ABSTRACT
Since the fi rst well-publicized hominid discoveries of the twentieth century in Africa, much of the world has had time to adjust to the idea of their shared African origins (see fi gures 4.1 and 4.2; see Gundling, 2005). But how does this idea really impact those whom the rhetoric reaches? As this chapter illustrates, terms such as “Cradle of Mankind” are profoundly multivalent and dynamic.1
While an overwhelming majority of natural history museum visitors believes that they have evolved Out of Africa, visitors understand their evolutionary heritage through their own cultural identities and through stereotypical representations of Africa circulating outside the museum. Ultimately, I found that the ways many non-black museum visitors imagine their earliest bestial origins in Africa (as discussed in this chapter) are quite different from the ways they envision their recent human origins outside of the continent (as discussed in the next). Both, however, are attended by heavy cultural preconceptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be truly evolved.
