Smithsonian to Open Hall Dedicated to Story of Human Evolution

By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 12:24 PM

The National Museum of Natural History announced Wednesday that it is dedicating a new hall to the story of human evolution, giving emphasis not only to how we became humans but how changes in the natural world affected human development.

The Hall of Human Origins, tracing a 6 million-year history, is scheduled to open March 17 -- 100 years to the day that the museum opened.

"Humans evolved over millions of years in response to a changing world," said Rick Potts, the Smithsonian's director of the Human Origins Program and an internationally known anthropologist. The work of his team in Kenya and China will be a keystone of the hall, with the working title "What Does It Mean to Be Human?" Potts said the materials will enable the public "to put humans in their place."

The 15,000-square-foot space will be named for David H. Koch, a chemical engineer and executive vice president of Koch Industries who gave $15 million for the hall's construction. The other primary donor to the project is Peter Buck, a physicist and co-founder of Subway restaurants, who gave $15 million to an endowment for research and accompanying education programs.

The total cost of the hall is $20.7 million, with $3.5 million from other private sources and $2.2 million from the Smithsonian's federal funds.

In a statement, Koch saluted the Human Origins Program, saying, it "has the power to influence the way we view our identity as humans, not only today, but for generations to come." Koch, an MIT-educated engineer, has given generously to many educational, cultural and medical institutions, as well as to conservative political groups. He was the 1980 Libertarian vice presidential candidate.

To tell the biological, cultural and ecological story, exhibitions will include 75 cast reproductions of skulls from the past 6 million years, a reconstructed face of Sahelanthropus (one of the oldest known hominids), fossils of early apes and humans, a large exhibit devoted to the human family tree, and a bone bed where visitors can learn about different kinds of fossil evidence.

One of the hall's highlights will be a display of original fossil skulls from the Cro-Magnon period and France's La Ferrassie cave, plus major discoveries from the 19th century. The materials are being lent by the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, which is closed for renovations. Another exhibit will contain a specially designed case with an original Neanderthal skeleton excavated from the Shanidar Cave in Iraq. The skeleton was discovered in the 1950s and has been in storage at the Smithsonian for the past 10 years.

"One of the threads throughout the hall is 'How do we know?' " said Potts. "How do we know a footprint is a human footprint?"

high five to the smithsonian for their commitment to actual science.

On a related not, it has recently been discovered that humans, not chimps, are the more primitive form, country to popular belief. I must say, I found that to be quite humbling...

you're going to have to explain to me what you mean by "more primitive form"

On a related not, it has recently been discovered that humans, not chimps, are the more primitive form, country to popular belief. I must say, I found that to be quite humbling...

A few years back a new fossil was discovered and determined to be the oldest known human/chimp species yet discovered and thus closest to the Common Ancestor. Despite this, it was noted that the species in question was more human-like then chimp-like indicating the Common Ancestor was more human-like then chimp-like in form. Thus, contrary to popular belief, chimps have evolved more then humans.

Actually, none of us are in our "primative form," as we have all been evolving into our current forms to this very day. While the fact that humans split from chimps 6 million years ago, rather than the 3 million years that separate the two closest great apes, chimps and bonobos, it doesn't mean we are any more primative. Thank you primatology.

you're going to have to explain to me what you mean by "more primitive form"

Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids
Tim D. White,1,* Berhane Asfaw,2 Yonas Beyene,3 Yohannes Haile-Selassie,4 C. Owen Lovejoy,5 Gen Suwa,6 Giday WoldeGabriel7

Hominid fossils predating the emergence of Australopithecus have been sparse and fragmentary. The evolution of our lineage after the last common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees has therefore remained unclear. Ardipithecus ramidus, recovered in ecologically and temporally resolved contexts in Ethiopia’s Afar Rift, now illuminates earlier hominid paleobiology and aspects of extant African ape evolution. More than 110 specimens recovered from 4.4-million-year-old sediments include a partial skeleton with much of the skull, hands, feet, limbs, and pelvis. This hominid combined arboreal palmigrade clambering and careful climbing with a form of terrestrial bipedality more primitive than that of Australopithecus. Ar. ramidus had a reduced canine/premolar complex and a little-derived cranial morphology and consumed a predominantly C3 plant–based diet (plants using the C3 photosynthetic pathway). Its ecological habitat appears to have been largely woodland-focused. Ar. ramidus lacks any characters typical of suspension, vertical climbing, or knuckle-walking. Ar. ramidus indicates that despite the genetic similarities of living humans and chimpanzees, the ancestor we last shared probably differed substantially from any extant African ape. Hominids and extant African apes have each become highly specialized through very different evolutionary pathways. This evidence also illuminates the origins of orthogrady, bipedality, ecology, diet, and social behavior in earliest Hominidae and helps to define the basal hominid adaptation, thereby accentuating the derived nature of Australopithecus.

1 Human Evolution Research Center and Department of Integrative Biology, 3101 Valley Life Sciences Building, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
2 Rift Valley Research Service, Post Office Box 5717, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
3 Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Authority for Research and Conservation of the Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture, Post Office Box 6686, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
4 Department of Physical Anthropology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, 1 Wade Oval Drive, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.
5 Department of Anthropology, School of Biomedical Sciences, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44240–0001, USA.
6 The University Museum, the University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
7 Earth Environmental Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.

So you're saying that, despite having undergone more changes, chimps are equally evolved as humans? By that logic a car, despite undergoing more changes sense the 1st wheel, is no more advanced then a horse-drawn wagon...

that makes no sense at all.

We and chimps have evolved the exact same amount, because the exact same amount of time has passed for us as for chimps since the common ancestor.

do you have a link to whatever story it is that you're mangling horribly in your reinterpretation?

So you're saying that, despite having undergone more changes, chimps are equally evolved as humans? By that logic a car, despite undergoing more changes sense the 1st wheel, is no more advanced then a horse-drawn wagon...

I'm not sure what he's referencing regarding chimps, but I'm not sure if you're aware that it is possible for animals to be generally considered more biologically primitive than their evolutionary kin, at least in part.

ie/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatara

More evolved is a strange term that sounds almost political.

I'm guessing this is what he's referring to...

http://www.livescience.com/animals/070417_chimps_evolve.html

1. Margaret A. Bakewell,
2. Peng Shi, and
3. Jianzhi Zhang*

Observations of numerous dramatic and presumably adaptive phenotypic modifications during human evolution prompt the common belief that more genes have undergone positive Darwinian selection in the human lineage than in the chimpanzee lineage since their evolutionary divergence 6–7 million years ago. Here, we test this hypothesis by analyzing nearly 14,000 genes of humans and chimps. To ensure an accurate and unbiased comparison, we select a proper outgroup, avoid sequencing errors, and verify statistical methods. Our results show that the number of positively selected genes is substantially smaller in humans than in chimps, despite a generally higher nonsynonymous substitution rate in humans. These observations are explainable by the reduced efficacy of natural selection in humans because of their smaller long-term effective population size but refute the anthropocentric view that a grand enhancement in Darwinian selection underlies human origins. Although human and chimp positively selected genes have different molecular functions and participate in different biological processes, the differences do not ostensibly correspond to the widely assumed adaptations of these species, suggesting how little is currently known about which traits have been under positive selection. Our analysis of the identified positively selected genes lends support to the association between human Mendelian diseases and past adaptations but provides no evidence for either the chromosomal speciation hypothesis or the widespread brain-gene acceleration hypothesis of human origins.

So you're saying that, despite having undergone more changes, chimps are equally evolved as humans? By that logic a car, despite undergoing more changes sense the 1st wheel, is no more advanced then a horse-drawn wagon...

Erm...evolutionary changes and "primitiveness" have aren't necessarily related. Quantity and quality are completely different. You could take a car and paint it a dozen different times and replace a bunch of the parts thereby making it undergo more changes...but that's not why you'd say that cars are more advanced. In the same way, if you made a million modifications to a wagon, without a motor and with a dependence on animals for locomotion, it would always be more primitive.

You see, evolution does not necessarily go from less advanced to more advanced. It goes from less well adapted to more well adapted. And think about it: humans in general perform best in civilized society, because that's what we've adapted to. Chimpanzees are best adapted to jungles, and surprise! That's where they live. Switch us and it doesn't work so hot. A chimpanzee would probably be freaked out in a city, and most untrained people would not fare well in the jungle.

So are we more "primitive"? In our jungle survival skills, definitely. But humans have better communicative abilities, better cognitive skills, and the ability to cooperate, which are things that they don't have.

Besides, humans don't really evolve biologically anymore because genetic traits don't provide the reproductive successfulness that they do in uncivilized society.

Erm...evolutionary changes and "primitiveness" have aren't necessarily related. Quantity and quality are completely different. You could take a car and paint it a dozen different times and replace a bunch of the parts thereby making it undergo more changes...but that's not why you'd say that cars are more advanced. In the same way, if you made a million modifications to a wagon, without a motor and with a dependence on animals for locomotion, it would always be more primitive.

You see, evolution does not necessarily go from less advanced to more advanced. It goes from less well adapted to more well adapted. And think about it: humans in general perform best in civilized society, because that's what we've adapted to. Chimpanzees are best adapted to jungles, and surprise! That's where they live. Switch us and it doesn't work so hot. A chimpanzee would probably be freaked out in a city, and most untrained people would not fare well in the jungle.

So are we more "primitive"? In our jungle survival skills, definitely. But humans have better communicative abilities, better cognitive skills, and the ability to cooperate, which are things that they don't have.

Besides, humans don't really evolve biologically anymore because genetic traits don't provide the reproductive successfulness that they do in uncivilized society.

Besides, humans don't really evolve biologically anymore because genetic traits don't provide the reproductive successfulness that they do in uncivilized society.

Besides, humans don't really evolve biologically anymore because genetic traits don't provide the reproductive successfulness that they do in uncivilized society.

The japanese for example are observably evolving - their average height has shot up in the last few decades...

The japanese for example are observably evolving - their average height has shot up in the last few decades...

The japanese for example are observably evolving - their average height has shot up in the last few decades...

Hooray for huge schoolgirls.

But anyway...I didn't think about things like the impact of the industrial world on natural selection. Which was silly of me, since I've used the Pepper Moth during the industrial revolution as a visible model of natural selection. Okay, people still evolve; I've changed my hypothesis. I do imagine that it's slower though, since people generally try to lower mortality rate.

Why don't creationist just say that God created evolution / controlled it, so indirectly, he created Man?

It's a win-win

Evolutionists still have evolution
Creationist still get God creating man

There.

That's the position of most creationists. I think they call themselves evolutionary-creationists and support the Big Bang hypothesis claiming it as proof of the, "Let there be light!", declaration by God. Everyone knows the annoying fools are the ones to get noticed and not the silent intellectuals, thus the ID creationists are the only ones that get into the news.

I don't think the idea that God directs evolution is called creationist...

I don't think the idea that God directs evolution is called creationist...

Behold, Theistic Evolution, when Young-Earth creationism is too crazy, and Darwinism is too blasphemous.

I don't think the idea that God directs evolution is called creationist...

Why don't creationist just say that God created evolution / controlled it, so indirectly, he created Man?

It's a win-win

Evolutionists still have evolution
Creationist still get God creating man

There.

No, you misunderstand (your own link, even). Proponents of Theistic Evolution (or Christian Darwinism) do not find Darwin blasphemous at all. Ultimately, theistic evolution is on the opposite side to creationism.

Believe me, I'm fairly familiar with theistic evolution. I'm not ignorant; I'm saying you are wrong.

He's being ridiculous on purpose, he doesn't actually think that. Just an attempt at being funny.

What happened to you, you use to be far more laidback. Now you seem rather stuffy.