American Museum of Natural History Research Library
author: American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History. Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins.; Spitzer Hall of Human Origins; Hall of Human Origins
birth: 2007
death: present
Permanent exhibition. Opened February 10, 2007. Located on Floor 1, Section 4. The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History opened as the "cutting edge" successor to the Hall of Human Biology. It is the first exhibition hall in the Museum to incorporate a teaching laboratory, the Sackler Education Laboratory for Comparative Genomics and Human Origins (1, 2007/08, p. 4, 41). The curators were Ian Tattersall of Anthropology and Rob DeSalle of Invertebrate Zoology. The hall covers millions of years of human history, from early ancestors who lived more than six million years ago to modern Homo sapiens, who evolved 200,000 to 150,000 years ago, pairing fossils with DNA research to present the remarkable history of human evolution (2).
The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins features casts of Lucy and Turkana Boy, the Mural of Primate Evolution, exhibits on Peking Man, Neanderthal tools, and Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon dioramas (2). The hall received the 2009 Merit Award for the Environments category from the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (3, 2009, p. 36).