Peabody Exhibition Delves Into Riddle Of Human Origins

NEW HAVEN — “Scientific evidence suggests that humans ultimately evolved from an extinct African Great Ape,” says Yale Anthropology Professor Andrew Hill, a specialist on human evolution and curator of “Fossil Fragments: The Riddle of Human Origins,” a new permanent exhibition that opened this week at Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Mr Hill explains: “From both fossil and molecular evidence, it seems that the human lineage and African Great Ape lineage diverged from one another between 6 and 8 million years ago.” From this starting point, the exhibition provides a wealth of new evolutionary information and fossil material.

After documenting the ongoing scientific history of our ancestry and profiling the individuals involved in important fossil discoveries, the exhibition examines a procession of hominid species from the earliest, living over six million years ago, to the earliest representatives of our own species, Homo sapiens, emerging in Africa 200,000 years ago.

Fossil evidence shows that the different kinds of humans that once lived in the past were very successful animals; some existed far longer than our own species has thus far, and at some periods more than one species of hominid lived at the same time, in the same place.

Exhibition highlights include a full-size replica of the most complete early hominid skeleton ever found, the “Turkana Boy” (for Lake Turkana in Kenya, near where the fossil was recovered). The young male Homo erectus stands some 5’6” tall with an estimated height at maturity of six feet.

A replica of a hominid footprint trail preserved in volcanic ash shows that the hominid that left it 3.7 million years ago walked on its back legs much like we do. There are real food remains and tools of Neanderthals, the best-known extinct hominids who lived from at least 300,000 to 32,000 years ago. DNA evidence indicates that Neanderthals did not contribute to the modern human gene pool.

The integration of art and science has been significant in developing the exhibition. A floor mural by the New England artist Tony Falcone, based on original archaeological plans of a site in Olduvai in Africa drawn by the renowned paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, makes visitors feel like part of an excavating team. They walk over bone fragments — a jaw bone here, a piece of limb there — scattered along the ground just as Ms Leakey found them.

Twelve cast bronze skulls represent six Homo sapiens skulls, each paired with a hominid ancestor or, in one case, our nearest living animal relative, the chimpanzee. Visitors can touch and compare each pair to get a visceral impression of the morphological differences between them.

Michael Anderson’s fossil reconstruction of a male Neanderthal is a three-stage examination of Neanderthal cranial and facial anatomy.

The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is at 170 Whitney Avenue. It is open Monday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm; and Sunday from noon to 5 pm.

Programs are free with admission unless otherwise noted.

Admission is $7 for adults, $6 for seniors (65 plus), and $5 for age 3-18 and older students with I.D. Admission is free for everyone on Thursdays between 2 and 5 pm. The museum is wheelchair accessible.

For additional information call the museum’s Infotape line at 203-432-5050 or visit www.Peabody.yale.edu.