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Articles
Pan the Tool-Maker
Latest Homo erectus of Java
Neandertal mtDNA
Middle Stone Age Bone Industry from Katanda
Pedra Furanda
Venus Figures

Web Sites
The Ancient Indus Valley
Stolen Stones: The Modern Sack of Nineveh
Clovis and Beyond
Chimpanzee Cultures
Oldstoneage.com

ROM Visits
Egypt Exhibit
Evolution of Man Exhibit

Bibliography 		ROM Visit 2: The Evolution of Man

The Evolution of Man exhibit can be found at the beginning of the Dinosaur (and other extinct reptiles) exhibit. It mainly consisted of a phenetic tree, a few skulls, and some stone tools.

I found this exhibit to be exceedingly out of date, and mostly faulty. Once you see past the androcentric nature of the exhibit, there are many other problems as well. If you look at the picture below, you can see numerous difficulties with their phenetic tree.


First, they have a huge polytomy at the bottom, showing orangutans, chimpanzees, gorialls, and hominids all evolving from one speciation event. This is very, very wrong. The only extant Great Apes that shared a speciation event are the chimpanzees and hominids.

It also shows Australopithicines as terminial taxa on different branches, which is also very, very wrong. Terminal taxa infer extant species, of which the Australopithicines are obvious not. The tree aslo makes it look like robust Australopithicines and gracile Australopithicines evolved far apart, which is not the case.

Lastly, the tree makes it look like Neandertals evolved directly from Homo erectus, and that Homo sapiens evoloved directly from Neandertals. Not only did humans not evolve from Neandertals, but there are many species between Homo erectus and Neandertals. The tree also makes it appear like humans from Mexico evolved from humans from France, which is just ludicrous.

The exhibit also has other faulty data, such as saying that a human found in Swanscomb, England is the oldest modern human ever found. They obviously haven't heard of Klassies River Mouth. They also say that modern humans are unique in being able to stand erect, which is obviously also not true.

Finially, in the exhibit of stone tools, they didn't put them in any sort of order. They were just lumped together as stone tools.

I really think this entire exhibit should be taken down and completely redone. The ROM is doing a disservice to the public by basically lying to them about human evolutionary history.

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