WASHINGTON — Our species has undergone a significant evolutionary change in the last 150 years. This is scarcely a sigh on the scale of long-term hominin evolution, some six million years of transformation that is the main concern of the impressive David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened this week at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. But without this recent, subtle, quick change, this $20.5 million exhibition would hardly have been possible.
The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in Washington includes this 30,000-year-old handprint from France. More Photos »
Multimedia
Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
Look, for example, at the gallery called “Meet Your Ancestors.” You can, if you like, gaze at the fossilized fragments of a Neanderthal skeleton discovered during the excavation of an Iraqi cave in 1958. Or you can examine two astonishingly well-preserved skulls on loan from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris for a few months — one from a 50,000-to-70,000-year-old Neanderthal, the other the original 1868 Cro-Magnon discovery, about 30,000 years old, representing our own species (Homo sapiens).
But these still might prove to be a little abstract to get the museum’s point, even with the careful preparation that went into the 15,000-square-foot exhibition. Move instead around a wall of 76 human skulls from different eons and see how the artist John Gurche has put flesh and hair on fossilized bones’ barren shapes. Here, mounted in cases, are heads of eight beings we recognize as distant kin, their simian characteristics qualified by expressions that reflect varying degrees of inner life.
Each is a different species, and each of these species, we learn, is human. Here is Homo heidelbergensis, who lived 200,000 to 700,000 years ago and may have been the ancestor of Neanderthals in Europe’s cold latitudes; the individual here looks out beneath protruding brow ridges, alert, interested, wary. Nearby is a less brawny, fierce-looking representative of Homo erectus, a species that roamed the world for almost 1.8 million years, far more than our own can yet dream of.
And, perhaps most startling, here is a female from Homo floresiensis, a species discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores only in 2003 that apparently became extinct just 17,000 years ago. Or is it a species at all? It has been casually referred to, as it is here, as a “hobbit” species since it stands just over three feet tall. But it clearly had a much smaller brain than Frodo’s or Bilbo’s.
Think, though, of what has happened to allow us even to acknowledge these personifications as close relations. Just a little more than 150 years ago Charles Darwin was made almost physically ill when contemplating the religious and cultural trauma his theory of evolution would inspire. He was deposing a divine order of immutable categories; he was also dissolving a sacral boundary that had separated the animal from the human.
Over the next century natural history museums remade themselves. Once they offered displays of hierarchical clarity. This approach changed into a narrative of transformations and demonstrations of a nature “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it; survival was the force of creation. The classical museum diorama shows habitats: nature’s theaters, whose forces shaped animal life. Ultimately Homo sapiens arose, standing erect over ancestral battlegrounds.
But now, under the oversight of the director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, the paleoanthropologist Richard Potts (who is also an author of a catalog published for the exhibition), something has changed again. As the hall points out, we now have far more information than Darwin did. There are fossil findings from thousands of humans extending over millions of years; we know how DNA works and can pinpoint the genetic crossroads of history; advances in microscopic analysis have allowed even identification of particles of fossilized pollen. These developments have offered a clearer understanding of the one idea that was always most difficult: the evolution of the human.
The exhibition’s theme is “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” And the new image of the human it creates is different from the one from a century ago. It isn’t that nature has suddenly become a pastoral paradise. Some of the most unusual objects here are fossilized human bones bearing scars of animal attacks: a 3-year-old’s skull from about 2.3 million years ago is marked by eagle talons in the eye sockets; an early human’s foot shows the bite marks of a crocodile. In one of the exhibition’s interactive video stations, in which you are cleverly shown how excavated remains are interpreted, you learn that the teeth of a leopard’s lower jaw found in a cave at the Swartkrans site in South Africa match the puncture marks in a nearby early-human skull: evidence of a 1.8 million-year-old killing.
Yet the emphasis here is not on the battle for survival but on the long trail of evidence left as the human thrived. Unlike Darwin, the hall reminds us, we know that there have been multiple human species, including Homo floresiensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, Paranthropus boisei, Paranthropus robustus, Australopithecus afarensis and Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
During the brief 200,000-year life of Homo sapiens, at least three other human species also existed. And while this might seem to diminish any remnants of pride left to the human animal in the wake of Darwin’s theory, the exhibition actually does the opposite. It puts the human at the center, tracing how through these varied species, central characteristics developed, and we became the sole survivors. The show humanizes evolution. It is, in part, a story of human triumph.
Thus along one wall of the exhibition space, we see a series of panels and cases that trace characteristic developments. We see how walking upright provided both advantages and disadvantages (by about 6 million years ago). Then came tool making (by about 2.6 million years ago), alterations in body shape, rapid increases in brain size (some 500,000 years ago), the urge for social interactions and the development of symbolic language and art (250,000 years ago). We see Neanderthal ornaments made from animal bone and the reproduction of a flute made from a mammoth’s ivory, about 35,000 years old, found in a German cave.
We also come to understand how interpretations of fossil remains are made by paleoanthropologists like Mr. Potts. A jawbone from which teeth are missing appears to be from an aged Neanderthal, part of a nearly complete skeleton found in a pit in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq. Analysis of the soil found bits of wood there along with pollen, suggesting that some 65,000 years ago an early human community ceremoniously buried its dead.
And at recent excavations in China, at Majuangou, stone tools were found in four layers of rock dating from 1.66 million to 1.32 million years ago; fossil pollen proved that each of these four time periods was also associated with a different habitat. “The toolmaker, Homo erectus,” we read, “was able to survive in all of these habitats.”
That ability was crucial. The hall emphasizes that enormous changes in the planet’s climate accompanied hominin development, suggesting that the ability to adapt to such differing circumstances was the human’s strength. Climate change was one of the forces that led to the triumph of Homo sapiens. A closing portion of the exhibition, with displays about population growth and contemporary climate change, suggests that Homo sapiens’ skills are being challenged yet again.
The hall bears repeated, close viewing, though children will also find amusements here, including the opportunity to come face to face with floor-level bronze models of their ancestors. But the two computer simulations at the exhibition’s end — one a simplified Sims-type game of cultural and environmental choice, the other a cartoonish vision of possible future evolutionary change — should be far more subtle. More wall text summarizing themes would have also helped: too much is left to the text of touch screens, buried inside menus of choices.
There are times too when it seems as if the Smithsonian has almost gone too far in humanizing evolution, as if it were answering those who, on religious grounds, object to the evolutionary universe and its inhuman brutality. (A touch-screen F.A.Q. suggests simply that such visitors use the show to “explore new scientific findings and decide how these findings complement their ideas about the natural world.”)
At any rate, the exhibition’s focus doesn’t really give us a feel for the daring of the evolutionary vision, which is a tale not of progress but of accident, frightening in the moment, fortuitous only in retrospect.
But the retrospective vistas provided here are, nevertheless, compelling and illuminating. This was conceived as a permanent exhibition, meant to serve a generation of visitors, but it was also designed to be easily adaptable to the pressures of scientific advances and visitor tastes. The evolution continues.
