Adam’s Baculum

2025 / Cast pewter, silver, fossilized dinosaur bone, aluminum / 10.5” x 4.5” x 1.75”

“This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

-Adam, Genesis 2:23

Origin myths carry the weight of belief, offering narratives that attempt to explain the body, its purpose, and its place within the order of things. Yet these stories often fracture under anatomical scrutiny. The rib cages of typical Homo sapien skeletons are symmetrical - six pairs in all, with not a single rib missing. If the biblical account of woman’s creation from Adam’s rib (Day 6 - 930AM) is taken as origin, one might reasonably expect his biological descendants would bear the mark of this loss.

Viewed through an evolutionary lens, other absences surface. There are bones humans no longer possess but that persist in our primate relatives; the baculum, or penile bone, is one such vestige. Between these missing parts - the rib that was taken and the bone that was lost - opens a rift in how we understand where we came from and what was relinquished in becoming human. In this gap between mythic removal and evolutionary erosion, the body emerges not as a fixed truth, but as a site of contested origins and selective forgetting.

Our attempts to trace “the beginning” echo the work of archaeologists: digging, excavating, uncovering what has been buried beneath layers of time and story. Like fossilized remains, our efforts uncover the fragmented contradictions that persist in the sediment of belief, evidence, and imagination. Through this longing to locate our origin, these truths fracture under their own certainty. They remain an imperfect architecture, fused and held together by the systems and structures that we put in place.