Natural History Museum

I thoroughly enjoyed our excursion to London’s Natural History Museum today.  Because I have been in London since last August, I have had the privilege to visit the museum countless times and have seen most of the exhibits.  However, I had only glanced into this exhibition and not actually delved deeper into it. Today, I was able to take a moment to absorb the information given and process what that meant.  Never before had I seen a physical representation of human evolution. It was like nothing I’d seen.  

We started on the outside, with a wall of skull replicas showing common ancestors and relative species as well as humans.  Inside the exhibit, we were taken through the evolution of Hominins and how they developed through time into Homo erectus, Homo florensius, Homo neanderthalenis, and finally Homo sapiens.  Some of the skulls were even shown side by side to face replicas to what these beings would have looked like before they went extinct. It was interesting to see the variation and size difference between species as shown by these depictions.  More specifically, I loved seeing how early Hominin heads differed from Homo sapien skulls. Many of the other species’ jaws were elongated with larger teeth and a wider face, with a flatter brain encasement. It was interesting to see how this trait was abandoned by nature for a longer forehead for a larger frontal lobe and pre-frontal cortex.  Another key thing that we saw in the museum was a lifesize replica of an early human man. Though he seemed shorter and hairier, you could see the resemblance and how we physically inherited traits over millions of years.

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