He had not been sick, was not injured in any way. So the sight of him face down in the marsh was a shock to his family. Surely this could not be so. Surely the stillness and seeming lifelessness of his body could not mean the end of his story. In truth it did not, although the future of his story was far beyond his family’s power to imagine.
Alive! He is well and alive! Not dead, please not dead.
They call to him. The gentle rocking of his body is his only response. They wade out to him. In the quiet the buzzing of flies is obscenely loud.
No breath, no life. Move, please move. They roll him onto his back and see his face, and then they know. Moments later they are startled by a wailing sound that they find to be their own. They carry his body ashore.
Some time later, they become aware that the shadows have lengthened into long stripes. The people do not know how long they have been here, but it is time to go. The lions will be waking now. Although the stone hand axe the man carried will remain in the marsh, his body will be gone tomorrow. It does not occur to them to move it.
The man persisted as a memory for a short time among his people, day by day, year following year, until there was no one left alive who remembered him. Long before this time his body had been dragged off and partially consumed by hyenas, and much of it had been decomposed by organisms which could use its nutrients for purposes of their own.
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Video by Yale Press
From the making of “Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins.”
His bones were buried by overwashing sediment and lay undisturbed for generation upon generation, encased in earth under the hurrying clouds. Bone that had once been alive was, little by little, replaced with groundwater minerals. Thousands of generations passed: birth cries and love, struggle and bright flashes of pain, until there was no member of his species still alive.
His bones remained still, in their bed of silt, as the surface of the land shifted above them. Rains swept away sediment, floods scoured the surface, cutting into earth until, one and a half million years after his death, the water opened a window and the sun once again warmed the bone of his cheek.
* * *
Something is moving in the distance: back and forth, back and forth, scanning the surface, a figure coming closer, silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky. Closer. An unintelligible shout, and a hand reaches down to touch the bone of the cheek. A stream of sounds–like a complicated birdsong but in a lower register, and then a second figure appears, bending low over the bones.
These are the man’s descendants of fifty thousand generations. They look different, with their domed heads and delicate flat faces. They are quick and curious, prying into everything, turning every stone. They chatter incessantly in rapid-fire streams of tongue-bending, tube-modified sound, punctuated by a series of pops, clicks, and hisses.
These inheritors have swarmed the globe and colonized virtually every environment on earth. They change everything they put their hands to. Too restless and curious to stop at their own world, they have set foot upon the earth’s moon, and have sent fantastic descendants of the dead man’s hand ax on journeys deep into space to look in upon other worlds. While the bodily shape of the man’s descendants has changed only subtly from his, the hand axe’s descendants bear no visible resemblance to their ancestor. They are composed of geometric shapes of light and ore and structural petrochemical. With them, the earth’s inheritors extend their eyes, ears, and consciousness far beyond the home planet’s living envelope.
These inquisitive descendants have also devised lenses that allow them to peer through immense distances backward in time, and strange lanterns with which to illuminate the shapes of their ancestors. We are those descendants and, at a distance of one and a half million years, we are straining to see you.
Who are you? We beings from your future are using every method we can devise to bring you into focus and answer this question. We want to know you, to see your face, even to experience the world through your senses. We measure you. We generate long chains of words and numbers in our effort to understand you. Past events leave residues you have not dreamed of. Past moments can be partially accessed, and, in a limited way, we can unfold them and study them.
We sift through the debris you cast off, trying to understand the way you lived. We hold the tools that you made and feel a connection with you. Did you give a thought to the distant future of the artifact you were making? Could you have imagined that it would last for uncountable years, outlasting even your lakeside homeland?
We would so like to know about your life, what you think about when you gaze into a starry night sky. Do you wonder about your people’s future, about whether there will be heirs to inherit your world and your ways? We can answer: Yes, for we are they.
Our ways are different now. If you could meet us, how unimaginably strange we would seem to you We and our technology are more closely connected than in your time. And we as individuals are linked in ways you cannot dream of. If you could see us without fear, you might grasp in some way the geometries of our lives.
We look into your empty eye sockets and wonder what you saw. We probe inside the space within your skull in our attempts to learn about your thoughts. We can see that in some ways you are like us. In other ways, you are still very much like the animals that came before you, and you conduct the affairs of your lives and your world as an animal would. If we could experience your thoughts, would they be those of an uncomprehending animal? We have found signs of your consciousness, and in this mirror of awareness we think we see a bit of ourselves. We view ourselves as part of a larger evolutionary stream of ancestors and descendants, of which you are also a part. We cannot help feeling a powerful kinship with you. You are, after all, our physical and symbolic link to the rest of creation.
* * *
We humans have a powerful need to understand our beginnings and our relationship to the larger cosmos. Testament to the universal nature of this need is the fact that all human cultures have mythologies that address it. Many of us have times during our lives when the yearning is especially strong to experience a connection with our origins and our links to the rest of nature as fully as possible.
For most of human history, religions have addressed this kind of yearning, often aided by art as a conduit for symbolic concepts and religious awe. The origins myths they have supplied are often beautiful, and the associated imagery compelling. Earth’s human cultures have produced thousands of these, many of them mutually exclusive. Today, we have the good fortune to be living at a time when a powerful methodology of testable inquiry is revealing details of the way it actually happened. The origins story revealed so far is fantastic beyond the powers of mere human imagination. It is the story of a small corner of the universe becoming aware.
Gaining an understanding of human origins through scientific study is one way of experiencing a link to the human past. Other kinds of experience—holding in your hands the skull of an ancient ancestor, for example—fulfill the yearning for a connection in ways that transcend measurement and analysis. I have found personally that one of the more potent ways of making contact is to use the best science available to create art about our origins.
In 1984, the Smithsonian Institution started a project to tell the story of human origins in a large, ambitious new hall at the National Museum of Natural History, an exhibit which later became known as “What Does It Mean to be Human?” Primary art for the new hall would be a series of sculptures of human ancestors created by myself. In the late 1980s, progress on the new Smithsonian hall stalled, an interruption that lasted for what turned out to be twenty-three years. It was immensely disappointing at the time. It was also immensely fortuitous in the long view. In the interval I was able to do research in dissection rooms and fossil labs around the world, and to formulate a powerful methodology for the reconstruction of human ancestors. The research behind hominin reconstruction involves the use of anatomical clues preserved in a fossil to re-create a fleshed-out form for an extinct hominid. Anatomical relationships found in living relatives can be used as a primer for reading the bones of extinct species. The work included numerous dissections of every species of living great ape, including humans, and took me into fossil vaults to study remains of human ancestors. By the time work on the hall resumed in 2007, I was ready.
This book tells the stories of the creation of fifteen hominin sculptures for the Smithsonian’s new David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened in March of 2010. Aesthetically and scientifically, the challenge was: how to build into the sculptures strong personalities that would reflect their species’ adaptive narratives? Together these stories trace the outline of the larger story of human history as suggested by the fossil record known so far.
Excerpt Two from Chapter 2: Walkers and Climbers: Australopithecus afarensis (3.6 to 2.9 million years ago).
At the end of the process [of reconstructing the A.L. 444-2 skull of Australopithecus afarensis,] we have an apelike face that conveys an impression of massiveness—something like a great ape with an enhanced masticatory (chewing) system. The jaws and cheek bones are large and heavily constructed, and the chewing muscles are very well developed. The lateral flare of the cheekbones results in a very wide face. It is also a very tall face, with a large, deep lower jaw that makes up a greater portion of the height of the face than it does in living great apes or humans. The area below the mouth is nearly vertical, reflecting the orientation of the front of the mandible. The nose is flat and apelike. The jaws project forward, with a convex area between the nose and mouth.The small distance between the eyes reflects the narrow interorbital region of the skull, and this imparts a unique look in combination with the wide face.
The braincase is small.
The head is now ready to be molded and cast in lifelike silicone. I implant hair and install the eyes. What do we have at the end of this four-month process? There is information here to be sure, as many of the distinctive features of the underlying skull of A.L. 444-2 are reflected in its facial form. But it also must be a face that we can relate to as a living being. If this final phase of bringing the head to life is not successful in achieving a living presence behind the eyes, the purpose of doing a reconstruction is defeated. For the facial expression of the reconstruction, I was shooting for a kind of startling awareness–a feeling of sentience at least as powerful as that visible in the eyes of any of the living great apes. If this kind of effort is successful, you may have something truly magical at the intersection point of science and art: a conduit to a living presence from another time, enabling you to imagine in a detailed way what it would be like to see one of these creatures alive. If the work is done well, the illusion can transport a viewer from museum floor to forest floor.
We are close enough to see the individual beads of his sweat. The sheen of his skin pulses at his jaw and his temple as he chews, and we can see muscle moving under his scalp nearly at the top of his head. He is a majestic creature. There is a slight frown on his robust features. We can see him breathing, and we become aware of a slight zoo-y smell. He brushes away a fly. We are struck with a strong first impression: Ape. He is absolutely an ape. We wait for something to contradict this impression, and we see nothing. Then he opens his mouth and pulls a berry-laden branch through his front teeth, jerking his head back as he pulls. Gorillas do this, but there is something different here, something decidedly un-apelike about it. It was only for a moment, but we’ve seen it: His teeth look human. He lacks the big canine teeth of a male ape.
Calls ring out, an unnerving sound that is only marginally like a human voice. He turns his head, looks back over his shoulder in the direction of his unseen compatriots who have been foraging nearby. They are gathering to move out from this open woodland setting. Those in the trees begin climbing down; mothers gather their young. The adult male we’ve been observing tucks a few remaining berries into his cheek and, for the first time, turns to look directly at us. Not having to search, he looks at us in a way that tells us he’s known of our presence from the beginning. He continues his gaze for just a moment longer than a mere curious glance. He stands up, still keeping a wary eye on us. Then, in a very familiar motion, he turns to stride away and is gone.
