Finally, there’s an app that let’s you see what you might have looked like if you’d been alive 700,000 years ago. Meanderthal is the Smithsonian Institution’s first official app for iPhone and Android and was released in May.
This is a well-designed app with a one-two punch that invites users to have fun, while it stimulates your curiosity about paleoanthropology, and then makes it easy to find out more – as much as you want – about it.
Here’s how: the app lets you upload a photo of your face and then blends it to one of the faces of three different human ancestors: homo floresiensis, who lived between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago; homo neanderthalensis who lived between 200,000 and 28,000 years ago; and homo heidelbergensis who lived between 700,000 and 200,000 years ago.
As soon as you’ve watched yourself morph from homo sapiens into one of our ancestors you can replay the morph, or choose to learn something about your new / old self.
The Share option lets you show off your new self-portrait on Facebook or email it to someone. The More option lets you choose a new species, start over or go to the exhibition website What Does It Mean To Be Human. You arrive at a vivid display of headshots of many of our human ancestors and can continue to explore from there.
One of the things that makes Meanderthal so good is that users get to see themselves in faces created by one of the world’s great paleo-artists, John Gurche. The faces come from the early human models he created for the Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History.
According to Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Human Origins Program who spoke to Live Science, the app provides an opportunity “for people to make emotional connections to our ancestors….It’s an important way to break down that barrier between things we think are so different or so ‘other.’”
It’s Gurche’s skill as an artist that helps us make this personal connection; the faces looking out at us are compelling, even at the size of a smart phone screen.
The app provides an engaging experience because it’s fun, focused and simple. It takes advantage of pop culture notions about Neanderthals to attract people, then provokes their curiosity and generously feeds it with information. Bravo!
By the way, the app’s release just happened to coincide with the announcement of a recent study showing that non-African modern humans carry between 1 percent and 4 percent of Neanderthal genes, and suggests early humans mated with Neanderthals.
