The Human Story

5 Pages 1299 Words

The main objective of the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution at the American Museum of Natural History is to “Look at what we share with other living things, and at how we acquired our unique attributes, in order to discover our own place in nature.” To do this the exhibit must answer some key questions about our origins, for example: When did humans first appear? What guided our development? What were key events to their discovery? How does our biology parallel that of our relatives, the primates? And how does our past affect our present and influence our future? The exhibit answers these questions by creating a cleverly laid out space that includes displays of several different types and styles.
Upon entering and moving through the hall it becomes apparent that the different galleries are arranged in ascending chronological order and deal with a specific topic as per our (Human) development throughout history. As a result, the hall could easily be compared to a 3-D/virtual reality-timeline that takes the viewer into the world of our distant ancestors while educating the viewer. For example, on hand are plaster copies of renowned fossil discoveries, including “Lucy” and the “Turkana Boy”, there are also displays depicting our earliest human relatives in their natural landscape and habitat, including the Neanderthals and Australopithecus Africanus.
The exhibit commences with the assertion that, “We belong to the great branching system of living things which has arisen from an ancestor that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago.” With this statement the museum establishes’ a definite commonality between all living things and directs it’s focus to the biological definition of humans.
The first gallery is titled Humans Are Vertebrates and through a combination of text and backlit sections of each system we are able to understand how each one works and what purpose it serves. The following systems define the human as...