Bob Geldof has joined forces with the BBC and BBC Worldwide for a groundbreaking anthropology project that will "record every human society on the planet".
Billed as "the definitive record of us - Mankind - at the beginning of the 21st century", the ambitious project will consist of a website, The Dictionary of Man, and a new eight-part BBC TV series, 'The Human Planet'.
The Dictionary of Man will be a vast digital catalogue of human existence where ideas and information can be exchanged.
On the website, human differences in the years to come will be logged and people around the world will be able to use the latest social networking technologies to track and trace family, tribal and national dispersal over the centuries.
As part of the project film crews will travel around the world to record the core 900 separate groups of people that anthropologists believe inhabit the earth.
This material will be available online, in DVD encyclopaedias, books, magazines and CDs.
Announcing the project at the MIP conference in Cannes, Geldof said: "This will be an A to Z of Mankind which will catalogue the world we live in now, the people who share this planet, the way we live and the way we adapt to face common and different challenges."
He continued: "Mankind is the world's most extraordinary animal. In an age of globalisation and increasing connection, we face the growing homogenisation of cultures and the disappearance of extraordinary and diverse mechanisms that man has invented in order to survive in whichever environment he has found himself. Culture is a function of survival."
