The Time I Went to the Natural History Museum and had a Nerdgasm

So I lied. After (almost) getting lost on the Tube (again, on the way home from the Natural History Museum), spending about 10 minutes just trying to figure out how to flush a toilet, and consistently forgetting that we live in a "flat" and not an "apartment," I've come to the conclusion that I am not yet qualified to offer legitimate advice about living in London. Also, I'm just way too excited about our day at the Natural History Museum to write about groceries and riding the underground. We started off the day with a lecture by forensic entomologist Dr. Martin Hall on the usefulness of blowflies in estimating time and location of death, toxicology, and even in collecting human DNA samples from crime scenes. Because British law prevents scientists from doing post mortem decomposition studies on human subjects, Dr. Hall does most of his work on pig carcasses. However, he has played a role in forensic entomological studies on human remains at - wait for it - the Anthropological Research Facility at UT Knoxville! I was pretty excited about this, since I was there less than a month ago myself. Our next lecture, given by Dr. Louise Humphrey, talked about the famous Christ Church Spitalfields collection. This collection of human remains is important to forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology because it is the first "known" collection of modern individuals. Out of the thousand or so individuals, the age and sex of 386 of them are known by the names, ages, and dates of death inscribed on their lead coffins. This has made it possible for scientists to test out new methods of aging and sexing on this collection. Our third lecture, by taphonomy expert Dr. Silvia Bello, discussed the study of tool marks and its relationship with cannibalism. We learned how different patterns of tool and teeth marks can suggest hunting vs. scavenging (tool marks over teeth marks from carnivorous animals suggest scavenging, while teeth marks over marks made from hunting and killing with tools suggest hunting). We also learned about different cultural examples of cannibalism, early evidence of cannibalism in modern humans, and the use of skull cups (made from human crania) in various cultures. Even after all of that, our last lecture on hominid fossils, given by Natural History Museum curator Robert Kruszynski, might have been the most exciting... because we got to see two extremely famous hominid fossils up close and personal! I don't know if I can stress this enough, but these were the real live actual original fossils, not casts or pictures, although I've seen copies of both in the textbook I used for ANP 440 (Hominid Fossils with Dr. Fenton at MSU). We saw a female Homo neanderthalensis from the Tubun cave near Mt. Carmel, and Broken Hill 1, aka the Kabwe skull, an amazingly complete Homo heidelbergensis cranium from a site in Zambia. If that wasn't enough excitement for the day, we got to see several exhibits in the Natural History Museum, my favorite being the Animals Inside Out exhibit. For those of you who may have seen the body works exhibit that features various layers of the human body, it's similar, but with various animals, including sharks, goats, gorillas, horses, and even an elephant and a giraffe. Whew! Nerdgasm. Here are the links for today... Dr. Hall http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/staff-directory/entomology/m-hall/index.html Dr. Humphrey http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/staff-directory/palaeontology/l-humphrey/index.html Dr. Bello http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/staff-directory/palaeontology/s-bello/index.html Dr. Kruszynski http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/staff-directory/palaeontology/cv-5512.html Tubun Neanderthal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabun_Cave Kabwe skull http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_rhodesiensis Animals Inside Out Exhibit http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/animal-inside-out/index.html Christ Church Spitalfields Collection http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/collections/blurbs/345.cfm