ABSTRACT
One of the most signifi cant revolutions within twentieth-century evolutionary science was the reconceptualization of modern human origins (the origin of Homo sapiens) and modern human diversity. Early in the twentieth century, theories of cultural relativism and advances in human genetics began to dismantle Victorian notions of human biology and culture. Most signifi cantly, throughout the twentieth century, scholars and scientists worked to discredit older theories of “race” and environmental determinism; as a result, they revealed the concept of race to be biologically insignifi cant, a social rather than biological construct. Furthermore, growing research in genetics, paleoanthropology and archaeology has come to reveal Africa as not only the birthplace of our earliest ape-like ancestors but also the birthplace of our culturally sophisticated modern human ancestors (see Stringer and McKie, 1996; McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). Together, the scholarship amassed throughout the twentieth century has strongly undermined ideas of teleological evolutionary progress and racial hierarchy. Despite critical growth in anthropological science, however, outdated Victorian progress motifs often linger in the popular imagination. As this chapter shows, museum visitors still hold on to racial folklore and a seemingly commonsense perception of race despite changes in evolutionary science and museum representation; this, again, emphasizes the struggle between the power of museum visitors’ preconceptions and their intuitive beliefs when confronting science in museums.
