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I went to New York City this weekend to see Paula. After yummy dim sum with Jesse on Sunday, we slogged through the torrential downpours to the American Museum of Natural History to see their new Hall of Human Origins. Now, I am a huge origins of man nerd. I never get tired of looking at motheaten Neanderthal dioramas and casts of Lucy’s skeleton. Natural history museums are my favorite, and that is always the first hall I zero in on.

So I can tell you with some authority that this was awesome. I heart dioramas, and these were in much better shape than my beloved Smithsonian ones. My favorite showed a Homo ergaster man and woman crouched over a newly-killed deer-creature; the woman was about to throw a rock at the raptor and dog that were coming to steal their kill. The people’s muscles were ropy and they were hairy, but upright…I love imagining these semi-sentient beings, so like us, but not.

My favorite artifact was something that might be a Neanderthal flute. The exhibit went to great pains to make it clear that it probably isn’t, it’s probably just a bone that got gnawed by animals such that there were holes on either end and down the middle; it looks like there are teeth marks, and besides, there’s no other evidence that Neanderthals had music. But think about that! Neanderthals with music!

I am particularly excited to think about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, two totally different species of hominids, running into each other in Europe. What did they do? How did they interact? This exhibit said that gene markers indicate that they didn’t interbreed, but they must have had some interaction. Neanderthals died out about 10,000 years after we showed up…did we deliberately kill them off? There’s something endlessly fascinating about the thought of two such similar sentient species sharing a planet. We think of humans as being unique, on a direct line of descent (ascent?) from chimps, but we weren’t — there were so many branches, some much more successful (in terms of years alive) than we have been so far. What if another had survived with us? What would the world be like?

Paula and I spent a long time watching videos of Kanzi, a bonobo, using a keyboard of hundreds of different words and symbols to talk. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has spent her career doing this; we read some articles and watched videos of her in B. G. Bill’s Linguistic Anthro class. It hasn’t been duplicated, unfortunately, and is therefore viewed with some skepticisim in the scientific community. But it is amazing to watch. He parses spoken words he knows combined in a new way — “put key in fridge” — in which the order is crucial, and follow the instructions correctly. He uses his keyboard to ask for a key to the room where his mother lives. He uses abstract words like “good” to mean “I really want to do this.”

Plus exhibits on music and art, lots of new information on DNA and what that tells us about our origins, and of course no shortage of skulls and casts of skulls. All in all, unbelievably cool. It’s a permanent exhibit, so no rush, but go take a look when you’re in New York.