ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Teaching Human Evolutionin the Museum

Monique Scott

Published online: 21 August 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Abstract As natural history museums are increasinglychallenged to represent the complexities of human evolu-tion, new innovations are required to create dynamic,dialogic experiences between museum scientists and muse-um audiences. After the opening of the Spitzer Hall ofHuman Origins in 2006, I had the opportunity to take myacademic experience in physical anthropology to publiceducation in the Sackler Educational Laboratory forComparative Genomics and Human Origins. In the lab, Iwas able to intervene in museum visitors’ preconceptions ofhuman evolution in a novel, informal educational setting.

Keywords Anthropology . Human evolution .Museumstudies . Informal learning . Dioramas

Introduction

In its “Fashion and Style” section, the Sunday New YorkTimes recently featured an article entitled “The New AgeCaveman and the City,” which informed readers of “a smallNew York subculture whose members seek good healththrough selective return to their Paleolithic ancestors(January 10th New York Times).” Or as one member andsome of his friends describe themselves, they are “cavemen.”More “authentic” proponents engage in exercise rituals suchas sprinting and jumping, playing catch with stones, fastingand feasting, blood-letting, and scooting around the under-brush on all fours, ironically enough. Some have proven theirfitness by running across the Brooklyn Bridge bare-chested

on a frigid night. One dogmatic proponent prefers to describehimself as “a pre-Promethean sort of caveman. Much of hisnourishment comes from grass-fed beef, which he eats raw.In a bow to the times, he sometimes uses a fork.” Notsurprisingly, selected members of the tribe were photo-graphed in front of a diorama at the American Museum ofNatural History (AMNH), a diorama featuring reconstruc-tions of modern humans from the Ukraine at 40,000 yearsago in the Hall of Human Origins.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we do not live in thePaleolithic Age. Rather, we live in an educationallychallenged age where fanciful images of “cavemen” havebecome canonized as commonsense, if these urban “prim-itives” are any indication. Visitors to the AMNH comeequipped with a weighty set of images drawn from popularculture, derived from romanticized Clan of the Cave Beartales, Geico Caveman commercials, 10,000 BC, Year One,and Land of the Lost films (as for the latter, a majority ofmuseum visitors I have surveyed were not certain whetherdinosaurs and humans co-existed; Scott 2007). Visitorsoccupy the nexus between the evolutionary folkloregenerated outside the museum and that which has beengenerated within it. Facing this constellation of hyperkinet-ic evolutionary information, museum visitors must negoti-ate the rocky terrain between evolutionary artistry and therather esoteric world of evolutionary evidence. For manyscientists, popular culture representations of human evolu-tion may seem fanciful and irrelevant to our discipline—that is, to the real science that happens in museums andother research institutions. But they also represent complexsources of information that visitors bring with them to thenatural history museum, as well as the doctor's office, thedinner table, and the voting booth.

Through my work as both a physical anthropology doctoralstudent at Yale University and as a museum educator at the

M. Scott (*)American Museum of Natural History,New York, USAe-mail: mscott@amnh.org

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AMNH, I have found that visitors approach the topic ofhuman evolution saturated with a lifetime of preconceptionsabout human evolution and human prehistory, whether thatlifetime is ten or one hundred years. As an anthropologyeducator, part of my work requires me to mediate betweenthe preconceptions that visitors bring with them to the topicof human evolution and the information that the museumdelivers to them through exhibitions and programs. Thiswas something my previous academic work in physicalanthropology prepared me to do in theory but not in practice.In this article, I'd like to share with you wisdoms from twojourneys—the doctoral and post-doctoral work I conductedresearching museum visitor perceptions of human evolution(1996–2004, 2004–2006) and how that has informed thework I've done educating extant hominids visiting themuseum about human evolution (from 2006–present).

Part 1: The Academic Encounter

Arriving at the AMNH as an evolutionary anthropologist, Inaively believed that my academic work in physicalanthropology, along with the years I spent probing visitorperceptions and misconceptions of human evolution, wouldguide my way. I had spent years investigating visitorperceptions and misconceptions about human evolution; Ihad published a book that sought to answer a simplequestion: “How do museum visitors perceive humanevolution exhibitions?” (Scott 2007).

This research interest had itself begun years earlier withanother simple question, which I overheard as I eavesdroppedon museum visitors. While working as a genetics intern in theAMNH in the 1990s, I overheard a provocative conversationbetween a mother and her young child. Standing in front of aHomo erectus diorama (now recognized as Homo ergaster)in Africa, which depicts a couple carving raw meat andwarding off imposing scavengers on the savanna, the childasked his mother, “Mom, why don’t we look like thatanymore?” His mother paused a moment before answeringsuccinctly, and surprisingly, “Because we left Africa.” Thisdubious rationale inspired in me a long chain of questions:What exactly happens when visitors encounter suchprovocative representations of human origins in museums?How do they make sense of them and integrate them intotheir identities? What set of other conceptual tools—whether popular cultural, intellectual, religious, racial, orpolitical—do visitors bring with them to exhibitions, andhow do these tools interact with what is being given tothem? And more specifically, how does the trope of“leaving Africa” come to represent a condition or catalystfor evolutionary progress?

After distilling these questions down into a manageableresearch question, I investigated a variety of human

evolutionary exhibition media and reconstructive images.In the process, I also probed, through quantitative andqualitative methods, the diverse ways museum visitorsenvision their evolutionary origins. I studied museumvisitor perceptions in four historic and world-class naturalhistory museums: the Natural History Museum (London),the Horniman Museum (London), the National Museums ofKenya (Nairobi), and the American Museum of NaturalHistory (New York City). Based on this cross-section, Iattempted to get at diverse and international perspectives ofevolutionary heritage, as well as looking pointedly atperceptions of the “Out of Africa” trope for some of thosepeople actually living “within” Africa.

After collecting questionnaires from nearly 500 visitorsinternationally and holding in-depth interviews with aselected number of visitors at each institution, I found thatteleological or progress-driven concepts of evolution arestill used as a crutch by visitors navigating evolutionaryinformation. Even scientifically astute visitors often misun-derstand the scale of human evolutionary time and thenature of evolutionary processes; they often find it moresatisfying—indeed, need to imagine a progress-drivenAfrica-to-Europe evolutionary plan, a Victorian progressmotif that fixes Africa in static evolutionary prehistory. Mywork contended that this conceptual rationale remainsfundamental to how diverse museum visitors come tounderstand their African evolutionary heritage, even formany visitors of African descent. Furthermore, it was clearthat audiences bring powerful outside images with them tothe museum. Visitors at all four museums used similarexternal frameworks to understand human evolution,images derived more from popular culture than from formaleducation. At all four museums, at least ninety percent ofrespondents stated that they'd had previous exposure toinformation on human evolution, either through school or,more importantly, through such popular media as televi-sion, books, magazines, and films.

As we know, museum audiences are more than just theaudiences of museums. These audiences participate inwider cultures and subcultures, institutions and practices.So the readings they produce are always “intertextual” and“interdiscursive,” symbolic dialogues between the museumvisitor, the museum exhibit, and other related media. Ifound that a handful of media, in particular, impactdramatically the ways a large number of people cross-culturally and internationally understand human evolutionand Africa. Visitors share common cultural referents anduse similar language when discussing their origins; theyrely upon a set of familiar icons, such as the Planet of theApes films, Clan of the Cavebear books, and NationalGeographic programming. And again and again, visitorsreach beyond the museum to television or other visual mediawhen responding to questions. For example, one visitor

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revealed some of his own preconceived assumptions whenanswering the question, “Do you think of African ‘ape-men’as ancestors?” (with me choosing to intentionally use theloaded term “ape-men”). He responded, “You know, one ofthese programs that I was watching said that there was a tribein Africa that still lives, how we would call, primitively.They reckon that more or less every single human in thisworld is related to this tribe. They're saying that Europeansand everyone, there is a common link with this tribe ofpeople who have, you know, obviously not really goneanywhere.” Here, television, rather than the museumexhibit he'd just experienced, is invoked to respond to aquestion about human origins. This visitor's response wasuncannily similar to one I heard nearly a decade later whileworking at the AMNH and passing in front of a diorama inthe museum’s “Hall of African Peoples.”Avisitor said, “Thisis actually how they still live. I've seen it on the television.”This is far from an unusual response. Television programs,then, validate the museum (in this instance a diorama fromthe 1960s)—reinforcing a conditioned nostalgia for asimplified version of a complex people.

Certainly, the same can be said of the image of theNeanderthal “caveman,” which relies much on the collec-tive museum visitor imagination—one that has been underconstruction for the past one hundred years, taking shapeon canvas, in the newspaper, on the television and film, orin the museum exhibition. The Neanderthal has alwaysbeen the quintessential caveman, even as images ofNeanderthals have fluctuated in tandem with theories abouttheir phylogenetic proximity to modern humans (Moser1992, 1996a, 1996b, 1998; Moser and Gamble 1997;Trinkaus and Shipman 1993). By far, the image of theNeanderthal is the most common representative of prehis-toric man. Its suite of characteristics—white skin, dishev-eled hair, stooped posture, vacant expression (the classiccharacteristics developed by artists such as Zdenek Burian,see Fig. 1)—sells and transports efficiently as an icon.

Many images of the Neanderthal are often juxtaposedcomically against the modern European as his brutishprehistoric ancestor. As comic relief, the Neanderthalprovides the best mirror for anxieties and fascinationsabout prehistoric humanity.

The popular 1949 film On the Town devotes a show-stealing musical number to the human adoration of cave-men at the AMNH. In this scene, a female anthropologist,smitten with cavemen, sings a song entitled “PrehistoricMan” with a group of dancing sailors. According toHollywood's construction of the museum's prehistoric andethnographic galleries, dinosaur skeletons mingle with ahunched Pithecanthropus erectus model (bearing an uncan-ny resemblance to one of the leading men), and these mixwith the usual array of African, Native American, andSouth East Asian artifacts (drums and masks, canoes andheaddresses, totem poles and grass skirts). This cinematicconstruction highlights the spectacular impact that theAMNH caveman dioramas have had on public perceptionsof anthropology and the museum. It also highlights theendless allure of the “caveman,” the Western epitome ofprehistoric life.

Sixty years after the opening of the Hall of the Age ofMan (Henry Fairfield Osborn's first human evolutionexhibition at the museum), the AMNH’s Hall of HumanBiology and Evolution, curated by Ian Tattersall, opened in1993. The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution was thefocus of my visitor studies and was not a disappointment todiorama enthusiasts. The Hall's artistic reconstructionsdominate visitor experiences in the exhibition, revealinghow its dramatic caveman models often overpower theexhibition of human evolution. The exhibition is punctuat-ed most significantly by its grand dioramas that encapsu-late, in four steps, the symbols of humanity: (1) a pair-bonded male and female standing upright in the firstAustralopithecus afarensis diorama, walking along in thevolcanic ash (presumably to create the iconic Laetolifootprints); (2) a male and female of the African savannascavenging for meat in the Homo erectus diorama, with ahyena and vultures menacing on the periphery; (3) a tool-making family in the Neanderthal diorama, with a manstanding sharpening a tool, a woman sitting tanning a hide,and, uniquely, an elder female advising the woman in herwork; and, lastly, (4) representatives of modern humanity, aHomo sapiens family from what is now Ukraine.

About the AMNH human evolution dioramas, oneinterviewee commented to me, “It's just weird the thingsthey have them doing in that one H. erectus diorama 'causeit's like, ‘oh my god!’ These are humans and that's whatthey did? Whereas here [the Neanderthal diorama] it's like,you kinda know about that stuff, like you see it sometimes,like, in movies or whatever, educational movies. But stufflike that [H. erectus] you don't really see.”

Fig. 1 Classic Neanderthal image, “A Neanderthal Encampment”(Augusta, 1960, Plate 8) illustrated by Zdenek Burian

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Again and again, visitors communicated to me that theyidentified most with the diorama of the Neanderthalbecause its constellation of behaviors seemed most familiar.And in fact, as Stephanie Moser points out, lay people vieworigins images so that they are comforted rather thanchallenged. So what is a caveman? He lives in caves, huntswild beasts, wields stone tools, and masters nature, right?However, according to Moser, these artistic motifs predateorigin's imagery, and they are borrowed from a successionof classical, biblical, medieval, and subsequent artisticgenres (Moser 1998, p 17). Yet this conditioned imagina-tion is part of the universal visual lexicon almost all visitorscall upon, including our modern-day tribe of New YorkCity cavemen.

Clearly, the visual images produced by museumscommunicate ideas far beyond the control of the originalscientific or artistic intent, which can be seen, for example,in their ability to project ideas that have not been articulatedin the associated text or labels (or by the curator orexhibition's designers, as Tattersall explains later in thisarticle). Furthermore, as Gifford-Gonzalez has noted, “Formost viewers, realism [the artistic technique used indioramas] is read as objective truth” (Gifford-Gonzalez1993, p 28). Many scholars of scientific imagery haveconsidered the persuasive effects of artistic “realism,” acommon artistic method. As Molyneaux states, “the use ofnaturalistic imagery implies a direct relationship betweenthe representation and the world, transparent and withoutinterpretive obstacles.” The ideas represented claim truth tonature (Molyneaux 1997, p 2). As Gifford-Gonzalez hasnoted, “Reconstructions highlight, in almost surrealist form,the paradoxical mediation of fact and fiction” (Gifford-Gonzalez 1993, p 28). So what do we do about all of this?

Part II: The Museum Educator's Encounter

Of course, educators can't always intervene in visitors'perceptions of, and projections onto, the AMNH Hall ofHuman Origins dioramas. However, I have tried my hand ata couple of interventionist strategies—one through an openquestion-and-answer forum with visitors and anotherthrough workshops about the construction of dioramasthemselves.

Hall of Human Origins Sackler Educational Laboratory

At AMNH, evolutionary educational work currently hap-pens in the 2007 Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, curated byIan Tattersall and Rob Desalle. The new exhibition hasseveral advantages for educators, including a circulararrangement of the exhibition's hominid dioramas, whichsubverts the linear progress narrative interpreted by many

visitors to the previous hall, and a display showing the step-by-step process of hominid model reconstruction by theAMNH’s own Gary Sawyer, who built many of the modelsfor display in the dioramas. The exhibition also includes theSackler Educational Laboratory for Comparative Genomicsand Human Origins (see Fig. 2), which is a unique andsignificant educational resource. It is a high-tech geneticsand hominid morphology teaching lab and educationalforum, allowing weekend visitors to spend time learningfrom an evolutionary scientist. (While I developed the labduring the exhibition's opening in 2007 and continue to runoccasional workshops in the lab and hall, the currentmanager of the lab is Dr. Samara Rubinstein, a physicalanthropologist and evolutionary geneticist).

From the outset, the weekend drop-in activity formuseum visitors to the Sackler Lab was very successful.What visitors appreciated most was the chance to go“behind the scenes” into a laboratory and work with amuseum scientist. Despite their unfailing disappointmentthat the skull casts they were holding and measuring werereproductions rather than real, visitors appreciated beingable to do a hands-on, interactive activity. I often tried toreinforce to them the value of holding these quality casts intheir hands and the value of being able to observe andmeasure these rare fossil specimens. They really seemed tocome around to the value of this, evidenced by the fact thatour most popular specimens—Lucy and the la ChapelleNeanderthal, of course—barely held up to the number ofhands in demand for them. The lab has to regularly removelayers of fingerprints or repair the odd zygomatic arch—apositive sign, I think. Overall, the Lab is an opportunity forvisitors to see human evolution as an accessible sciencerather than an esoteric one, and one not mysteriouslyhidden on the other side of the Museum walls. And situatedas it is at the end of the Hall of Human Origins, it alsooffers visitors a unique museum opportunity to engage in a

Fig. 2 The Sackler Educational Laboratory within the Hall of HumanOrigins. Credit: American Museum of Natural History

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hands-on, interactive laboratory experience with a scientistwithin the exhibition.

For many of the early Hall of Human Origins labweekends, I experimented with how to run the sessions inorder to develop a system for best utilizing the space. Oneof the most interesting challenges was reassuring surprisinglydistressed visitors during the measurement activities that notevery fossil cast has an upper canine or that sometimes it ishard to measure the size of the brow ridges with our rathercrude calipers. I also emphasized that the pleasure and pain ofdoing paleontological work is that fossil data can be ratherhard to quantify, and fossils do not fall into easy categories(like the seemingly straightforward quantitative data thatgenetic base changes seem to suggest).

Increasingly, I came to develop the lab into a spacewhere visitors could ask me any questions they have aboutthe exhibition in particular or human evolution at large.Without a doubt, this was the most successful andrewarding new aspect of the open workshops for me.When visitors came into the lab, I offered them the optionof doing two quantitative activities but I also mentionedsomething like, “And here's your chance to ask any burningquestions you have about human evolution. I'm here to domy best to answer any and all questions you have, big orsmall.” I would stoke the fire by asking them abouteverything from their favorite films, commercials, andbooks about human evolution. This—fortunately or unfor-tunately—is a much more effective conversation starterthan asking them what they have learned from the labelcopy on the mitochondrial clock. However, once visitorswere comfortable talking about Land of the Lost or 2001: ASpace Odyssey, I made it my mission to make it back totalking about the hard science, the label copy. I rely, then,on the old bait and switch, baiting them with popularculture before switching to hard science, something Ilearned from my interviewing years. Visitors seem to lovethis opportunity to chat informally about human evolution,even if it takes them a few minutes to warm up. They ask acolorful array of questions. I have often found myselfdiscussing whether or not race is real, whether or notNeanderthals and modern humans made love or war, theorigins of art, language and culture, why the missing link isstill missing, whether or not we are still evolving, andwhether the cross-like sutures on top of the human skull arean imprint of Christianity. I have been asked (by a boylooking scornfully at his younger brother) whether babieswere “monkeys” because they lack bipedality, and (it beingthe aughts) I have even been asked about the taxonomicstatus of George W. Bush. There were a number of otherengaging topics, such as whether or not we can get geneticmaterial from early hominids and, quite thankfully, whatkinds of evidence the dioramas are based on. After thesesessions, visitors were usually wholeheartedly thankful for

the experience. On some occasions, I found it hard to getvisitors to leave—one young couple saying this is theseminar they wished they had in college. Interestingly,visitors were sometimes willing to spend hours in the labeven though a visitor study conducted in the museum foundthat visitors were spending only 20 minutes on average inthe expansive Hall of Human Origins.

Overall, the experience of teaching in the lab—and nowdesigning weekend programs with Dr. Rubinstein—hasbeen extremely fulfilling. And as I continue to giveworkshops and tours of the Hall of Human Origins, Icontinue to learn from visitors as they challenge me withthe most unexpected questions. The challenge is a goodone, and one that keeps me, and other museum scientists,on our feet—and thus, perhaps, evolving.

The Art and Science of Neanderthal Dioramas

I have developed another rewarding workshop in the Hallof Human Origins that I refer to as “The Art and Science ofDioramas” (see Fig. 3). A direct response to my academicresearch, it has become a staple of my museum educationalrepertoire, something that can be used to engage—and Ihope, inform—visitors of all ages, including elementarystudents, college students, graduate students, and teachers.The “Art and Science”workshops typically center around themuch beloved Neanderthals, taking advantage of the researchI gathered on their canonical image as caveman. I open theworkshop with questions like: “What comes to mind whenyou think of a Neanderthal? What did Neanderthals actuallylook like? What did they do? Where have you seen thembefore?What images come to mind?” Thenmost importantly,I ask, “How do we know what we know about Neander-thals?,” encouraging participants to develop critical lenses forlooking at visual evolution displays.

I also point out that typically at the AMNH, we think ofdioramas as a recreation of a natural setting and a renderingof a specific moment in time. But in human evolutionexhibitions, these are merely artistic tableaux, and it's

Fig. 3 Neanderthal reconstructions in the AMNH Hall of HumanOrigins. Credit: American Museum of Natural History

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important to understand them as such. (In fact, curatorTattersall bristles at the word diorama in relation to the Hallof Human Origins tableaux but I often use “diorama” withvisitors to begin with language in which they're comfort-able.) This encourages visitors to think critically abouthuman evolution, to tease apart the science from the sciencefictions embedded in images—to divorce the animals theysee in the Akeley Hall of African Animals from the animalsdepicted in the Hall of Human Origins (as when, during myacademic research, some children would ask, “Why didthey put those humans in there?,” referring to a Hall ofHuman Origins diorama).

For the first half of the “Art and Science” workshop, Idiscuss the process of building reconstructions and pointout how AMNH scientists recreate anatomy in front of our“Reconstructing Anatomy” display, showing the extraordinarywork of Gary Sawyer. I thenmove on to discuss the creation ofreconstructions of whole hominid scenes and lifestyles infront of the Neanderthal display—slowly moving from hardscience (the anatomy, musculature) to the more speculative(such things as the facial expressions and facial hair).

The “Reconstructing Anatomy” display features a videoof Gary Sawyer at work reconstructing a model. Theexhibit says that “Drawing upon modern skulls and faces,facial reconstruction experts sculpt highly detailed modelsof long-dead hominids using fossil skulls as fragments,since the smallest variations in bone shape or texture cansuggest particular facial features. By paying attention totiny details, those experts truly bring the dead to life.”Visitors can witness, step-by-step, that in the trajectoryfrom fossil to flesh to face, it begins grounded in hardscience (the skeletal anatomy, the musculature, even thecheekbones and nasal width). Then it increasingly comes tolife with more imaginative, artistic elements (the expres-sion, the wrinkles, the hairstyle). The viewer, then, sees the“picture” in a new light: as an amalgamation of informedand deliberate choices.

I also share with visitors Ian Tattersall's own wordsregarding the pleasures and pains of reconstructing the past.When the previous Hall of Human Biology and Evolutionopened in 1993 (which included many of the samedioramas, including the Neanderthal diorama), Tattersallwrote in Scientific American:

Our arbitrary decisions were still only beginning.Once I would have laughed if anyone had predictedthat I would spend weeks agonizing over Neanderthaleyebrows. Did they even have eyebrows? (Our closestliving nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzees, do not.)If Neanderthals did have eyebrows, where were theyon those bulbous brow ridges? Similarly, how longwould untended Neanderthal beards have grown? Howmuch body hair did the men and women have? What

was its color and texture? What was the skin color? Allthese details offered endless scope for quibbling.

Students and visitors are always very intrigued when I sharethis information, if not disturbed. If scientists can't tell us howbushy Neanderthal eyebrows are, then who can? Thisbecomes a great platform for questioning visitors why theirown interests lie in the bushiness of Neanderthal eyebrowsrather than the infinitely more interesting occipital bun orbarreled rib cage of Neanderthal anatomy. And it's a greatplatform for having them move away from their predispositiontowards easy adaptationist explanations for characteristics.

From reconstructing anatomy, we move to the Neander-thal diorama to consider the reconstruction of the Neander-thal lifestyle, which includes considering diets, language,fur coats, gender roles, and inevitably, hairstyles. (I blamethis on those Geico commercials and endless film representa-tions of Neanderthal men with the shaggy yet well-kemptbeards.) Here, I try to point out that models and motifs—thewhole environmental scene—are not one and the same; weneed to scientifically dissect the evidence behind each in theirown right.

As someone that enjoys the history of physical anthro-pology and believes it contextualizes our present under-standings in important ways, I always incorporate a historicalperspective into my Neanderthal workshops. I usually beginby discussing how representations of Neanderthals arelinked to visual traditions dating to the nineteenth centuryand that most popular images tend to lag doggedly behindcurrent science. I always point out that there has been anenduring interest in Neanderthals since the first was found inthe Neander Valley of Germany in 1856 (aside from theGibraltor fossil found in 1848 that didn't come to publicattention until much later). I also mention that the firstNeanderthal created quite a stir (this occurred after Busktranslated the German article into English in 1861, and afterDarwin's publication of The Origin in 1859). Some peopleimagined it to be part human, part animal. Others imaginedit to be a monstrous or grotesquely deformed human. Stillothers imagined it to be a very distant ancestor. Whileencouraging this critical exercise—“How would you makesense of a fossil for which you have no context to understandit?”—I remind them that 150 years later, people still imagineand recreate the Neanderthal lifestyle in different ways.(I also remind them that this is not unlike relatively recentconversations around challenging, intriguing new finds,such as attempts to understand the taxonomic place ofFlores, aka “the Hobbit” science meets pop culture again,which Tom Gundling has addressed in his work.)

In this workshop, one useful exercise is to point out severalhistorical conventions for representing Neanderthals. Inparticular, there have been two primary ways of thinkingabout Neanderthals—as big, hairy, brutes and as good-natured

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guys next door (Moser 1992). Where do these ideas comefrom? Do they come from evidence? The idea of Neanderthalsas brutes comes from a misinterpretation of a pathologicalNeanderthal fossil in 1909 by Marcelin Boule, whoactually used his reconstruction to prove that Neanderthalswere not on the human lineage. This was followed by SirArthur Keith in 1912, who used an illustration to argue that hisNeanderthals were rather human-like, supporting his notionthat they were on the human lineage. What this strategyattempts to convey to visitors is that images do not onlyrespond to scientific arguments, they produce scientificopinion. Ultimately, the aim is to make museum visitors moresavvy about visual images and the powerful circulation ofinformation about human evolution within museums and thelarger public sphere.

Most importantly, at the Hall of Human Origins Neander-thal diorama, I ask students to tell me which aspects of therepresentation are based on evidence and which are inference.Visitors of all ages usually respond enthusiastically and quiteaccurately once they become engaged. In the end, I make surethey take home certain knowledge, such as that an examinationof the fossils can tell the ages, sex, andmedical condition of theindividuals, or that the wear pattern on the teeth can tell whatthe individuals ate andwhether theywere using their front teethto hold animal skins. Investigations can also inform scientistswhat tools the hominids used and whether they were hunting;and they can tell from other faunal remains what they werehunting or what was hunting them, and scientists can tell fromfossilized pollen what vegetation was around. On the otherhand, we must make inferences about such characteristics ashair color and texture, skin color, and facial expressions, and Iemphasize to students that they have to be wary of consideringthese visual images as objective, scientific truths.

In the end, I challenge participants to take a set ofevidence—for example, two dimorphic, gender-different,Neanderthal fossil skeletons, one with arthritis, as well as aset of handaxes and a burial site with ochre pigment on ahollowed-out bear femur—and recreate their own scene. Thischallenges visitors to come up with and evaluate alternativescenarios based on the evidence, as well as to exercise theirsenses of creativity and artistry. My favorite scenarios (basedon varying sets of evidence) was the diorama of a wholefamily of Neanderthals sleeping or the family of Neander-thals vomiting after a binge on some rancid meat (leaving oneunfortunate family member dead). However, I also think itwould be comical to see a group of Neanderthals runningbare-chested and barefooted across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Conclusion

It has become clear to me that few human evolutionexhibitions stand alone, and the images visitors viewed in

one museum experience stand consciously and subcon-sciously beside other images they have seen throughouttime and across space. As one Kenyan intervieweeshrewdly commented to me when questioned as to onedisplay's meaning, “meanings are in people.” This couldnot have been better stated. While museum visitors learnsome new ideas from human origins exhibitions, they alsobring some of themselves and some powerful preconceivedimages to bear upon what they see.

So what is the big picture (visual pun intended)? I thinkmy overarching finding is that the public benefits frommore spaces for informal dialogue between scientists andmuseum visitors around the topic of human evolution.These forums go far in challenging preconceptions andhaving visitors think critically about the human evolution-ary information they encounter at the museum, in theirtextbooks, and the larger cultural matrix of popular media.The cultural information visitors bring with them into themuseum should not leave those of us in museums with adefeatist attitude. It does not lessen the responsibility of themuseum to intervene in the wider culture; in fact, it places agreater burden on museums to relay more challenging andconscientious spaces for visitors to learn. Is it “so easy acaveman can do it?” I would think not. But equipped withour academic training as well as the latest goings on inpopular evolutionary science news and culture, I thinkthose of us responsible for evolutionary education are upfor the challenge.

References

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Moser S. The visual language of archaeology: a case study of theNeanderthals. Antiquity. 1992;66:831–44.

Moser S. Science and social values: presenting archaeological findingsin museum displays. In: Smith L, Clarke A, editors. Issues inmanagement archaeology. St. Lucia, QLD: Tempus Press; 1996a.p. 32–42.

Moser S. Visual representation in archaeology: depicting the missinglink in human origins. In: Picturing Knowledge. 1996b. p. 184–214. See Baigrie 1996.

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Moser S, Gamble C. Revolutionary images: the iconic vocabulary forrepresenting human antiquity. In: The Cultural Life ofImages. 1997. p. 184–212. See Molyneaux 1997.

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