The world is becoming smaller by the day. The mass media bring us all closer together, and promote a single lifestyle. Western culture, the most advanced, technologically-speaking, proves attractive to the majority of the inhabitants of the so-called ‘Third World’, who all too easily abandon their traditions and customs, in the rush to become part of this new lifestyle, this new social system, very different from their traditional codes of behaviour. Very different, too, from the cosmogony imagined by their forefathers, as they looked to the sky, observed nature and, generation after generation, studied the seasonal changes of climate. There have been many losers in this rapid change: people who have been uprooted; tribes now extinct, victims of illnesses such as flu, against which they had absolutely no defence; men and women lost between the past and the present, unable to fully embrace either. But a privileged few have managed to survive. Ethnic groups that live very much as their ancestors did, and still conserve the wisdom that for so long has served them so well. It is these inhabitants of our planet that we will visit in the course of this series. Each episode of ‘Heirs of the Earth’ will not concentrate on a specific ethnic group, but rather a region, with a number of different groups. We will study their diverse customs, and how these are related. The history of these peoples will be told in the first person by the people themselves, who will introduce us to their traditions, their beliefs, their music and their daily life.