ONCE upon a time, the idea of primates acting like humans was the stuff of PG Tips adverts and not a great deal else. Nowadays, animal experts are discovering more and more behaviours which seem to echo our own, as Dr George McGavin demonstrates in the three-part Monkey Planet, in which he gets up close and personal with some of the world’s most fascinating primate species.

It’s not all monkey business. He has a serious point to make about our ancestry.

“We – that is monkeys, lemurs and apes – are all primates, and I want to introduce you to this amazing animal family, to meet some relatives you never even knew you had,” he says.

He’s hoping to learn more about the reasons behind the extended family’s successes and what it is that makes them so special. It looks like the secrets could lie in a number of areas, from their ingenious survival tactics and extraordinary physical adaptations to the fascinating familial structures which seem to echo our own in a number of uncanny ways.

And their highly intelligent, flexible minds, which demonstrate that the smartest primates are actually more like us than you’d ever think possible.

McGavin’s journey takes him from the snowy mountains of Japan to the blistering, windswept savannah of South Africa. From the ninja tarsier, a springloaded ambush predator the size of a tennis ball, to the magnificent herds of geladas in the mountains of Ethiopia, primates have evolved and adapted to suit environments far and wide.

He finds a remarkable number of parallels between us and our primate cousins, and captures behaviours which have never before been caught on camera.

He begins in the jungles of Borneo, where he meets a wild-living orang-utan by the name of Siswi, who has learned to use all manner of human inventions to make her life better – using soap to wash herself, doodling with a pen and paper, and even untying a moored boat and paddling it out into the river by herself.

Then he leaves the heat of the jungle for the numbing cold of the Japanese Alps, where he finds macaques who huddle together in trees to share their warmth, and heads 100 metres underground to a secluded monkey dormitory.