Good show

So I went to the hominid exhibition and on the whole I was quite pleased with it. I was a bit annoyed by all the early hominids being depicted with half-open mouths—it made them look like halfwits (and maybe that was the intention, but still) but they were all nicely done. (The Neandertal woman looked very sweet, reminding me of a friend of mine. :-) The people who had done these reconstructions are obviously very skilled (as a modeller I can attest that making life-like humans is non-trivial) and frankly, the locally produced reconstructions of other animals, such as the Diatryma, rather paled in comparison.

But, what really pleased me was that the texts surrounding the exhibits were very clear and managed to present a lot of information in a very compact space on what had driven the evolution of the different species of hominids and really present the branching bush with multiple, co-existing species. Furthermore, noise-producing exhibits were kept down to a minimum, which however didn't make so much of a difference as it seemed every toddler parent in Stockholm had brought along their kids for me to stumble over. (I've lost my reflexes as my own kids these days are taller than me.) Most kids seemed very happy and excited by all these strange-looking people that now were dead. (“Why did they die, Mommy?” “I don't know, maybe they got sick or something.” This is of course true for the individuals, if not for the species as such, one had better keep track of what is meant—these reconstructions being both based on individuals, but also being representatives of all their contemporaries.)