It would be interesting if someone were to make an exhibit for a museum showing the timeline of humans and hominids, and under that showing children’s toys and literature, showing how these guys were represented in popular media. It probably already exists, right?
P.S. I feel kinda bad that this bumped Dan’s more important, statistically-related post. So go back and read Dan’s post again, hear?
Are there a lot of children’s toys of hominids? I remember having a bunch of dinosaurs but no hominids
There is a literature on this. One blogger to follow on the topic is John Hawks:
http://johnhawks.net
Hawks points to these essays on Neanderthal depictions:
http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/our-neanderthal-complex
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0043824042000303692
And there is this recent NY Times article, which mentions the interesting work of the Kennis twins:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/magazine/neanderthals-were-people-too.html
Finally, after a quick search, I also found these articles:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-41585-7_18
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/the-visual-language-of-archaeology-a-case-study-of-the-neanderthals/28FCEB61706704F6C58085CCADEFD54A
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0092.00096/full
I don’t know if this relates to what you mean:
https://www.bradley.edu/sites/bodyproject/media/gi-barbie/
“And yet, recent decades have seen boys’ action figures become impossibly, even grotesquely muscular. Some recent dolls have biceps bigger than their heads—not a positive message about brain vs. brawn. Jackson Katz, in his documentary Tough Guise, observes that the GI Joe doll’s biceps have been steadily enlarged over the years to the point that the figure’s body proportions are virtually impossible for any real man to attain. ”
“What is indisputable, however, is that the Barbie’s body dimensions are very far outside the “normal” range. In a [2003] study, Urla and Swedlund calculated that if Barbie were full size, her measurements would be 32-17- 28, typical of a woman suffering from anorexia. Add to this anorexic frame her large gravity-defying breasts and you have a body ideal that is virtually impossible for a healthy, non-surgically altered woman to attain.”
Also see:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.515.2280&rep=rep1&type=pdf
“We hypothesized that action toys would illustrate evolving ideals of male body image in the United States. Accordingly, we purchased and measured the most popular male human action figures which have been manufactured over the last 30 years. On both visual inspection and anthropomorphic measurement, it appears that action figures today are consistently much more muscular than their predecessors. Many modern figures display the physiques of advanced bodybuilders and some display levels of muscularity far exceeding the outer limits of actual human attainment”
“Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views Since 1600” may be of interest to those thinking about this topic, too.
A review, here: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/37678/1331010405_ftp.pdf?sequence=1
Michelangelo’s David seems really modern in his musculature. Were there bodybuilders in 15th Century Florence? There might have been, but I just don’t know. One theory I garnered from a Mark Helperin novel would be that the marble miners that Michelangelo presumably dealt with would have been really buff.