Robin Williams

You can see amazing stuff.

With more and more animals coming into town, we've got bin chickens, as they call the ibises, which are large birds, and they raid the bins.

And, of course, we've got the white cockatoos, which know how to open wheelie bins.

They copy each other and learn from each other.

Adaptation.

And you can tell that by taking your knowledge and going from the cities out into the wild.

And doing a comparison, like Darwin did.

Pamela Yeh, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Los Angeles.

And so back to Cairns, northern Queensland, and another reminder of the essential ability, knowing how to look at something and see a pattern or structure that most might miss.

Here's a leading archaeologist at James Cook University.

Well, Scottish is almost Greek, isn't it?

One problem, Arianna, and I found this when I was looking down a microscope, supposing to see what other people saw in that kind of haze or blob of something, whatever it is.

I could never differentiate, and they could do so almost immediately.

Now, I find the same sort of thing when I look at samples.

Your wonderful rooms here are full of drawers of samples of parts of fish.

Now, I can't tell one from the other, but then you've got to add another difficulty of trying to work out whether it's got ancient human associations.

When you are just walking around on a coastline or somewhere like that, how do you actually differentiate between what's important and what isn't?

Where recently have you been walking to look?

Dr. Arianna Lambrides, archaeologist in Cairns, and we'll hear her full amazing story in a couple of weeks, doing detective work on tiny clues.

Another report coming up, searching for the tiniest of clues for a gigantic payoff scientifically.