He doesn’t sit in an armchair, but continues to work on television documentaries that bring the natural world into our living rooms.
In my lectures on human origins, I always insert clips taken from his programmes, particularly when it concerns the origins of human behaviour as seen in the lives of our close cousins.
On one occasion he brought home to us the grisly details of chimpanzees co-operatively hunting a colobus monkey, and sharing the meat.
Here, he said, we see the origins of our own co-operative behaviour. On another programme he illustrated how they make and use tools.
However, today I will turn to Madagascar with its many fascinating parallels with the settlement of New Zealand. Archaeological research has traced the origins of the first permanent human settlement of Madagascar to about 400 AD, with the likelihood that it was a few centuries earlier.
Like the Māori, those intrepid explorers spoke an Austronesian language and reached Madagascar on the ocean-going waka from their homeland, which has been traced by common languages to southern Borneo.
On arriving, they encountered a strange new world, populated by massive elephant birds, even bigger than the biggest moa, weighing in at about 700kg.
And this brings me to David Attenborough. On a visit to Madagascar, he collected an elephant bird egg. This became the subject of a new venture, for he wanted to find out how old it was and to do so, he turned to our son Tom.
Tom was then director of the radiocarbon dating laboratory at Oxford University and he was invited to David’s home in Richmond to collect the egg. Some months later, David went up to Oxford for the result and there is a delightful scene where Tom gives him the date; it was laid about 1300 years ago.
This would make it one of the last of those colossal eggs known. There is another close match with New Zealand, for both the elephant bird and the moa succumbed to human hunting and became extinct about the same time.
