Sorry its been so long since my last post, but I promise I will get more consistent with my writing schedule. So, to get back to exploring exhibits after a summer of research and moving, I decided to check out the Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History. What could be more DC than a trip to the Smithsonian (and the Natural History museum has always been one of my favorites).
Opened in March of 2010, the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins explores the story of human evolution over the past 6 million years.
To enter the exhibit, visitors must pass through a tunnel, which is reminiscent of images from the Back to the Future movies and other instances of time traveling seen in popular culture. As you walk through the short tunnel, with LED lights along the top of the tunnel and different images of early hominins and hominids flashing past on the video screens, it is possible to imagine that you have been - momentarily - transported to a different places and time.
Video screens on both sides of the tunnel show visitors different stages of human evolution, although almost no description is given to these scenes. The videos, along with the tunnel itself, seem to transport the exhibit visitors in to the distant past, creating a type of physical barrier between the exhibit and the rest of the museum.
As you move through the exhibit, it becomes evident that the curators wanted to connect the visitor to the exhibit in a personal way. Through a constructivist approach (allowing the visitor to make their own path around the exhibit, asking questions without a definite/finite answer, putting the patron in the exhibit in different ways), the curators were able address why different stages of evolution should matter to modern visitors, and thus connect with their audience.
By using broad questions and statements, the label text throughout the exhibit is designed to draw the visitor into the rest of the didactic, by evoking both curiosity and emotional responses from the visitor. From simples questions that mankind has struggled with for lifetimes, like "what does it mean to be human?"....
...to placing the visitor on a family tree, something so familiar to us today, but made so different because of the other branches surrounding our own.
The exhibit is also has many interactive areas, from discerning the difference between early fossilized footprints (can you find the Australopithecus afarensis?)
to solving archaeological mysteries from Shanidar Cave, where Neanderthal burials were discovered.
There are also sculptures scattered throughout the exhibit of different hominins carrying out ordinary, everyday tasks, another way to evoke an emotional connection from the exhibit visitor. These statues include a Paranthropus boisei gathering food and a Homo heidelbergenisis (below) sitting next to a fire.
Around the exhibit are more traditional didactic panels - in contrast with the more interactive panels - that cover various aspects of life, from body shapes to social life.
These panels still maintain some interactive aspects, mainly in the form of asking different questions of visitors.
They even created an app that allows visitors to transform themselves into an earlier hominin.
Here I am as a Homo neanderthalensis! (don't all Neanderthals were red lipstick?)
One of the most interesting parts of the exhibit for me was the section on early art. Using images from cave paintings from around the world, the curators were able to show that art - often considered a defining characteristic society and mankind itself - has been an important part of the evolutionary story. Yet another connection between the visitor and the subject of the exhibit.
At the end of the exhibit, the visitor is greeted with the fact that the story of human evolution is not complete. By showing how we continue to manipulate our environment and how that in turns effects both our culture and physical bodies, the exhibit comes full circle. The visitor is brought back to the present at the end by a very simple device: a electronic screen displaying a number. The number is constantly changing, increasing as the visitors stand there. It displays the current population of the world. Once again, putting the person standing there (who is one of those billions of people) into the story of human evolution.
I want to briefly apologize for the low quality of my pictures in the post. I was using a non-flash setting that was not working as well as I had hoped.
