Götz Bielefeldt

Looking at whether the history of early human evolution should be rewritten. For decades, most experts have been convinced that Africa is the cradle of mankind and many fossil finds from Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and Chad seemed to prove it.

In 1916, the name of the French fortress town of Verdun came to symbolize the greatest battle of attrition of all time - a portent of mass death on the battlefields of the 20th century. Based on selected individual fates, the film "The Hell of Verdun" tells the story of a military inferno in which people were regarded as material, not as individuals. More than 700,000 soldiers, German and French, died, were wounded or remained missing, without the course of the front changing significantly.

Scientists speculate why the end of the last Ice Age caused the extinction of some of Earth's largest animals.

Filmmaker Michael Höft and his team travel to Kyiv during the coldest winter of the war. There, experts from the Ukrainian military intelligence service present the ARD team with surprising findings: downed Russian drones contain numerous components manufactured in the West, including electronic parts from German companies.