Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Tag: Museum of Man

  • San Diego – Museum of Man (Beer for Breakfast)

    San Diego – Museum of Man (Beer for Breakfast)

    The Museum of Man in San Diego had a temporary exhibition when I visited in 2015 which was all about beer. I have to say (write), what a marvellous choice of exhibition…

    And beer for breakfast? The text of this exhibits reads, “The Sphinx is a silent symbol of Egypt, but if he could talk he would tell tales of beer. Why? In Ancient Egypt beer was money and they paid a labourer a gallon of beer a day. By even modest calculations it took at least 231 million gallons of beer to build the Pyramid of Giza. To the Egyptian labourer, beer was a vital source of nutrition. Containing about 3% alcohol and packed with vitamins and minerals, it was a lot more like fermented oatmeal than our European-style beers”.

    A gallon of beer a day? There are eight US pints in a US gallon (I think), but that’s about 6.7 UK pints. Nonetheless, 6.7 UK pints per day is still quite a lot. I’m not sure I’d want that much, although if this fermented oatmeal tastes like a fine oatmeal stout, then perhaps I might have been tempted….

  • San Diego – Museum of Man (Gigantopithecus)

    San Diego – Museum of Man (Gigantopithecus)

    There’s one exhibit that I remembered from the Museum of Man in San Diego, which is their model of Gigantopithecus. This is a recreation of the largest great ape that ever existed and they lived between two million years ago to around 300,000 years ago (or so Wikipedia says). Standing at around 7 to 8 feet high (although it wouldn’t perhaps have been standing for much of the time), the ape likely went extinct because food became harder to find and evolution favoured smaller apes.

    Here’s what the exhibit, called Mr. G by some of the staff, looked like in the museum, but I was disappointed to read that it was taken permanently off display in 2016 (I visited in January 2015) when they were modernising some of the exhibits. The ape had only been created in 2003, so its life-span was quite short and I’m not sure what they’ve done with this intriguing item.

    The museum said that “one of the special features of Mr. G was that he was built with an infrared sensor so that any time someone came near, his eyes and eyelids would move”, although this had stopped working in the last few years, and it definitely wasn’t working in 2015. Anyway, I hope that somewhere this ape is still around, it’d be a bit irritating for the species of gigantopithecus if even their models went extinct.