The series consists of six episodes, each of which focuses on one of the following regions: Iraq, India, China, Egypt, Central America, and the West. In the beginning of the series, Michael Wood narrates: "We humans have been on the Earth for more than a million years, but civilization - life in cities - has come about only in the last 5,000. Through history civilizations have rose and fell, carved out of nature, dependent on nature, in the end - nature took them back. But in the past few hundred years, one form of civilization - that of the West - has changed the balance of nature forever. And now it is civilization itself that has become the central problem of our planet. To understand why, we must look afresh at how we see history." Then he travels around the world exploring those ancient cultures; he tries to show how different cultures have developed over time and how the past greatly influences all our lives.