Anthropology

Human evolution has been the subject of controversy for many years especially against Creationists who do not want to believe we come from apes. However, science has revealed evidences of the evolution of man from one era to the next. While science has many theories about the evolution of the modern man, one of the main contributors is the environment that forces man to change and adapt in order to survive. There are basically two major hypotheses that dominate the field habitat-specific and the variability selection hypothesis.

There are many evidences that paleoanthropologists have dug up to support the claim that the external environment did change man. The shifts in climate patterns have been found to be affected by many different activities of the earth and the major changes often stay for hundreds of years. Having established that, the nature of organisms is to have a habitat preference and when the habitat changes, they can only relocate to their favored habitat, become extinct, or adapt. The case of man is that of the latter and is called, collectively, the habitat-specific hypotheses. One of the most accepted hypothesis of the habitat-specific hypothesis is the savanna hypothesis which capitalizes on the fact that environmental pressures in of the African savanna influenced the many human adaptations we see today.

There is also what is called the variability selection hypothesis where they claim that humans were not shaped by a single type of habitat or environmental trend, but rather, continuous shifts in the environment due to instability was the cause of human adaptations. The adaptations were developed to cope with different environments rather on just one environment. An enabler for this is genetic adaptations, where natural selection chooses some genetic traits to be more prominent over others. This is coupled with the evolution of structures and behaviors to survive unexpected changes.
As research goes deeper, it was found that the variability selection hypothesis was the more acceptable one with evidences of ancient hominins found in different environments and habitats. Moreover, they were found to be moving around in diverse habitats and environments. These ancient creatures were found to have evolved even more in the area of brain development when they were discovered to have developed tools. These tools aided the hominins in getting significant advantages in the race to adapt to their environment and survive. Many of the uses of these tools were for hunting and slicing game for food. This represents the early beginnings of human technology and has influenced the altering of the diet of the early men.

However, this hypothesis also posed a problem for the early analogs of man some were unable to cope and became extinct over time. Such species include the grass-eating Equus oldowayensis, which was replaced by the Equus grevyi which both graze and browse. Not only were species wiped out, so were ways of life. An example is the Acheulean toolmaking hominins who were able to cope with changing habitats throughout much of the Olorgesailie record, but the Acheulean way of life disappeared from the region. Those who did survive however, were able to tolerate different environments and became scattered in different locations in Africa and Asia. Such early locations were found to be in Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia, Yuanmou, China, Nihewan Basin, China, and Java. These places have different environments, plants, animals, food and climatic conditions (including temperature, aridity and monsoonal rains). New ways of life involved newer tools, social networking, development of communication and symbols, and even ways of conveying them.

The theme of this exhibit is that humans are basically survivors. What we must remember now, being stagnant in our evolution for thousands of years, is how to survive our man-made alterations to our environment as well as the natural alterations that are now occurring. It reminds us of the new challenges to our survival as well as the survival of other organisms in this planet. This also poses the question of how much of our culture and way of life will survive after a few thousand years should evolution run its course once again.

More importantly, the exhibit resonates the ability of man to be ingenious to survive. It encourages people to become ingenious and become better survivors because of the advantages we have over our ancestors, the most glaring being the highly developed brain they have passed on from generation to generation. A fact we should be thankful to evolution for.