It’s not everyday that I find myself gripped by a detailed, scientific explanation of fossils and ancient scientific studies, but something about "Becoming Human: Unearthing Our Earliest Ancestors" leapt off the screen for me.

It’s not just a scientific case study; it’s a mystery, about piecing together the clues to recreate mankind’s earliest days.

In the first episode, which premieres at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, "Becoming Human" shows how the crucial piece of the puzzle was the discovery of "Selam," or "Lucy’s Child," a nearly-complete child fossil that altered our understanding about how we think the evolution from ape to man took place.

It was not a discovery that was taken lightly. The scientist who first stumbled upon the fossils spent five years excavating the imprints from sandstone, working with one grain at a time.

And NOVA recreates that agonizing work, revealing the moment when the face first came into focus, and revealing the discoveries about Selam’s brain that marked an important chapter in human evolution.

This is pretty captivating stuff, seeing the unveiling of something that’s been hidden away for 3.3 million years, holding clues that are vital to our understanding of ourselves.

Things grow even more astounding the following week, on Nov.10, as we move from "Selam" to "Turkana Boy," the first skeleton found in Kenya that bears a close resemblance to modern humans.

Sporting a more evolved brain, and noticeably different physical features, these are the people, scientists believe, who mastered fire, hunting and showed traits of social bonding.

And scientists have also started to theorize that what became our greatest advantage as a species was not our ability to create fire or build structures but our capacity to run long distances, tiring out prey like deer so we could move in for the kill.

The final chapter on Nov. 17 narrows in even further, going beyond the first humanoid and the first Homo erectus to reveal the roots of our own species, the Homo sapiens.

For some time now, we’ve believed that Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago in Africa, but there’s a new wave of evidence that suggests a period of global cooling resulted in an exodus from Africa far earlier than scientists originally imagined.

There was a stretch of time when the Homo sapiens population could have dropped to only a few hundred, and as it was the migratory decisions made by those early souls that allowed the species to endure.

NOVA often has a way of bringing to life scientific stories with gusto. But this three-part television event is operating at an entirely different level.

It is breathtaking, to think about the millions of years that have brought us to where we are today, the astounding discoveries that have helped us to piece together our lineage.

We talk about bringing science to life, but "Becoming Human" helped me to realize that I am living proof of a most unlikely chain of events that started eons ago.

E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com