Thanks to the Smithsonian’s “Meanderthal” application, I can now definitively claim that, despite premature balding, I am one darn good-looking Neanderthal. Who apparently gets beaten often.
As an ancient midget, though, I look much less bruised:
That’s Homo floresiensis, A species that lived from 95,000 to 17,000 years ago on the Asian island of Flores. Their brains were only about 1/3 of the size of a modern-day humans, but they rivaled Homo species of the same time in tool-making and cooking with fire. (See, being short isn’t always a handicap).
To give you a comparison, here is my head compared to the cast (replica) of an adult Homo floresiensis.
Clearly, as you can see, I was excited to be at the museum. I’d ironically forgotten that the Museum of Natural History (in NYC) isn’t quite the same as the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, and I decided, this morning, that I could not rightly claim to be a paleobiology-lover without seeing the Koch Hall of Human Origins.
So I saw it. My favorite part was the cave wall – a wall (in obligatory darkness, like a real cave) featuring covered replicas of famous ancient cave paintings.
This is how ancient artists signed their work. They would use a long, hollow object to blow pigment around their hands, forming the handprint.
If you go there, feel free to be a dork (like me) and measure your hand against the ancients’. I still have a floresiensis hand.
The museum itself also has an Ocean exhibit that features a REAL giant squid (even though it’s dead) found in 2005 and a coelacanth, an ancient fish species thought at one time to be extinct but re-discovered in the late 1930’s.
Combine the evidence of “extinct” creatures being re-found and the bones of the plesiosaur (below), and you have my obligatory freshman-year persuasive paper written for speech, “The Plesiosaur Predicament,” which explains how the Loch Ness Monster is real.
It turns out that a majority of my friends (don’t I know how to pick ‘em?) that I’ve met attending law school seem to be on SSRI’s (happy pills. Antidepressants. Whatever nomenclature you prefer). I think it’s because of the lack of sunlight. I was informed in the middle of Category 1 Hurricane Irene (first an earthquake, then a hurricane) by a 2L (second-year law student) that the sky looks like that all day during the winter.
Like what? Gray? Cloudy? Depressing? Frown. There’s a reason why I didn’t move to England.
Ironically, the law school students rely on the same medication that is often given to prisoners in the mental wards of jails and prisons. The problem is that once the inmates are released, they, on occasion, no longer have access to the medication due to lack of funding for the medication itself or for the doctors who prescribe it. What a tangly issue.
Anyway, sitting in your room all day reading ancient cases (or sometimes recent cases, like Iqbar v. Ashcroft, which are especially infuriating) is probably not beneficial to your health. Typically, it seems as if you could lack some essential Vitamin D.
According to vitaminddeficiencysymptoms.com (reliability?), the first symptom of a deficiency is – you got it – depression! So today, I closed my books with a resounding thud, stepped into my purple flip-flops, and traversed the Metro (yes, despite it being the weekend!) to get to the National Mall.
And boy, was that a good decision.
It appears that once you begin taking pictures of yourself to the left of the National Monument, the fever slips in. Then you need a picture of yourself to the right of the Monument. In front of the Monument. Smiling at the Monument. Surprised by the Monument.
Pinching the Monument.
Symptom of a typical law school student: lacking a life.
But all is good.
To close, I will share with you some frightening things to look out for while journeying through the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History:
T-Rex eating oblivious people.
Getting in a fist-fight with unknown giant prehistoric wombat creature.
Llama? Placed right by frightening wombat creature and classified (correctly) as a “camelid.”
And, of course, the tusk of an ancient hippo(now extinct) that was 25% bigger than the hippopotamuses existing today.
And that’s the way the hippo heckles.
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