Unfortunately I don't have a lot to go on. From what I can remember each episode started with an old man (possibly with a massive white beard) telling stories to a bunch of kids/young people. The kids/young people would then resemble characters in the story. Possibly the cartoon tried to chronicle parts of human history, starting with extremely early humans. I have this vague recollection of a part of the intro sequence which showed people crossing a land land bridge connecting asia and north america.
The cartoon also had a sci-fi series or something, in which the same characters (or at least characters that looked the same) were in a space setting.
If I had to guess I would say that the cartoon was made in the 80s.

It's the kind of cartoon that puts you in the mood for civilization :)

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

I was going to post about those myself, but you replied before me. They were both pretty nice and fun shows! Now I'm all nostalgic -will have to find them on youtube or something...
Anyways, you forgot the human body spinoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time..._Life -that was the one that was shown more onTV where I live...

Cool series. They were aired in 5 minutes mini-episodes each evening (so 1 full episode/week) when I was a kid, and you couldn't keep me away from the TV when it happened. Which was quite a success for an educative series about history.

I bought the boxed sets of "Il était une fois... l'Homme" and "Il était une fois... l'espace" 3-4 years ago and watched them again, and if you're willing to accept a few kitch episodes, especially in "space", they aged up pretty well. At 43, I'm still a fan :)

Damn, now I'll have the "...space" theme song in my head all day. Again. ^^

I like ...Life above all of them and think it is great cartoon. I loved it as kid and was looking forward to each episode.
Others are good too with the older one being better than the more recent, IMO.

They still air them here from time to time but for some reason they usually skip ...Life. :-( Those are both czech cartoons. Quite popular ones.
In the first one (Maxipes Fík) I always liked the openening scenes with rabbit and hunter more than the cartoon itself. :-)

Since the question was answered i gotta say: When your in new Texas and ya need some help, its mighty good to call on others... right Thirty/Thirty?

No but really, this got answered with the Speed if a Puma!

Damn, I didn't think it was going to be this easy! Like Starkrun said, with SPEED OF THE PUMA!
Thank you! Thank you so very much! I've been looking for this one for a long time.

Here is the bit that I remembered : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyBBZmS4xT4 NO! all I need is my trusty [url=https://youtu.be/UaMo4k7iG7s?t=62]Sara Jane

Oh, didn`t know that it was a french series. Always thought it was german, because of the geman title song by Udo Jürgens: "Tausend Jahre sind ein Tag" (Thousand years are one day). :-)

Meow! Purr, purr... Glad to have helped. ^^

The funny thing is that even though it's a french series and it immediately jumped to my mind when I read your description, I've never watched it. However, I loved The Many Dream Journeys of Meme.

The concept was nice and educational, but for some reason I could never really warm up to the characters. Not sure how much of that was due to the writing, how much due to the voiceovers and how much due to the drawing style and production values.

Why did the characters look so different from each other? Sure, like many cartoon series of the time it's a co-production of European and Japanese studios, but did they actually assign the look of the characters to artists with completely different style (franco-belgian BD / Japanese anime), or is that a style in itself, to mix many different looks? Superficial kid that I was I always wondered what the pretty girl with the big eyes saw in that dude with the semi-mullet, bushy eyebrows and creepy pupilless eyes ... :D

Maybe his good character or something? (I recall he usually tried to stop the bad guys and stuff...) As for his eyes, I hadn't thought that they were weird or anything...so, ugh, now I gotta get all these images of creepy pupilless dolls out of my brain...

True, but I didn't see that as a sympathethic trait, I remember him more as a show-off, know-all, white knight wanna-be hero. Maybe it was the writing; the whole concept of there being bad guys and that dude always trying to save the day with an attitude of superiority and self-righteousness is in itself a bit simple and boring already. Or my memory isn't that good anymore and I'm just outright prejudiced against him, because my kid self was jealous or something. ;)

I agree, though I appreciated the series more from a educational perspective, Il était une fois was(is) extremely preachy.

I'm only aware of one show that had a likable white knight : https://youtu.be/I4Iiuky_73k?t=100
"Ride Destiny! RIIIDE!"