshly caught kill. We gallop across the Steppe with extraordinary Mongolian horsemen who were 'born in the saddle'. And in a perfect partnership with nature built up over generations, Maasai children must literally talk to the birds. The honeyguide leads them to find sweet treats, but they'll have to repay the favour.

Rivers provide the essentials of life: fresh food and water. They often provide natural highways and enable us to live in just about every environment on earth. But rivers can also flood, freeze or disappearaltogether!

Human Planet joins Sam Niang, a Laotian fisherman, as he walks a high wire strung above the raging Mekong River rapids on an extraordinary commute to work.

There's also a look at the remarkable partnership between Samburu tribesmen and wild elephants in their search for water in the dried-out river beds of northern Kenya.

Also in the programme, a father takes his two children on a six-day trek down a frozen river as part of the most dangerous school run on Earth, and the ice dam busters of Ottowa provide a dynamite solution to a city centre hold-up.

A look at the one environment that's been made by us for us - the city. Over half of the world's population now lives in the urban jungle. The city is built to keep untamed nature out - but nature can't be pushed away. From bed bugs sucking our blood at night to rats in our restaurants, many animals have adapted to a life with us.

But not all urban animals are seen as pests. In the ancient city of Fez in Morocco, the leather tanneries depend on wild pigeon droppings for their business. Even futuristic Dubai would falter without falcons. In the suburbs of Jaipur, a Bishnoi woman breastfeeds an orphaned fawn. People are starting to realise that nature is key to our continued survival. On Manhattan's rooftops there is a community of beekeepers. In Masdar, Abu Dhabi, British architect Norman Foster is creating a carbon-neutral waste-free future city. Is this the future? The human planet is starting to realise that we'll only survive if we protect nature.