New Exhibit: Hominin Hallway

March 2, 2022
View down the Hominin Hall exhibit with close up of the oldest human ancestor, Sahlanthropus tchadensis.

The Pacific Museum of Earth (PME) is hosting a family reunion millions of years in the making in their new exhibit: the Hominin Hall. The PME’s Hominin Hall explores the story of human evolution, starting our narrative 7 million years ago in Chad with Sahelanthropus tchadensis and concluding with our own species –Homo sapiens– and our uncertain future on our fragile planet. In this exhibit, visitors will delve into the lives of ten different hominins and explore how some characteristics and ways of life, from bipedalism to omnivory, came to define our lineage and continue in our own lives.

The replica skulls used in this exhibit were purchased in 2019 with a UBC Academic Equipment Fund for use in several EOAS courses and for display in the PME with the goal of showing the relative blink of an eye that humans have played in the long stretch of deep geologic time, by placing human evolution in a temporal context in the overall arc of the evolution of the biosphere. As visitors walk through this gallery, they will be confronted with the daily flow of UBC students walking up and down Main Mall, whose motion amplifies the dynamic story of human history we aim to tell and illustrates our condition as the last hominins of what was once a much larger family tree. In addition, the Hominin Hall’s placement in the front hallway of the Earth Sciences Building will provide a “zoomed-in” version of the last 7 million years of the Walk Through Time, an upcoming exhibit soon to be visible just outside the gallery windows.