Visit the Sackler Lab to handle casts of hominid skulls, learn about DNA and the human brain, and ask a scientist your questions. For families with children 8 years old and up.

Lab highlights:

• Measure features of ape and early hominid skulls - such as the size of their brains, teeth, and browridges - to determine how closely related they are to humans.
• Observe the earliest stone tool technologies and determine how our early ancestors hunted and survived in their environments.
• Visualize DNA from strawberries, and even yourself!
• Assemble models of human brains to learn what parts we share with other animals and what parts are uniquely human.
• Play brain games to test your memory, visual perception, and decision making abilities.
• Use media interactives to learn about neurotransmitters and how the decisions you make everyday affect the chemicals in your brain.

Teachers

If you teach 8th - 12th grade students classes and would like to book a class trip to the Sackler Educational Lab, please visit  our Class Trips website

Credit

The Museum is deeply grateful to the Hall's lead benefactors Anne and Bernard Spitzer, whose marvelous generosity inspired and made possible the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins. The Museum also extends its gratitude to The Mortimer D. Sackler Foundation, Inc., Katheryn C. Patterson and Thomas L. Kempner, Jr., Arlene and Arnold Goldstein, the Honorable Lucy Wilson Benson, and the Stout Family for their generous support.

The Museum greatly acknowledges The Mortimer D. Sackler Foundation, Inc. for its support to establish The Sackler Brain Bench, part of the Museum's Sackler Educational Laboratory for Comparative Genomics and Human Origins, in The Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, offering ongoing programs and resources for adults, teachers, and students to illuminate the extraordinary workings of the human brain.