Reposted from the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/arts/design/09orig.html?ex=1171688400&en=f0fc44f6c80ce3a8&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Our ancestors have arrived at the American Museum of Natural History. They are very old, and we are only beginning to recognize them and ourselves in them. They remind us of our origins long ago and how we have emerged as modern humans in the fullness of time.

The museum's new permanent exhibition on human origins, which opens tomorrow, merges notable achievements in paleontology and genetics, sciences that have made their own robust evolutionary strides in recent years. Each introduces evidence supporting the other in establishing a genealogy extending back to protohuman species that arose in Africa from earlier primates some six to seven million years ago.

These two scientific threads run through the exhibition like the strands of the DNA double helix.

Ellen V. Futter, the museum's president, said the "mutually reinforcing evidence" was organized in the exhibition to address three fundamental questions: Where did we come from? Who are we? And what lies ahead for us?

Turn right at the entrance of the new installation, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, and you see paleontology's side of the story. More than 200 casts of prehuman and human fossils and artifacts illustrate stages in physical and behavioral evolution. Four life-size tableaus depict scenes in the lives of human predecessors, the realism stamped by the presence of pesky flies on their shoulders.

Some of the most striking displays are reconstructions from fossil and other evidence of what these ancestors probably looked like. Museum scientists and technicians have recreated the faces and bodies of the famous Lucy skeleton and Neanderthals — even the controversial Hobbits, the tiny specimens of what may be a previously unknown extinct species found recently in Indonesia.

The reconstruction of Turkana Boy is especially evocative. Based on one of the most complete ancestral skeletons ever excavated, the fleshed-out Homo ergaster, a species that lived in Africa 1.9 to 1.4 million years ago, is almost six feet tall, with a body form remarkably like that of modern humans.

"The fossils on which the reconstructions are based are witnesses to a dynamic history," said Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the museum and co-curator of the exhibition. "Now we have a much larger story to tell, with the addition of what we are learning from molecular biology."

Bear left in the hall, and there is the sign "DNA Tells Us About Human Origins." Below are three tubes containing particles of DNA in a milky white solution. The samples are not particularly impressive, until you think that this is the stuff of encoded information shaping an entire organism and the material that has transformed the study of genetics, or genomics, and revealed the place of humans in the rest of life.

One of the vials holds human DNA, and another a chimpanzee's. The analysis of their genetic material has confirmed what comparative anatomy predicted, showing that human DNA is 98.8 percent identical to that of chimps and bonobos, our closest living relatives. And our DNA is, on average, 96 percent identical to our most distant primate kin, some of which are mounted on the wall.

The third vial contains a DNA sample from a 40,000-year-old Neanderthal, the extinct close cousin of Homo sapiens. The discovery of a Neanderthal skull in 1856 led to the recognition that different kinds of humans once lived on Earth. This rare DNA specimen, on display in this country for the first time, was donated by the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, the first laboratory to succeed in extracting the genetic material from Neanderthal bones.

Standing nearby are the skeletons of a chimpanzee, a Neanderthal and a modern human, and stations with interactive electronic displays are ready, at the touch of a screen, to explain the differences and similarities between the bones, brains and DNA of the three species.

Other computer animations offer insights into how scientists decode the hereditary information, how it is transmitted through generations, and how mutations of mitochondrial DNA, the traits inherited through the mother's lineage, reveal relationships through time and migrations. A video of a "tree of life" changes before your eyes, like a kaleidoscope, showing the branching interrelationships among 479 species.

Rob DeSalle, the exhibition's other curator and a molecular biologist at the museum, said genomics is leading to the discovery of "the history between other species and humans and the relationships of humans to each other."

The genetics side of the exhibition is not as visually compelling as the fossils and reconstructed life in other sections. Plan to invest more time with the interactive displays and videos, which convey the truly new contributions to understanding the science of human evolution and the complexity and connectivity of life.

The Hall of Human Origins occupies the galleries of its predecessor, the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, which had its opening 12 years ago, before many of the advances in genomics and a number of major fossil discoveries. That exhibition closed in September 2005 to make way for its more up-to-date replacement, supported by a gift from the Spitzers, the parents of Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York.

Some of the cast of fossil characters may be familiar to regular museum visitors, but they have been revitalized in new settings. For example, the Australopithecus couple that left tracks walking 3.5 million years ago across a plain at Laetoli, Tanzania, appear here. The surprise is that they are so small, no more than three feet tall. Yet the discovery of their footprints was the first clear evidence that prehumans were walking upright well before they made tools.

In the habitat displays, two Homo ergasters butcher a carcass and fight off a vulture and a jackal trying to steal the meat, and a Homo erectus, Peking Man, crouches and is about to be pounced on by a hyena. The curators said these were reminders that early human ancestors were prey rather than predator for much of their history.

Toward the back of the gallery, the cultural aspects of evolution are illustrated. An exact reproduction of the painted animals from the cave art at Lascaux in France stretches across the wall. Other displays include a replica of a 75,000-year-old piece of ochre decorated with geometric patterns, a recent discovery in South Africa and one of the earliest examples of symbolic thinking and creativity in modern humans. In this context the exhibition reviews the elements that make humans different from other life: tool use, language, music and writing, as well as art and other forms of creative expression.

Off in a side room, the Spitzer Hall has an educational laboratory with microscopes and laptops ready for visitors, guided by instructors, to try their hands at examining fossils and learning how to decode DNA. The lab is designed with young people and student groups in mind, but anyone is free to experience something of what it is like to delve into the human past. Elsewhere a multimedia bulletin board offers news of the latest developments in research into the human past.

One issue cannot be entirely sidestepped in any public presentation of human evolution: that many people in this country doubt and vocally oppose the very concept. In a corner of the hall, several scientists are shown in video interviews professing the compatibility of their evolution research with their religious beliefs.

Standing nearby at the end of a tour of the exhibition, Michael J. Novacek, a paleontologist and the museum's senior vice president, said that a previous show on Darwin had been a reassuring test case. The exhibition was popular, he said, and provoked "very little negative response."

Dr. Novacek said the new hall was "an emphatic statement about the theory of evolution and its power to tell us our origins and history."

"We emphasize that a scientific theory is an argument that is very carefully tested against scientific evidence," he continued, "and this one has withstood much scrutiny."

The modern human capacity for symbolic and creative expression has brought forth different narratives to explain where we came from, drawn from myth, religion and pre-Darwin science. The exhibition's parallel lines of fossil and molecular evidence have the cumulative effect of solidifying the foundation for the more recent scientific narrative of human evolution.

There are still many gaps in knowledge, and unsolved mysteries. But seeing ourselves in the train of preceding species, we also recognize the degree of our separation from other animals, even our earliest ancestors. Only modern Homo sapiens in our time could present with such newfound authority the epic narrated through the museum's Hall of Human Origins.

The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins will open February 10 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street. Museum hours: daily, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. (to 8:45 p.m. on Fridays). Suggested museum admission: $14; $10.50 for students and 60+; $8 for children 2 to 12; free for members. (212) 769-5100 or (212) 769-5200; amnh.org.