Ann Jones

So how did a bird with a voice like this end up with a 46cm swirling hydraulic penis that corkscrews counterclockwise and travels faster than the speed limit?

The answer lies in the evolution of sex.

Sex is weird.

I know you know it.

I know it.

God has seen whatever you do when you're doing it.

And so I'm going to make a series about it.

And the thing is, when you really think about sex, it gets even weirder.

There's an outie that has to get stuck inside an innie that then links to a production line of eggs to assemble a perfect little baby.

So many things have to line up.

Why do we do it like this?

Congratulations, you have just swiped right on an ardent adventure with me, a series where we are going to try and unpick how we, and I mean all living things really, not you and I personally, but how we went from splitting ourselves in half to double the population, to periodically feeling compelled to copulate in such a vigorous and sometimes highly embarrassing manner.

And in this first romp, we are going to time travel through Earth's history right up until it needs fresh underpants with the very first erection.

But to get there, we're going to have to go way back to the primordial soup where we're going to trace every single partner that nature has had since coming of age.

Earth, this is your sexual history

Four billion years ago.

And for the first half a billion of those years, it was just fire, brimstone, meteors.

I don't know, I wasn't there.

And then one day, we still don't know how this happened, by the way, but life just popped into existence.

From the minestrone of early Earth's oceans arose your great, great, great, great nana.