This week's programme in the series on Man and Science Today.

Among the Yakut Indians the woodpecker is a prized animal. Its blood is used against scrofula; a powder prepared from a mummified woodpecker is used against high fever; contact with the beak is used as a toothache cure.
These practices may seem typical of bizarre primitive superstition, but to Professor Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, they suggest a process of thinking just as valid as any in civilised medicine.
For more than 30 years now, Professor Levi-Strauss has been studying and analysing the mind and behaviour of so-called primitive man. What he has found has turned out to be so subtle and complex that his theories should revolutionise the way that civilised man thinks of himself. In this film portrait Horizon sets out not only to explore some of Levi-Strauss's theories but also to capture the spirit of the man and his work.