Viewers of the BBC’s Human Planet marvelled at the ingenuity of Papua New Guinea’s Korowai people as they built a tree house high above the ground for a tribal family to use as their new home.

The episode of the acclaimed documentary series proceeded to show the family moving into the tree house and setting up home there, 140 feet up amid the tall canopy of the rainforest.

But it has now emerged that the entire sequence was staged for the cameras, plunging the BBC into a new row over fake programmes.

The corporation admitted that a sequence filmed for an episode of Human Planet in 2011 misled viewers by giving the impression the tallest tree houses built by the Korowai people were used as homes.

In fact the families live in tree houses built much closer to the ground, leaving the higher ones for ritual purposes, or simply meeting places for the tribe’s teenagers.

The programme also failed to make it clear to viewers that the particular tree house filmed for that episode had been erected for the benefit of the cameras.

The blunder was only discovered when the writer and adventurer Will Millard returned with a film crew for the forthcoming BBC Two series My Year With The Tribe.