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For the Hall of Human Origins
at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum,
paleo-artist John Gurche sculpted a series
of hominids, or early humans.
Gurche and the Smithsonian curators chose poses that would
reflect a signature characteristic of each
species.
A *** erectus female is sculpted in mid-stride,
carrying a dead antelope over her shoulder.
A *** heidelbergensis male squats next to an open fire
holding out a piece of meat.
A Neanderthal female holds an animal hide in her teeth,
as she makes a piece of clothing.
Gurche is now working on a model of Paranthropus bosei.
As always, he starts with the fossil bones.
Right here, this collection of things that
look like granoa, this is actually a partial skeleton
from one individual, and believe it or not,
that has a lot of information contained in it
that tells us something about the proportions of
these critters.
So for example, this phalange that see on this
humerus, or upper arm bone, speaks volumes about the
kinds of musculature that this individual had
on its arm.
It's because much of the muscle attachment sites are
places where the muscles have stimulated bone growth
and caused a rippling of the bone,
so this phalange for example tells you that a couple of
the muscles of the arm were very well developed
and those are these two right here.
And you can see I've given them quite a bit
of development.
The skull reveals a central feature
of Paranthropus bosei.
Basically this species is a specialist in
chewing tough vegetable food,
and they have massive molars four times the size of ours,
and they have boney crests to support very
large chewing muscles on the skull,
so we decided to have this individual pulling a tough
root out of the ground.
The contrast that's made between this individual and
our hominids that are in our ancestry living at the same
time are sort of the path of the chewing machine and the
path of the thinking machine,
and this is the chewing machine.