Picture your typical human evolution museum display. You walk into a dimly lit space with glass boxes on white plinths or roped off areas. There are lots and lots of bones. Maybe a bit of history on how those bones were collected, and pictures of the famous people – usually men – who collected them. Often there are reconstructions of what these human ancestors might have looked like: dark-skinned and hairless ape-people, walking, mostly naked, holding stone tools, or even being hunted.
But where are you? How does such an exhibit show you who you are and how you came to be? We don’t think it does. So, in 2018 we were among a group of human evolution researchers who decided it was time to do things differently. The result is Humanity, a new human evolution exhibit that opened in September 2023 at Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town.
The exhibit offers a close look at the problematic history of palaeoanthropology; it also attempts to decolonise the story of human origins. To do so, it looks at how human evolution has been portrayed in the past, in ways that reinforce western biases and alienate and dehumanise living Africans. Then it works to remove those biases and make our understanding of human evolution scientifically accurate, broadly relevant and inclusive.
