Gathering the Ancestors

In 1984, forty of the most significant fossils of human relatives from thirteen different countries all came together in one place. This special exhibit, titled “Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity”, was the largest public exhibition of fossil hominins in history. The American Museum of Natural History hosted these fossils from twenty institutions for a five-month public showing. The Taung Child, the SK 48 cranium of Paranthropus robustus, the original Neandertal skull and femur, the Mauer mandible of Homo heidelbergensis, the Sangiran 2 skull of Homo erectus, and dozens more represented many parts of the fossil record known at the time.

Once the fossils arrived in New York in early April, the museum invited scientists to an exclusive symposium. Many researchers had the opportunity to study and compare original hominin fossils that they had not before seen. Then the public exhibition began. By its end in September, close to a half million people had seen this direct evidence of our evolution. The event was in many ways an unparalleled scientific and public triumph.

But the exhibition was not without controversy. Some of the world's most well-known scientists spoke out against it. Protests by political figures threatened to stop the exhibit midway through. Institutions that had agreed to contribute fossils pulled out at the last minute.

Not for the first or last time, the science of human origins found itself at the center of geopolitics.

Assembling the cast

The idea for the exhibition started in 1979 from conversations between American Museum staff members John Van Couvering, Ian Tattersall, and Eric Delson. In the aftermath of the event, the three recounted their journey in the introduction to their collection of presentations from the scientific gathering, a valuable piece of history. Another description of the event was published by Paul Beelitz, an admininstrator at the museum who handled many behind-the-scenes details. In addition to these histories, for this post I've pulled together some details from journalists' reporting on the exhibition and associated events.

“Our view was that the primary purpose of the exhibition was not, in any political sense, to make a statement about human evolution, as if to dignify the challenge of ‘creation science’, but simply to make it possible for the public, lay and professional, to witness at first hand and for the first time a full sample of what had been found in the century or so since the search for prehistoric humans began.”—Ian Tattersall, John Van Couvering, and Eric Delson

By 1981 they had gathered support from four foundations that funded paleoanthropological research, as well as several key scientists from other institutions. With the support of these key organizations, the American Museum was ready to move forward. An essential question: Could they work out how to provide security to the fossils during transit and for the duration of the exhibition? Only with these arrangements would other institutions agree to lend fossils for the event.

In their history, Tattersall, Van Couvering, and Delson reported early enthusiasm for the exhibit by Elisabeth Vrba and C.K. “Bob” Brain from the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa (now the Ditsong Museum of Natural History). Building from this start, Delson pitched the idea to a broader range of scientists at the First International Congress of Human Paleontology, held in 1982 in Nice, which had been organized by the French paleoanthropologists Henry and Marie-Antoinette de Lumley.

Not all scientists thought that the exhibition was a good idea. While there would be many detractors, Richard Leakey received the most public attention as an opponent of the plan. Not only the co-discoverer of many important hominin fossils, Leakey had for many years been director of the National Museums of Kenya. According to the biographer Virginia Morell, Leakey saw the U.S. exhibit of Kenya fossils as an unacceptable risk, considering the strength of the creationism movement and possible protests. The Kenya government declined to participate. Ethiopia, then still governed by the Provisional Military Administrative Council—known as the Derg—also was out.

Other institutions declined to participate because of the changing political landscape of colonial legacies. Formerly colonized countries like Zambia had for more than a decade been seeking repatriation of important hominin fossils sent to Europe during the early twentieth century. Travel of these fossils for an international exhibition would bring many questions about why they could not travel to their homelands.

Some European institutions forged ahead with participation anyway. France and Germany were happy to send fossils from their own soil, like Neandertals, and also fossils that they possessed from Global South countries, including Algeria, Morocco, and Indonesia. The Netherlands signed up to send three fossils from Indonesia, including the original skullcap of Homo erectus from Trinil.

In addition to South Africa, the greatest volume of fossils were to come from Tanzania. Together these two nations planned to send some of the most valuable holotype specimens of fossils ever discovered.

A surprising number of fossils could be scrounged from institutions in the U.S. Some were more recent skeletal remains representing early inhabitants of the Americas, the final phase of the evolutionary story in the exhibition, which would also be rounded out by an early skull from Chile held by the American Museum itself. Others were on long-term loan from institutions in other nations for study by American researchers. The home institutions for these loaned fossils became sponsors of the exhibition also, bringing the number of participating nations to thirteen.

Show and tell

In their account, Tattersall, Van Couvering and Delson describe a scene at the Nice Congress, where the South African anatomist Phillip Tobias made an impassioned appeal for the scientific potential of the fossil gathering. In his view, the event would provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for researchers to study and compare the fossils first-hand. The addition of this scientific symposium would mean that the Ancestors exhibit was not a mere public spectacle, it entered the realm of scientific research.

While many of the most exciting new fossils, such as the famous “Lucy” skeleton, would not be at the exhibition, what would be present in strength was a new generation of scientists who had cut their teeth working on these newest fossil discoveries. They were now coming into prominence in the field, and these researchers were debating new ideas about human origins and evolution. They would make the scientific sessions into the most historic and newsworthy aspect of the gathering.

This idea also escalated a risk less apparent to the public: Scientists are not all equally capable of handling fossils without damaging them. This added new wrinkles to the security arrangements.

“Obviously, we could not simply lay all of the available fossils on a table and invite a free-for all.”—Ian Tattersall, John Van Couvering, and Eric Delson

Research on fossil anatomy requires detailed comparisons between fossils. Some of those comparisons can be accomplished with high-quality replicas. In the 1980s, the Wenner-Gren Foundation worked to coordinate the production and distribution of replicas of some fossils to research institutions. But despite their best efforts, for many hominin fossils only poor-quality replicas were available, and for others none at all. Replicas often fail to capture surface details, or convey the subtle distortions and pattern of damage that may be present in fossil remains. For such studies, original fossils must be examined.

The Ancestors session thus gave participants the opportunity to better understand the comparisons that were essential for their anatomical or taphonomic work. More than 100 scientists would visit as part of the Comparison Sessions.

One session was open to the press. Roger Lewin attended and filed his report for Science, providing a lively account of various scientists' experiences. For anyone familiar with the last half century of human evolution research, this is a fun article to read. Lewin included vignettes of scientists who were in the midst of debates, meeting and examining fossils together to hash out their disagreements.

A memorable scene pictured in the article is the late William Kimbel studying the cranial base of the Sts 5 skull of Australopithecus africanus, together with Todd Olson. Kimbel had helped to describe fossils of Australopithecus afarensis from Ethiopia, specializing on the base of the skull. The caption of the photo of the two scientists says a lot: “The two have for several years differed in their interpretation of the older fossils, Lucy and her fellows, from Ethiopia. They still disagree.”

Lewin described the beginning of a trend that has since grown enormously: the specialization of researchers upon particular anatomical elements. Some scientists today work almost exclusively on the foot and ankle, others work mostly on ribs, or on vertebrae. Still others work on teeth, sometimes focusing entirely on small aspects of dental morphology or dental wear.

This growing specialization creates a challenge: Few scientists are familiar with the broad picture across the entire anatomy of the skeleton. Lewin described this as one of the most valuable aspects of the Comparison Sessions: enabling specialists to look together at the big picture across species.

For my mentor, Milford Wolpoff, the importance of a gathering for comparisons was simple. Researchers often find themselves talking past each other. It takes getting together with the primary evidence to understand how the details of opinions actually relate to the fossils.

“Yes, I've seen all these things before, but the great thing was being able to thrash out longstanding points of difference and be sure you were talking about the same thing. You can't do that properly through the literature.” —Milford Wolpoff, quoted by Roger Lewin

Geopolitics of fossils

Any major international exhibition in the early 1980s faced some formidable political challenges. These would affect the organization of the event and the willingness of some institutions to participate. One challenge would threaten to derail the exhibition after it began.

One of the political challenges was homegrown in the U.S: the increased organization and political muscle of American creationism. Many states and local boards of education had introduced policies or laws requiring instruction in so-called “creation science”—using the argument of “equal time” for alternative ideas about the origin of species. Parents in Arkansas, Louisiana, and other states sued to remove creationism content from schools as an unconstitutional imposition of religion by the state. At the same time, in states without mandated creationism content, many parents sued to release their children from learning about evolution, arguing that it was state-imposed indoctrination.

The McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education federal court ruling in 1982 provided the first precedent holding that creationism is a religious doctrine and not science. This principle would later be applied nationwide after the Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987, already working its way through the lower courts in 1984.

While these court cases showed the way that education policy would go in the future, they also energized the political movement led by prominent conservative religious leaders like Pat Robertson. The idea that opponents of evolution education might create trouble for a major exhibit of hominin fossils, one of Richard Leakey's concerns, did not seem so far-fetched. In the end, however, no major protests materialized.

“This is a statement about science, an active statement about evolution. We don't seek controversy but we often find ourselves in the midst of it. We insist on the right to learn and on the primacy of the material evidence.”—Thomas Nicolson, AMNH Director, quoted by Roger Lewin

At the height of the Cold War, many Western countries were attempting to build new scientific collaborations that spanned political divides. The Ancestors exhibit spanned the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, which were boycotted by the U.S.S.R. and fourteen other Eastern Bloc countries. While no fossils from the Soviet Union were part of the exhibition, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—one of the few non-boycotting Eastern Bloc nations—did participate by sending two of the Neandertal skulls from Krapina.

Important progress toward scientific exchanges on human evolution between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China had been underway since 1980. Still, most Western scientists knew little about Chinese fossil discoveries from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The only representation of Chinese fossils in the Ancestors exhibit would be the exceptional casts of the lost “Peking Man” fossils held by the American Museum itself. But important Chinese researchers led by Wu Rukang arrived and participated in the scientific symposium.

The biggest threat to the exhibit came from the central inclusion of South African fossils. Growing protest of the apartheid government of South Africa, both in the U.S. and internationally, could not overlook an event that drew almost a quarter of its objects—and valuable corporate sponsorships—from that country. Many within the scientific community opposed any scientific collaboration with South Africa while apartheid policies were still in force. Portions of the public were even more vehement. The AMNH emphasized that the South African researchers and curators responsible for the exhibit were personally opposed to apartheid policies. That could not answer the calls for boycott.

As the date of the exhibition arrived, the Tanzanian institutions acceded to pressure from an anti-apartheid group at the United Nations by withdrawing participation by its institutions from the exhibit.

Other last-minute withdrawals had also happened during the lead-up to the event, centered on the colonial legacies of participating institutions. Indonesian fossils that were to have been contributed from the Netherlands were withdrawn by the Dutch government. Two important fossils of early Australian people, coming from the Museum of Victoria, were also withdrawn in respect of opposition by Indigenous Australian people to their export. These withdrawals—so precipitous that there was no time to change the exhibit book—reduced the tally of fossils coming to New York from 53 to 40.

After the exhibit's opening the public pressure related to apartheid actually intensified. Promotion of the exhibit brought it to the attention of New York City council members, who threatened to axe public funding for the American Museum if the South African participation in the exhibit were not removed. In response to this pressure, the museum agreed to end an agreement for South Africa tourism promotion, and to include signage in the exhibit denouncing apartheid.

Legacy

As a middle school kid in small-town Kansas, I read about the Ancestors exhibit in Science '84, the short-lived popular science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I pretty much absorbed anything related to science.

“Most of the fossils are held inside vaults of concrete or stone, accessible only through massive steel doors that look more appropriate to a bank than to a scientific institution. Not one of the museums holding important hominid fossils allows the public to see the originals. Most display replicas cast in plaster or plastic. A few display nothing. Even the photographs published in many books are often of casts.”—Boyce Rensberger

This introduction gave way to a series of photos, something I always remember from science coverage from those days. Ancient, fragmentary bones, skulls fitted and glued from with the support of wax or plaster of Paris, fossils of human relatives, to me those were extraordinary.

Looking back today at this article it's dispiriting to read so starkly about the secrecy and concealment of the fossils. It would be another decade before I saw paleoanthropology as a career. I could not have imagined how much the secrecy aspect of paleoanthropology would shape my future trajectory.

To the public and many scientists, the Ancestors exhibit was a great success. It really was something special to enable so many people and scientists to encounter the evidence for our origins. But for the next generation this exhibit would mark a high tide of openness. Forty years later we have never seen its equal.

Could the ancestors ever be gathered again?

Human evolution research is entering a hopeful phase of greater public presence and engagement. Major exhibitions of fossil hominins have unfolded in recent years. Some have been significant events within the countries of origin of the fossils themselves, such as the popular exhibits of new Homo naledi fossils at the Maropeng Visitor Centre of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. Others have been international—one example is the upcoming visit of the Lucy and Dikika skeletons of Australopithecus afarensis to the National Museum in Prague.

I care about this because seeing the evidence matters. For ages people have told many stories around the world about where they come from. So many of those stories are divisive, setting one group of people as special and others as inferior. So many of the stories grapple with the age-old problems afflicting humanity and cast blame for them on someone else.

Science for more than 150 years has been working to understand the real truth of where we came from. Reality involves many twists and turns, unexpected discoveries, times where new evidence made us change our ideas. What this story has that the others don't is evidence. Anyone can inspect the numbers, check our math, repeat our measurements. But all that loses any power if people cannot see the evidence for themselves.

Beyond this scientific view, there is a broader reason people should see the evidence. Our ancestors still have the power to inspire and change us, if only we take a moment to get to know them.

For me the most powerful thing I read about the Ancestors exhibition was one of the last things shared from behind the scenes by Paul Beelitz, his impressions watching visitors to the fossils on one of its first days.

“Getting in through the back entrance, I observed the visitors—mothers and fathers holding children up and offering explanations, students who had previously known the fossils only from books, couples strolling from case to case, and still others with no knowledge of paleoanthropology walking silently and reading labels. These were the first of the exhibit’s almost half-million visitors. If one word were used to describe the expressions on their faces, it would be ‘reverence’.”

Notes: I began writing this post as I was investigating some of the history behind the “Lucy” exhibition that traveled the U.S. from 2007 to 2010. The contrast between that event and the earlier Ancestors exhibit in terms of controversy, especially by scientists, was something I wanted to investigate.

For Ancestors, I was fascinated to read about some of the political opposition that emerged. I was also intrigued by the flips by certain scientists who were prominent within the Ancestors symposium and who twenty years later would strongly oppose travel by the Lucy skeleton.

One of the more durable records of the events is a series of comparison photographs of the fossils while they were gathered together. Chester Tarka of the AMNH worked in the evenings within the fossil vault to complete this photography, which enabled illustration of anatomical variation in ways that had not been easily possible from photographs taken at varied institutions with different focal lengths, orientations, and lighting. After the exhibition, a selection of these photographs were made available for purchase as slides by the firm Pictures of Record.

In assembling this post, I was very grateful for the histories published by Ian Tattersall, John Van Couvering, and Eric Delson, and also the diary published by Paul Beelitz, who handled much of the administration behind the scenes of the exhibition. These provide a wonderful record of some of the details of the lead-up to the exhibition, with some names of people and arrangements. I hope that I have been able to convey some of the events to new readers with charity to the efforts that were made to bring them here in 1984.

References

Beelitz, Paul Francis. (1986). The “Ancestors” Project. Curator: The Museum Journal, 29(1), 25–51.

Burke, Cathy. (1984, April 12). These are the ancestors of all of us. UPI. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/04/12/These-are-the-ancestors-of-all-of-us/4187450594000/

Freedman, S. G. (1984, June 1). Fossil dispute may bring apartheid denunciation. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/01/arts/fossil-dispute-may-bring-apartheid-denunciation.html

Lewin, R. (1984). Ancestors Worshiped. Science, 224(4648), 477–479. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.224.4648.477

Morell, V. (1995). Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings. Simon & Schuster.

Scheid, Don E. (1983). Evolution and Creationism in the Public Schools. Journal of Contemporary Law, 9, 81–126.

Tatterall, Ian, Van Couvering, John A., & Delson, Eric. (1985). The “Ancestors” Project: An expurgated history. In Delson, Eric (Ed.), Ancestors: The Hard Evidence (pp. 1–5). Alan R. Liss.