Ice Age Mammals and the Emergence of Man

This hall provides a glimpse of the Ice Age, one of the most extraordinary times in earth's history. Mounted skeletons of some of the largest Ice Age mammals dominate the hall: a towering giant ground sloth, a woolly mammoth, an Irish elk, a long-tusked American mastodon, a saber-toothed cat, the mummified remains of a big horned bison, and dozens of other Ice Age animals are displayed. At the northeast entrance is a life-sized diorama of a reconstructed Neanderthal burial site depicting a Neanderthal family burying a young man in a shallow grave, along with tools and food; the reconstructed diorama is based on a 70,000-year-old site found in the Regourdou cave in Dordogne, France.