The West Coast: California

This chapter explores exhibits in San Diego’s Museum of Man (now the Museum of Us) and the California Academy of Science’s Kimball Natural History Museum in San Francisco. Before its removal in 2018, San Diego’s Footsteps through Time was among the top three human evolution exhibits in the U.S. This case study reveals why an anthropology museum considers such content less relevant, whereas a small amount of race-related biological anthropology material has been retained within another exhibit (Race: Are We So Different?). A Side Trip to the NAT, San Diego’s Natural History Museum, includes description of a special exhibit on the controversial Cerutti Mastodon site. San Francisco’s Human Odyssey provides a good comparison case for Cleveland’s human origins exhibit (Chap. 5 ), as both foreground the Ethiopian early hominin fossil record. Additionally, the California Academy includes content relevant to the interpretation of modern human biological variation.