Homo erectus: Hominin #8 - 1/88 Limited Edition

Format: 2160 x 2160 px - MP4 Looping video - 150 dpi

This Hominin bust by the Smithsonian paleoartist John Gurche is built with clay over a cast or 3D print of an ancient skull, from which a silicone mold is taken and the face painted into the mold. Acrylic eyes, and bear or human hair implanted manually and individually.

Materials: clay, casting, 3D printing, silicone, acrylic, paint, bear hair, human hair.

Medium: digital photography, post-production coloring, animation.

After a century of fragmentary finds of Homo erectus, a beautifully preserved skeleton of a young male was found in Kenya in the mid-1980s. The boy’s skeleton shows the adaptive package of a fully terrestrial biped built to travel, capable of long-distance walking and running. Homo erectus adults were tall and long-limbed (more body surface area to deal with heat stress), and had a definitively projecting nose. Gone are the climbing-related features of the australopiths. The brain size is much larger than that of apes, australopiths and Homo habilis. They made two-sided hand axes, the first to do so. What accelerated this brain evolution and cultural development?

Theories include having hands completely freed up from locomotion to specialize as a dexterous manipulation organ capable of making stone tools, creating feedback loops between this process, brain evolution and the development of culture. H. erectus emerged 2 million years ago and lived more than 1.8 million years, making it the longest surviving of all our hominin relatives.

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