You are on the second floor of the Walton Center for Planetary Health, in the offices of the Institute of Human Origins. This display is part of three large displays in the Marston Human Origins Education Gallery.
This is a large wall display that features two long panoramas of field sites that compare two different types of environments and two different ways to study anthropology and archaeology.
Display Title: Institute of Human Origins Field Sites
Display subtitle: Hadar Ethiopia—the image is of a brown arid and desert environment with rolling hills and washes but reveals stratified layers in the hillsides. There are three circled numbers at points on the image (numbers 1, 2, and 3).
Display subtitle: Pinnacle Point South Africa—the image is of a long peninsula jetting out into the Atlantic Ocean. The sides of the peninsula are rocky and pocked with cave openings. The peninsula has a green, grassy top, with houses built on the top. The ocean is deep blue. There are three circled numbers at points on the image (numbers 4, 5, and 6).
Hadar Ethiopa panorama points of interest:
Image number 1: People bending down digging in a desert environment with small shrubs and trees around against a backdrop of a large hillside with very stratified layers.
Text: Geological Layers. Hadar is located in the Afar Rift Valley in Ethiopia, where over millions of years natural forces such as wind and erosion have exposed layers of fossil-bearing sediments and volcanic rocks essential to dating the hominin and animal fossils found in the area.
Image number 2: Dry desert area close up of four people sitting of laying on the ground digging at the topsoil and looking at small items on the ground.
Text: Fossil hunting. Paleontologists and students painstakingly crawl across the dusty hills and ravines to spot fossil bones and teeth in the arid Hadar environment.
Image number 3: Fossil skeleton "Lucy" on a red background
Text: Lucy! In 1974, a young paleoanthropologist, Donald Johanson, found a small fragment of an arm bone sticking out of a hillside—it turned out to be part of the 3.2 million-year-old partial skeleton that later became popularly known as "Lucy!"
Pinnacle Point South Africa points of interest:
Image number 4: A rocky cliffside with a large opening and a long set of wooden stairs that reach up to the cave opening from lower levels
Text: Cave openings at the edge of the ocean. Over 20 years ago, researchers started working in cave sites located by the ocean at Pinnacle Point in South Africa. They had to build their own stairs to reach the sheer cliffside entrances.
Image number 5: Two side-by-side images looking out the same cave opening—the image on the left shows a wide, flat plain; the image on the right looks out on a rocky ocean shoreline.
Text: Inside looking out. The caves were occupied by early modern humans from 200,000 to 40,000 years ago. The record of glacial and interglacial global climate cycles would reveal the presence of a large plain during the cold periods and close-by shorelines during warmer periods.
Image number 6: Inside the cave site looking up and out toward an opening with light streaming in. The inside of the cave has been excavated to reveal many layers of sediments. There is a person on a tall ladder propped against an excavated wall with small orange flags going up the side of the excavated wall. Other lights and equipment are in the photograph.
Text: Scientists have revealed over 50,000 years of human habitation in one of the caves. This research helps us understand how early modern humans gathered essential seafoods and made the earliest stone tool blades and shell beads.