Cro-Magnom Man & Modern Homo Sapiens
On Shelf #3: What makes a human modern? All of the specimens on this shelf are those of our own species Homo sapiens. You will find Cro-Magnon [found at Les Eyzies, France in 1868; ~27 kya], a 10 thousand year old modern human skull found in Germany, a skull of a contemporary modern human adult from Asia, and the skull of a modern human infant. There are several physical features that make the modern human skull distinct from those of archaics such as Neanderthals. There are also behavioral characteristics that distinguish modern humans from other human species. We have place a copy of the so-called Venus of Willendorf here to represent those behaviors.
• If you compare the modern human skull to those of, say, the Neanderthals, you can see that the forehead is more prominent in our species than it is in theirs. This gives the impression when seen from the front that modern human brains were larger than those of Neanderthals, but that is an illusion. Neanderthals actually had, as an adaptation to the cold, slightly larger brains, but those brains sat behind the face rather than above the face as in our species. That placement probably acted to counter-weight the heavier face of Neanderthals.
• The modern human face and jaws have become more gracile. This has forced a supporting structure that is normally inside the jaw to move to the outside, thus forming the chin – only modern humans have a true chin.
• Further, as mentioned before modern humans have generally lost the eyebrow ridge that seemed to serve in other species to help buttress the facial bones from the constant shock of the chewing muscles doing their work.
• More than anatomy however, the main distinguishing characteristic of modern humans is the emergence of symbolic thinking as evidenced by the production of immediately non-pragmatic and more aesthetic and very probably meaningful objects such as the Venus figurine displayed or the cave wall art on the sign. (Though we do not and probably will not ever know what significance these things had to the people who produced them, we can safely assert that they must have had some meaning. Modern humans unlike their contemporaries of other human species were projecting meaningfulness onto the world.)
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