Hominin Hall

Welcome to your family reunion! |

Homo sapiens, welcome to your family reunion! You’ve developed thousands of complex languages, built enormous cities to house your people, and changed planet Earth on a scale never seen before. Yet we’ve only been alone for a short time in our evolutionary history.

Don’t know any of your distant relatives? That’s alright; it’s been over three and a half million years since some of your family members have shown up to one of these get-togethers. This is the Virtual Hominin Hall of the Pacific Museum of Earth, an exhibit designed to share the story of human evolution. Although we are the only surviving member of the genus Homo, there used to be many more of us in the family. At times, we coexisted alongside each other! Truth is, our evolutionary story has long been portrayed as a linear march culminating in us, Homo sapiens. But today, we know our ancestral history to be more like a tree, with many branches growing together over millennia. Of course, there is still so much we do not know about the hominin story. In this quick-moving field of research, discoveries are made every year. Don’t be surprised if what seems accurate today is disproven tomorrow! Perhaps you yourself will one day uncover something that dramatically changes this story — our story.

Hominin Hall FAQs |

Including you (Homo Sapien), there will be 10 of your most distant relatives. Use the navigation arrow below on the right to get to know some of your ancestors...

Look for the colourful circles to learn about your ancestors' geographic origins.

 

Look for the colourful circles to learn about your ancestors' culinary preferences.

Look for the colourful circles to learn about the evolution of your ancestors' brains.

Look for the colourful circles to learn about how your ancestors got around millions of years ago. 

Look for the colourful circles to learn about how your ancestors' earliest inventions.


Downloadable learning activities |

We’ve created a series of learning activities for you to get to know everything about your oldest relatives!  Click, download (& print) the worksheets below.

  1. SKETCH A SKULL
  2. MORPHOLOGY & BEHAVIOUR