Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough is a British television natural history series made by the BBC in association with Warner Bros. Television and Reiner Moritz Productions. It was transmitted in the UK from 16 January 1979.

During the course of the series presenter David Attenborough, following the format established by Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (both series which he designed and produced as director of BBC2), travels the globe in order to trace the story of the evolution of life on the planet. Like the earlier series, it was divided into 13 programmes (each of around 55 minutes' duration). The executive producer was Christopher Parsons and the music was composed by Edward Williams.

At a cost exceeding £1 million ($1.2 million), it was an immense project that involved filming over 100 locations around the world and took three years in the making by a team of 30 people with the help of more than 500 scientists. Highly acclaimed as a milestone in the history of British wildlife television, it established Attenborough as not only the foremost television naturalist, but also an iconic figure in British cultural life. It is the first in Attenborough's Life series of programmes and was followed by The Living Planet (1984).

Several special filming techniques were devised to obtain some of the footage of rare and elusive animals. One cameraman spent hundreds of hours waiting for the fleeting moment when a Darwin's frog, which incubates its young in its mouth, finally spat them out. Another built a replica of a mole rat burrow in a horizontally mounted wheel, so that as the mole rat ran along the tunnel, the wheel could be spun to keep the animal adjacent to the camera. To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, a slow-motion sequence was filmed in a wind tunnel. The series was also the first to include footage of a live (although dying) coelacanth.

The cameramen took advantage of improved film stock to produce some of the sharpest and most colourful wildlife footage that had been seen to date.

The programmes also pioneered a style of presentation whereby David Attenborough would begin describing a certain species' behaviour in one location, before cutting to another to complete his illustration. Continuity was maintained, despite such sequences being filmed several months and thousands of miles apart.

The best-remembered sequence occurs in the episode 12, when Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's sanctuary in Rwanda. The primates had become used to humans through years of being studied by researchers. Attenborough originally intended merely to get close enough to narrate a piece about the apes' use of the opposable thumb, but as he advanced on all fours toward the area where they were feeding, he suddenly found himself face to face with an adult female. Discarding his scripted speech, he turned to camera and delivered a whispered ad lib:

There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know. We're so similar. Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to ours that we see the world in the same way as they do. They live in the same sort of social groups with largely permanent family relationships. They walk around on the ground as we do, though they are immensely more powerful than we are. So if ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature's world, it must be with the gorilla. The male is an enormously powerful creature but he only uses his strength when he is actually protecting his own family from a marauding male from another group, and it's very, very rare that there is any violence within the group. So it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise all that is aggressive and violent, when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not—and that we are.