Natural History Museum exhibition shows changing face of Britain over 1million years

 
Meet the ancestors: Emily Williams takes a look at a Neanderthal, left, and Modern Man, part of the Natural History Museum’s exhibition, Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story
18 November 2013

A new exhibition at the Natural History Museum will show how the faces and bodies of people in Great Britain have changed over one million years.

It includes these sculptures of a Modern Man — who arrived on these shores 33,000 years ago — and his shorter predecessor, the Neanderthal, who was here 7,000 years earlier.

They were created using the latest techniques for Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story, which will open in February.

Everything from height and build to skin colour is based on the findings of extensive scientific research conducted by the museum over the past 13 years.

Compared with the first people to arrive in Britain — about 900,000 years ago — Neanderthal and Modern Man are fairly recent inhabitants.

The Neanderthal figure, which is based on a skeleton from a cave in Belgium, is stocky, short and very muscular with a distinctive skull shape and a very small chin.

He is distinctly different from Modern Man, who came to Britain from Africa and is much taller and looks similar to humans today but stronger. Both groups are thought to have used pigments to mark their skin.

The exhibition, which will take visitors on a journey through 900,000 years of history, will be the most extensive of its kind on human evolution in Britain.

It will also bring together all the significant fossils of humans from England and Wales.

Among the exhibits on show will be the Swanscombe skull, the earliest known Neanderthal in Britain, and the Clacton spear, the oldest wooden spear in the world.Researchers also found evidence of mammoths in Kensington, lions and rhinos in Trafalgar Square and hippos swimming in the Thames.

Today’s Britons are the product of the 10th attempt humans made to re-populate Britain, 12,000 years ago — making us one of the youngest populations in the world.

Professor Chris Stringer, palaeontologist and world-leading human origins researcher at the Natural History Museum, said: “What we can show is that there were at least 10 attempts to colonise Britain. Nine of them failed — this is the 10th colonisation.

“The earliest people were entirely hunter gatherers living entirely off the land. No agriculture, nothing like that, and their main technology was based on flakes of stone.” Professor Stringer added: “From the point of view of science, this is a project I’ve been working on for 13 years.

“In 2001, when we started, the oldest evidence of humans in Britain we had was 500,000 years and since then it’s almost doubled to 900,000. On the early story this is certainly the biggest exhibition and the first time covering human evolution in Britain on this scale.”

Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story will open to the public on February 13.

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