Surviving: The Body of Evidence
Section Highlights

Surviving: The Body of Evidence is a new exhibition about the process of evolution and its profound impact on humans.  The exhibition is designed to encourage visitors to “see for themselves,” to find the clues and discover the evidence in their own bodies—evidence that explains how humans have survived and evolved into who we are today.

Fit For Life
In the first section of Surviving, a dramatic display of video monitors shows ordinary people doing ordinary things (such as walking, dancing, eating and talking).  Each of these distinct actions illustrates the inherited human strengths and capabilities that have been fundamental to human evolutionary survival.

The video monitors on the wall are deliberately arranged in a random chaotic pattern of different sizes and mounted to allow viewers of all heights a good vantage point from which to see.

Our Place in the Natural World
This section explores our place in the natural world and how humans trace their lineage back millions of years to common ancestors shared with other mammals and primates. 

This section challenges visitors to TOUCH, LOOK, COMPARE and NOTICE.  ‘Prompts’ to action include peek holes, viewing devices, mirrors, and sliding and flip panels. Featured are touchable bone casts from a variety of animal species.  The visitor can grasp, explore, and find the evidence that connects humans to other primates and mammals.

Curious People
Here, visitors are introduced to a gallery of famous world scientists whose curiosity prompted them to make some amazing discoveries.  These scientists include Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), Joseph Leidy (1823-1891), and Mary Leakey (1913-1996).

Visitors sit and relax in oversized audio chairs, where they hear, in the scientist’s own words, the revolutionary concepts they contributed to the field of  evolutionary science.

Finding Your Human Ancestors
The next section reveals the mounting evidence of human evolution. Faceted mirrors provide a playful background to the showcase.  The unique characteristics of our human ancestors are explored through a series of touchable cast skulls, tools and other important artifacts.

Touchable casts have been fabricated through Penn Museum’s extensive human fossil cast research program.  These casts include many famous skulls and bones. The highlight of this area are the skeleton casts (“Lucy”, Nariokotome Boy, Neandertal, and Modern Homo Sapien) mounted on silhouetted backgrounds that people can touch, stand beside and compare to their own physical form.  Visitors can hold the hand of a “Lucy” cast or stand face-to-face with the skeleton of a boy who lived 1.6 million years ago. As the species evolve closer and closer to modern Homo Sapiens, the multi-faceted tinted mirrors in the background of the display transform to a clear flat mirrored background: the visitor is the final display.

The Body of Evidence
Here the visitor is introduced to “the body of evidence,” the true star of the show.  This 16’ luminous woman, a larger-than-life sized figure, helps to illustrate how our bodies now function, because of our evolutionary past.

Look though the transparent outer skin and see the bones that make up the body’s structure. At each station visitors have the opportunity to interactively explore highly rendered anatomical visualizations of the specific joint, rotating the images and adding or removing the various anatomical layers. Visitors can also see pre-rendered animations of how bones and muscles interact to allow a full range of movement in the human body. A multimedia presentation shows how the muscular-skeletal system differs in chimpanzees and humans and explains the evolutionary significance of these differences.

Carrying the Scars of Evolution
The displays in this section focus on human imperfections and the fact that it is no coincidence many humans suffer from the same kind of physical ailments.  Common problems such as back aches and crowded wisdom teeth result from the process of evolution.

Three tall 10’ corner units surround the end gallery space, where visitors learn about the way bones, teeth and brains have developed, which directly affects our health today. A series of entertaining video presentations help people of all ages to understand about these scars of evolution inherited by all.

We Keep Evolving
This section of the exhibition features interactivities that explore some of the ways the process of evolution continues today.

Our diet. Flip up the dinner plates at each place setting to determine how modern diets affect our health and that of our ancestors. Our teeth. Turn the rotating disc to learn about an odd genetic mutation that affects many people’s teeth. Our future. Spin the drum to rearrange the parts of the body to witness the cultural variety in humans today and the potential loss of variety in the future.

Surviving into the Future
Here, a movie presentation that explores what the future may hold for our human descendants.  As visitors exit, they can also participate in a touch screen poll sharing their ideas about how they think humans may evolve.