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About The Exhibit
You are a survivor. Your body holds the evidence. The process of evolution and its outcomes have had a profound impact on every aspect of your daily life. And the process continues. Penn Museum invites you on a journey of self-discovery, through Surviving: The Body of Evidence, an interactive, multimedia exhibition that starts, and ends, with you.
You’ll start at Fit for Life, an introduction to your inherited human strengths and capabilities.
Then, travel back millions of years to meet ancestors from now- extinct species, as you consider Our Place in the Natural World. Touch and examine more than 100 casts of fossil bones from the primate and human evolutionary record as you move forward, Finding Our Human Ancestors.
Encounter some of the world’s most brilliant scientists and revolutionary thinkers as they put voice to their breakthrough theories in dramatic reenactments, in Witnessing Evolution.
Then, find out more about the particulars—why your back may ache, your son’s wisdom teeth are impacted, or your sister had trouble giving birth. Take stock in the imperfect, but remarkable, human being that you are today, in We are Not Perfect, but We are OK.
Genetics, evolutionary biologists, nanotechnology engineers, even school children, share what they think in We Keep Evolving—and invite you to make a prediction about our shared evolutionary future.
Directions
For directions to the Surviving: Body of Evidence exhibit please click the link.
Contact Information
Penn Museum
3260 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
p. (215) 898-4000
websiters@museum.upenn.edu
Credits
Surviving: The Body of Evidence is designed by Toronto-based Reich + Petch Design International, whose work includes the Smithsonian’s Hall of Mammals in the National Museum of Natural History. The interactive elements and A/V components are produced by Chedd-Angier-Lewis, producers for the PBS series NOVA and Frontline, with exhibition interpretation by Blue Sky Design.
In addition to support from the National Science Foundation, Surviving: The Body of Evidence is made possible by the generous contributions of many individual, corporate, and foundation donors, including A. T. Chadwick Co., Andrea M. Baldeck, M.D. and William M. Hollis, Jr., DuPont Company, Dr. Leslie Hudson, Virginia and Harvey Kimmel Arts and Education Fund, Diane vS. Levy and Robert M. Levy, A. Bruce and Margaret Mainwaring, P. Agnes, Inc., Park Avenue Charitable Fund, Schering-Plough Corporation; Eric and Alexandra Schoenberg Foundation, Eric J. and Barbara Schoenberg, Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation, The Women’s Committee of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Wyeth and anonymous donors. Planning for this project was supported by the Heritage Philadelphia Program at the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by The University of the Arts. This website was designed by Night Kitchen Interactive.
Education Resources
Websites
- University of California Berkeley’s Evolutionary Website
- University of California Museum of Paleontology: The History of Evolutionary Thought
- The Smithsonian: The Early Human Philogenetic Tree
- PBS: Interactive Web Activities About Evolution
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Evolution
- Enchanted Learning: The Evolution of Mammals
- The Theory of Evolution
- Literature.org: Read Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species
Articles
- Science News “European Roots: Human ancestors go back in time in Spanish cave”
- Scientific American “Articles about Evolution”
Exhibits
Exhibit Supplement
Hosting The Exhibit
To find out more about hosting the Surviving: Body of Evidence exhibit. Please click the link to visit the Penn Museum’s travelling exhibit page
Meet The Curators
Dr. Janet Monge
Acting Curator, Physical Anthropology; Keeper of Physical Anthropology; Associate Director, Casting Program, University of Pennsylvania Museum; Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
Janet Monge has undertaken fieldwork in many locations in Europe, Kenya and Australia. Her primary research interests are in human evolution, skeletal biology, growth and development as applied to extinct members of our evolutionary lineage. Beyond these research foci, she maintains a dedication to the preservation of museum collections and has developed methodologies to preserve and broadcast datasets to the physical anthropology community using Computed Tomography (CT scans), traditional radiology, and human dental micro-anatomy as well as in the distribution of the highest quality castings of human fossils to Universities and Museums all over the world. An example of this work is The Radiographic Atlas of the Krapina Neandertals.
It is her plan to develop a “virtual museum” of skeletal collections so that researchers from all around the world can use these CT scans of the Penn Museum collection as part of their own research design. As of June 2007, over 3,000 skeletal materials have been scanned and entered into this database. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation (along with P.Thomas Schoenemann, a Research Associate at the Penn Museum). In her own work, results of this endeavor have been presented at several professional meetings. Her own research interest in the project stems from the use of the scans for comparative purposes to the study of Human Evolution, specifically in the understanding of the cranial-facial morphology and dentition of Neandertals. As co-curator, with Dr. Alan Mann (Princeton University and Curator Emeritus of the Physical Anthropology Section, Penn Museum), of the Museum's forthcoming traveling exhibition, "Surviving: The Body of Evidence," one of the most ambitious exhibit projects ever developed at the Penn Museum. The exhibition is scheduled to premiere at the Penn Museum in 2008, before traveling to several sites nationally. This exhibit is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. She continues as Associate Director of the Casting Program (non-profit small business venture, world-wide sales distribution to museums and universities for research and teaching) that stores over 3000 molds and casts representing every phase of human evolution.
Dr. Alan Mann
Dr. Mann is a physical anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Emeritus Curator of Physical Anthropology at Penn Museum. He also holds a research appointment in the Anthropology Laboratory of the University of Bordeaux. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.
His primary interest is in the fossil evidence for human evolution and he has done fieldwork in South and East Africa, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany, and now works primarily in the southwest of France. His current research focuses on the evolution of the Neandertals and their relationships to modern peoples. He is particularly interested in the origin of language and its importance in the emergence of the quality of ‘humanness’. He is co-director of the excavation of a Middle Paleolithic Neandertal site in the Charente Department of southwest France.
Dr. Mann is the author of Some Paleodemographic Aspect of the South African Australopithecines and is co-author, with Mark Weiss, of Human Biology and Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective, as well as more than 75 articles in professional journals and popular magazines. He has also written a children’s book on human evolution. He has been a consultant for the National Geographic Society and is the Anthropology consultant for the World Book Encyclopedia.