Sunday 30.10: Musée de l'homme

We took the metro to the Town Hall, and saw a big queue for the Sainte-Chapelle, went to the tourist office to ask for maps, museum pass and metro pass, the subway to Charles de Gaules, line 6 (if this info is a bit useful ?). See pictures on the other page of this day.

Musée de l'Homme

Very nice museum. The introduction was a bit long (what is a species, difference between species and genus, the link between Homo and other organisms) and superficial.

The section about the evolution of homo was interesting, well documented, could have been going into more details (pictures of digs, details of bones recovered). 

Lucy was there, at least her bones. 

Then we went to the section about Neanderthal and Denisovan which was illustrative. I missed maps of the out of Africa and detailed presentation of the actual knowledge of the DNA sequences and the percentage of Neanderthal DNA sequences found in human (around 2%) and in Denisovan.


One of the oldest burial (a woman, 24'000 years ago), with a coiffe made with seashells.. 




Chronology of prehistoric art


Other objects (bottom left, Löwenmensch (see dadoo.ch for my pictures)

I would have appreciated a more extensive coverage of neanderthal burials.

A link to myself about the Mousterian Culture.

The next two sections were about art : human body representation and parietal art.

There was a section about tool evolution before homo sapiens and a smaller about tools created by sapiens. But it was a far cry from what we saw in the MNA. 

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