Maybe it’s unintentional, but “Bones of Turkana,” a look at the life and work of Richard Leakey, feels a bit defensive, as if Creationists had just made viewers a sales pitch. “Don’t listen to them,” it seems to say. “Evolution is still the way to go and is every bit as beautiful as the biblical story.”


The program, Wednesday on PBS stations, recounts the discoveries of possible human ancestors that Mr. Leakey and his team have been making since the late 1960s in the Turkana Basin in Kenya. Only once does it come close to addressing Creationism directly — “If you get to the point that you don’t care less about the evolution of the buffalo or a butterfly, you are probably somewhat of an intellectual pygmy,” Mr. Leakey says — but it hits hard at the idea that reading the clues in ancient bones is a profoundly moving exercise.


“It’s a very emotional activity to dig and excavate and record,” one archaeologist who’s researching the beginnings of tool use says, “because you know that you are the first one after the hominid to touch something and take something in your hand.”


The program, which is accented with songs from Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” recounts the Leakey team’s signature discoveries, like the 1.6-million-year-old Turkana Boy found in 1984.


The most interesting part of the program isn’t the unearthing of the bones, however. It is when Mr. Leakey and his colleagues use those bones and other clues to shed light on the emergence of distinctly human behavior: walking upright, using tools, communicating via language. The crusty Mr. Leakey even grows momentarily poignant when talking about one human trait suggested by Turkana Boy: compassion.


“He had a spine that looks like it had deformities,” Mr. Leakey says. “He wasn’t a fully functioning, robust, shortly-to-be-a-teenager type. He was probably a person who needed a lot of help.”


That, says Mr. Leakey, who lost both legs in a plane crash in 1993, is a subject he knows something about.


Bones of Turkana


On PBS stations on Wednesday night.


Produced by National Geographic Television. Written and directed by John Heminway; John Bredar, senior executive producer of National Geographic Specials; Mr. Heminway, producer; J. J. Kelley and Katherine Carpenter, co-producers; Maggie Noble, editor; Toby Strong, director of photography.