“Light will be shed on the origin of man and his history. Seminars on human evolution.” 8th edition of QuarantaScienza. Scienziati online
From October 1 to December 16, 2024, QuarantaScienza. Scienziati online, the annual science popularization event of the Academy of XL. This eighth edition, “Light will be shed on the origin of man and his history. Seminars on Human Evolution,” is edited by member Prof. Giorgio Manzi.
“For Mankind, the problem par excellence […] is to determine what place man occupies in nature.” So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley in 1863, just a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s book (The Origin of Species, 1859) that was to radically change the course of the biological sciences and our worldview, in which Darwin had spent only one line about the human species: “light will be shed on the origin of man and his history.” At the time it was only a wish, a bold prediction, but today, more than a hundred and fifty years later, we can say that that promise has been fully realized. Especially in recent decades, the science of our origins, or paleoanthropology, has been profoundly renewed, so much so that we have been able to witness major changes in the way we look at and read prehistory and our evolution. New discoveries have come to augment the fossil record, important methodological advances have been made, and new forms of knowledge have intervened to define hypotheses and conclusions. Nevertheless, old questions have been replaced by new and more complex ones.
It is precisely these questions that will be attempted to be answered through a series of twelve seminars, organized as part of the FortyScience – Scientists Online series, which have been divided into a general introduction (1st seminar) and two sections: the first (2-6) of a general nature and the second (7-12) on the paleoanthropological and other documents we have available to us today.
The conferences will be held on the Zoom platform (to request access credentials write to segreteria@accademiaxl.it ) and will remain available at www.quarantascienza.it
