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Museums and Evolution Their role in the great story Notes by Craig Robertson Evolution, in particular human evolution, is the great story, the most important knowledge to come from science, and museums play an important role, a crucial role, in disseminating this knowledge to the general public. (Listen to the interview with Francis Thackeray Part 1.) The subject is certainly popular in museums across southern Africa, as these examples show: (Left) Display for human evolution, in the final case of an extensive exhibition on the evolution of life on earth in the Geology Museum, Windhoek, Namibia.

The eternal battle between apes and big cats; diorama in the beautiful Museu de Historia Natural, Maputo, Mozambique.

Diorama depicting stone age hunter, McGregor Museum, Kimberley, South Africa.

A small museum in the Stevenson-Hamilton Memorial Centre, Kruger National Park, South Africa, features a display on human evolution.

Most museum exhibitions are more interesting when they are based on the institution's own collections. When it comes to human evolution certain African museums are outstanding. A key organisation in South Africa is the Institute for Human Evolution, headquartered in the University of Witwatersrand in central Johannesburg. The Institute administers the Origins Centre, in the same location, and the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, located around Sterkfontein just outside the greater city area. In April 2010, members of the Institute and their colleagues announced the latest important fossil discovery for human evolution: Australopithicus sediba. The University Medical School also houses one of the most important fossil collections in the world. (Left) Exhibition on human evolution near the entrance to the Institute for Human Evolution, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. This display includes a number of reproductions of fossils held by the Institute.

Plaster casts of fossil skulls used for everyday study and demonstration at the Institute for Human Evolution.	The Origins Centre, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.	A spectaclar exhibition of stone tools in the Origins Centre, University of Witwatersrand.	Tools from important locations for the appearance of modern humans, on the South African coast.
Well-presented displays tell the story of the evolution of life and humans, and introduce the visitor to the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site at Sterkfontein Caves.	Some of the fossils shown - in replica - come from the various dig sites that make up the overall 'cradle' site. The visitor sees...	...an actual dig site. Fossils are found in breccia deposits; e.g.'Little Foot', one of the most important Australopithecus specimens ever found.	Deep underground, the breccia walls where 'Lttle Foot' was found may hold the almost complete skeleton.
In the medical school of the University of Witwatersrand, an enthralling fossil room.	Perhaps its greatest treasure, the three pieces of the Taung child skull sit in their box.	The pieces assembled; their calcite sparkles under the light.	Bernhard Zipfel, University Curator of Collections, holds the Taung child skull.

Another key institution is the National Museum of Natural History or Transvaal Museum, in Pretoria (part of Ditsong, a relatively new institution created from a number of South African museums). Its public exhibitions include displays illustrating the evolution of life on earth, and a particularly extensive treatment of human evolution. Again, its own fossil collections are an important ingredient in the displays.
I am strongly drawn to the idea of imagining evolution in the African landscape, of dramatizing it happening to real individuals. The diorama is an underrated art form and this museum proves the point better than most. A series of small dioramas showing life and death among the australopithecines is particularly good, as are others showing the Taung child confronting the Crowned Eagle that may have killed it, and a leopard dragging away another australopithecine that it did kill. These displays have a fabulous quality in the best sense of the word, yet they are grounded in historical facts derived from solid evidence and the best science. (Note: Specimens shown below are curated at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History [Transvaal Museum].)

Evolution in general and the human story in particular are laid out in the Transvaal Museum.	In some cases based on fossils shown on this page...	...the dioramas are particularly dramatic.
Mrs Ples, Australopithecus africanus, in her, or possibly his, tray in the Broom Room, Transvaal Museum.	A famous pair: (left) the leopard mandible found with (right) a juvenile australopithecine skullcap at Swartkrans, near Sterkfontein, the fossils for the diorama above far right.	(Above) The skull showing the puncture marks, and (next right) a perfect fit.		Skull and mandible of sabre-toothed cat species; australopithecines would have had to dodge these too.

The Cradle of Humankind

What does it mean?

Notes by Craig Robertson

The notion of a "cradle of humankind", a more politically correct replacement for the "cradle of mankind", has a nice sort of appeal in the world of popular archaeology. It derives from Charles Darwin's prediction that Africa would prove to be the cradle, that place where our species was nurtured by Mother Nature. (I'm using both terms here for the sake of search engines.) My own impression of Africa is that it is so fecund, and has been for so long - it teems with life even today when the wildlife has been decimated - that it is almost as though the chances were that it would throw up some extraordinary creature.
But the "cradle" is a bit sentimental given the reality that our remotest human ancestors must have faced a physically very tough, often violent, disease prone struggle to survive. But no doubt there were sweeter times, and cradles even back in the trees where they might have learnt a trick or two from the birds.
The notion has an appeal that in places even attracts tourism. In my study one can see that I am an unashamed enthusiast for these places. There are more than a few of them, especially in Africa - Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa all have sites that claim the title - but also some in Asia - Indonesia and China. India is looking for a breakthrough discovery. Here are some photos from trips I have made in the last few years.

Sign near Sterkfontein, outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Here ancient humans invented rubbish.

Just up the road, the sign at Swartkrans.

Dr. Francis Thackeray, at the time Director, Transvaal Museum, South Africa, at the World Heritage of Human Origins Conference, Mildura, April 2007. He is now Director, Insitute of Human Evolution, University of Witwatersrand. He is holding a replica of "Mrs. Ples" from The Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, South Africa. It is a specimen of Australopithecus africanus.

Statue of Robert Brooom of the Transvaal Museum holding the australopithecine skull known as "Mrs. Ples", outside the cave at Sterkfontein where he found it in 1947. The "Ples" derives from a prior taxonomic designation by Robert Broom - Plesianthropus transvaalensis - at the time of its discovery. The Site comprises localities at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans and Kromdraai, which are contiguous, and just outside Johannesburg, and further afield at Taung and Makapansgat in the Transvaal. The fossils in these locations are Pliocene-Pleistocene in age, i.e. about 2 - 3+ million years.

I have always found the study of human evolution very interesting. I don't know what percentage of the world's population know of this, or accept it. Of course there are many who reject it on religious grounds, but even secular critics have attacked Darwin. I think it is the great story to come from science.
Not only is the story big, but so is the story of how it became to be written. It has come slowly and somewhat painfully since the late nineteenth century. It is also interesting how both stories manifest themselves in the popular culture. Every capital in Africa I saw has a museum with an account of the story; so do most science museums anywhere in the world. You can collect kitsch souvenirs from them. We'll be hearing a lot about Darwin in 2009. The story of how the story has been unearthed is a long-running drama; look at the lives of Eugene Dubois, discoverer of Java Man, of the Leakey family and other great contributors.

Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. More properly called Oldupai Gorge, it is another claimant on the "cradle".

Olduvai site museum, overlooking the gorge.	Part of the display in the Olduvai site museum, showing casts of 3.8 million year old hominin footprints at Laetoli, a restricted area about 45 kilometres away.
There are some interesting books about all this; see for example: The Discovery of the Hobbit by Mike Morwood and Penny van Osterzee (Random House Australia, Sydney, 2007), which includes an account of Dubois' life; Ancestral Passions by Virginia Morrell (Touchstone, New York, 1995) about the Leakeys, and Richard Leakey's own book Origins Reconsidered: in search of what makes us human (co-authored with Roger Lewin, Little, Brown & Co., 1992) Zebras grazing in Ngoro Ngoro Crater, Tanzania, not far from Olduvai Gorge.	Part of the display in the gatehouse at the entrance to Ngoro Ngoro and Serengeti, Tanzania, showing human evolutiion.
A display showing human evolution Kampala Museum, Uganda.	Handaxes of Homo erectus, found in situ, Olorgesailie, southern Kenya.
The road across the lava fields to Lake Turkana, northern Kenya.	Lake Turkana, northern Kenya; far over the horizon is Koobi Fora, and Ethiopia, more "cradles".

Even though a properly rigorous scientific attitude, or worldview, does not allow us to think that humans have any special importance, nevertheless the story that emerges from archaeology is still an enthralling drama. I find it hard to accept that it has all been some sort of fluke, a mere chance series of events, even when we consider that the asteriod that wiped out the dinosaurs would have missed the earth if it had have arrived 20 minutes earlier or later. As anyone who has studied science and mathematics can affirm, it is always important to understand initial conditions. They are at least as important as the dynamics that follow on in any system. What were ours? Was it arcadia or hell-on-earth? We don't really know what they were; life is of quite uncertain origin so far, and so is the moment when our ancestors went a different way to that of the chimps.
One of the first things we have to get our minds around here is the immense age of the earth. See for example Basin and Range by John McPhee (Noonday Press, New York, 1980) who coined the term "deep time". As Prof. Bill Compston's work proves with scientific rigour, there's a good four billion years for life to evolve, and not just for the age of the earth, but the earth-moon system too; see the Bill Compston interview. Think of the tides coming and going twice a day every day for all the eons of time when so much of the evolution of life was taking place in the litoral between the high and low tidemarks, the plants adapting to standing out of the water, the animals crawling out and learning to breath the air. It's plenty of time for the thousands of generations required to establish the millions of species.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day we can kickstart this process by beaming signals at complex minerals on distant planets, preparing them for settlement by humans who, as usual, arrive very late in the process.
We all know the sort of analogies about how it happened on earth: if the age of the earth was the length of your arm, human history is like a single scrape of a nailfile off your finger; if the age of the earth is viewed as a single day, humans appear only in the last moments before midnight, and so on. (Strange how many people seem to be under the impression our ancestors knew dinosaurs.) But time is not the only thing that is important. In fact sheer duration is relatively less important than other things like morphology and behaviour. These things come, given enough time, and when they do they move to centre stage.
In my novel The Expedition, the second part of the book is an attempt to dramatise the story of human evolution through the perceptions of a group of characters who, as it were, emerge in the course of the story in a series of steps.
The first chapter of this section starts with a violent undersea birth and ends when two apes, mimicking the cranes on the open plains of Africa, stand up to dance in front of their gathered kin. This is a very long time span; it includes the move from water to land, and the end of the dinosaurs.
The next chapter ends with the first self-referential sentence being spoken - a character speaks her name. Both of these steps take place in "the cradle". In the cradle we have the lullaby. Its gentle rhythms emulate the rise and fall of the wind and the swaying of the tree branches where mothers learnt to sing to an audience of one. Early speech followed the natural rise and fall of the breath; the first half spoken words were crooned to babies who grew to talk.
The next chapter ends with the first sea voyage, and so on. The time duration between each of these major steps is at least an order of magnitude less each time. I believe none of this was a fluke, because even from long before they got up to dance they were trying it on, these characters, our ancestors. And they kept doing that all the way through the many stages of our evolution until the tribes came out of the deserts and founded cities. Then things changed of course. But trying it on hasn't stopped. The Expedition must always press forward.

The famous Locality 1, or "Peking Man Site", at Zhoukoudian, outside Beijing, China. The first skull of "Peking Man", now regarded as a variety of Homo erectus, was found in the rock face behind the cave, in 1929.	Souvenir from the shop on Dragon Bone Hill, Zhoukoudian.
My wife Hui outside the gate to the museum and caves on Dragon Bone Hill, Zhoukoudian.	The Peking Man urinal, near the gate at Zhoukoudian.

The African landscape features a great range of environments; everything from spectacular deserts to humid jungles, sometimes not all that far from each other.

The Namibian Desert at dawn.

Dawn breaks in the bush, Kruger National Park, South Africa.

But it is those in-between habitats, the open woodlands and savannahs that are the most intriguing. It was in them that our ancestors made the critical changes, literally the first steps toward becoming human. (See: Cradle of Humankind (Part1); the footsteps at Laetoli.)

A troop of baboons head out to forage, early morning in Kruger National Park, South Africa.

There's always somebody watching; serval cat, Kruger National Park, South Africa.

Travelling through these landscapes I wonder why it is that the baboons are still living there the way they have for millions of years, yet I am driving past rubber-necking at them.
Some australopithecine group, at some time in the Pliocene epoch, somewhere in Africa, became ancestral to Genus Homo. Which species, just when, let alone where it happened are among the great questions remaining about our evolution. We may never find enough fossils to fully clarify the answers. There were a number of australopithecine species during the relevant time period. We have no clear picture of how many or how they were distributed. (Listen to the interview with Francis Thackeray Part 1.) Some australopithecines were still around long after Homo appeared, and may well have been of common ancestral stock. The lines of descent may have gone along complex paths we have no trace of in the fossil record.
Nevertheless the overall structure of, and evidence for, our evolution is clear. We diverged from the chimpanzee ancestors and soon started walking on two legs; Francis Thackeray suggests some of the earliest hominins, even before Genus Australopithicus, may have been bipedal. Perhaps indeed it was the moment when we parted with the chimps. It was to do with bipedalism, i.e. the decision to walk upright. And it was a decision because the option was there not to - our ancestors could have stayed foraging around on all fours like baboons still do. But they didn't. They walked upright and did it for a long time until their bodies were more or less adapted to it, even though they must have thought every day 'my feet are killing me', 'my back is killing me'. But they kept doing it, as we do today, and still must teach our infants to do so. Why?
I cannot believe it was simply because of food gathering practices, or being able to see predators better - the baboons survived in the same environment without walking upright. I think our ancestors did it because of something else - something social. It made one hands free most of the time, hands free and mobile at the same time, and therefore able to carry things, especially a stick, and that gave an advantage, a primarily social advantage, that could not be let go of.
This meant behaviour preceded anatomy. There is intentionality, even a certain wilfulness about it. The body was selected for by social requirements to walk. You had to walk to mate. Only after a long time did our brains start to grow. Stone tool-making, language and art came later.

	(left) A Ring-tailed Lemur in Pretoria Zoo, South Africa. Walking on two legs seems to have a long history as the stance of this lemur in the Pretoria zoo might suggest. Early apes would have had a similar climbing posture. Apes like gibbons can go upright with great accompanying vocals. Chimps will do it to get food. But none of our other near or far relatives ever persisted with it; they only do it on occasion for a particular reason, such as a threat posture.
Crocodile at waterhole, Kruger National Park. One feature of life on the savannah is central: the waterhole. It draws everyone in despite its dangers.	Elephants at waterhole, Etosha National Park. Walking upright, once adopted, was not enough. We had to learn to run for it too. That meant bigger chests, better coordination and more strength.
Elephants jousting at waterhole, Etosha National Park.	Late in the dusk at a waterhole, Etosha National Park. There are thousands of Red-billed Queleas swarming in the reeds; frogs calling. (808 Kb mp3 file; 51")
A Grey-crowned Crane stands alert in Pretoria Zoo, South Africa...	...then flashes a hint of the dance it can do.

I like to think those first australopithecines would watch the cranes on the savannahs that they shared. These birds did not just walk upright, they danced. Mimicry was already an established way of learning. They would have tried dancing too, and decided it was the way to go.

Interview with Francis Thackeray
Cradle of Humankind (Part1)
Cradle of Humankind (Part2)