The film is narrated by explorer Lowell Thomas, whose steady voice guides viewers through an ambitious anthropological journey to Australia.
Joining him are Paul Withington, a Harvard physician, and Clifton Childs, an archaeologist, as they set out to explore a provocative question heard at the explorers club: which communities on Earth most closely resemble mankind’s ancient Neanderthal ancestors? The framing frames science and curiosity as the motive power behind the voyage, inviting audiences to weigh evidence as the team travels.
From the west coast of North America, the expedition sails onward, and the crew records indigenous peoples and their customs across a string of island stops. The route takes them to Hawaii, Bali—where the documentary shows Balinese daily life including scenes of topless women—Fiji, and traditional Māori communities in New Zealand. Each back-to-back encounter is presented as a living data point in the larger quest to map humanity’s deep history, with the camera capturing daily routines, dress, tools, and social rituals that filmmakers present as traces of ancient kinship.
The narrative then shifts to urban and desert settings as the travelers reach Australia. In Sydney, the harbor and city are laid out as a counterpoint to the more remote places they will visit. A train journey takes them to Ooldea, where Aboriginal Australians living in the desert are filmed, followed by a stop in Broome to visit the Aboriginal settlement of Boolah Boolah. The voyage continues across the Timor Sea to document fishing communities, where the footage includes a dugong being cut up and a sea turtle being dissected alive, a sequence that unsettles some viewers while underscoring the documentary’s unflinching stance on life in these regions.
Back on the mainland, the film presents Indigenous people who are described—through the documentary’s lens and accompanying flashbacks to an anthropology text—as still retaining traits that the filmmakers equate with primitive lineage. It contends that these observations position the Aborigines as some of the closest living approximations to mankind’s ancestral Neanderthals. > who have not lost their cannibal instincts.
A pivotal, emotionally charged chapter follows rumors of a white woman living with an Aboriginal tribe. The expedition heads to a very remote area and eventually discovers a white woman who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. She is married to a tribal Aborigine and is mother to his blond-haired child. The film records the careful, respectful inquiry into her welfare, and she ultimately declines to accompany the expedition back to civilization, choosing instead the life she has built in the community she has joined. Her decision leaves a lingering question about belonging, survival, and the pull of two worlds, a theme that threads through the entire journey and lingers in the viewer’s mind long after the final images fade.
