Visitors to the museum can also do more now than simply stare in awe at the bones. In an adjacent state-of-the-art educational lab, school kids can handle casts of a Homo sapiens skull and pelvis. They are also invited to sequence their own DNA, using cells swabbed from the inside of their cheek, and compare these sequences on sleek laptop computers to those of gorillas, lemurs, horses, and crocodiles.
The last section of the hall showcases creativity, from language to music and art. A beautiful 25,000-year-old limestone engraving of a horse from Abri Labattut, France, hails from an early period of human artistic expression, but the exhibit also explores creativity in other animals—such as birds and dolphins—and even in machines (a wire-trussed robot called RAP, or Robotic Action Painter, zigzags about at random, creating and later signing a work reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s splashes). But the sheer range of human creativity on display is what is most mesmerizing. In a final extravaganza, two large screens offer a hypnotic sampling of recent art from around the world, from orchestras and drummers, spinning records, a simpering Marilyn Monroe, and a tap-dancing Fred Astaire, to that apotheosis of human creative vision: synchronized swimming.
Q&A
DISCOVER senior editor Josie Glausiusz spoke with Ian Tattersall, cocurator of the new Hall of Human Origins and curator of the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History.
Why did you decide to transform the old hall? What were your goals?
There’s been an enormous amount of water under the paleoanthropological bridge, as it were, since 1993. The fossil story needed to be brought up-to-date, and there was this other opportunity of integrating the molecular story, which is something that only existed in a very rudimentary fashion back in the early 1990s.
What do you mean by the “molecular story”? How has sequencing our genes helped to chart the course of human history and evolution?
It’s been known for a long time that the great apes are our closest relatives, but the actual geometry of relationships between us and whatever our closest great ape relative is has been more clarified by DNA than it has been possible to do with the fossil record.
DNA also allows us to tell a much more complex story about the spread of Homo sapiens—initially out of Africa, and then to take over the entire world within the space of 70,000, 80,000 years. We really don’t have a very good fossil record for this at all. But by comparing the DNA of modern populations, particularly mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA, we can tell who in the world today is related to whom, where their ancestors came from, and how Homo sapiens spread across the face of the earth. That’s a story we weren’t able to tell really at all from the fossils. Then there’s the very recent achievement—again since 1993—of isolating DNA from Neanderthals. We now have the prospect of actually reconstructing the entire Neanderthal genome.
I was told that some people considered the dioramas in the old hall racist, because as the humans represented there evolved, their skin became lighter.
I think you always get some grumblings, but that particular complaint is based on a total misapprehension of the evolutionary process. We have tropical origins as a species, and if you are a hairless creature in a tropical environment, it is not a good idea to have light skin—due to the amount of ultraviolet radiation you are being subjected to. Generally speaking, you only find the very light-skinned populations in temperate latitudes, so it doesn’t really make much sense to suppose that our tropical ancestors out of Africa had anything but darker skins. It’s got nothing to do with any racist argument at all.
The Neanderthals, who became extinct a little under 30,000 years ago, adapted to colder climates, and are believed to have had lighter skin. It’s not as if we’re saying that primitive people had darker skins than advanced people; we were making no kind of political statement with the dioramas. We still have those original figures and have recycled them into the new hall.
