patgund | Day tripping

As part of the San Diego SF meetup, met

duckflambe at the San Diego Museum of Man in Balboa Park.

While the "Weapons of the World" display was seriously cool, I'm afraid I went into major geek mode on their Hominid exhibit. Casts of the major finds in the field, from replicas of "Lucy" (Australopithecus Afarensis) and Taung Child (Australopithecus Africanus) on up. And the skull casts were out where you could touch and examine them from all angles.

The "Zinjanthropus" (Australopithecus Boisei), and another A. Boisei skull, (cast of KNM-ER-406), were particularly weird looking to me. Very, very, very flat face, with these massive supraorbitals, (almost flying buttresses), connecting to a fairly small braincase with a very pronounced sagittal crest, (esp. with KMN-ER-406) It almost looks like something that didn't develop on this planet - maybe the skull of a protoklingon. (Maybe that's where the cranial ridge comes from in Klingons - a remment sagittal crest from anchoring powerful jaw muscles.)

Several of the casts of the Homo species were also interesting, but didn't have the "wow, that's weird" feel of the Australopithecus species. Homo Erectus is almost a "eh." really, nothing interesting to see here, move along. I did find the pronounced brow ridges in Homo Ergaster to be interesting. There's almost a ghostly feel to looking at the skull of H. Sapiens Neanderthalensis though - so alike, and so different. Almost like it calls up a distant, instinctual memory.

Okay, I'm occasionally a paleogeek. :-)