Evolution and Diversity. Meet the Scientists

Is man an invasive species? Do we all hail from Africa, to which a shared nostalgia still binds us today? What is it that unites the peoples who have spread to the four corners of the world over the centuries, and what is it that divides them? Exhibition curator Telmo Pievani will be answering these questions and many more as he conducts an overview of the "Homo Sapiens" exhibition.

His name means "source" in the local language. Australopithecus Sediba lived at the same time as the first Homo in East Africa, less than two million years ago, thus potentially shifting our direct ancestors' origin from Ethiopia to South Africa.  Like all of our ancestors, he's a unique mosaic of features which Lee Berger will be helping us to decipher.

A few Homo Sapiens tribes looked across the sea between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago and succeeded in completing the crossing, thus marking the start of the great Australian epic. Tonight we'll be hearing the story of how the Australian continent was populated, amid discoveries and leading-edge scientific techniques... and to the accompaniment of the didgeridoo!

The abundant remains of a human settlement dating back 1.85 million years, the oldest date ever recorded outside Africa, have recently surfaced midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. David Lordkipanidze will be telling the story of the discovery of Homo Georgicus, our first, pioneering ancestor to come out of Africa.

What does it feel like to know that until only a short while ago we, the human species, were never alone? Or to discover that human races are all in our head, not out there in the world? Or that we're all African? Federico Taddia and Telmo Pievani take a disarming look at the more amusing and ironical aspects of human evolution.

We became modern about 40,000 years ago.  That was when our species began to use its imagination and to ask itself questions about nature - a process which marked the birth of the modern human mind.  Using data from molecular biology, the neurosciences, ethology and psychology, Giorgio Manzi and Juan-Luis Arsuaga will be explaining how we became "Sapiens".

Introduced by Giovanni Destro Bisol
Touaregs, Burmese, Tatars, Swedes, Basques, the Maori and the Navajo are all equal yet all different. In the course of Homo Sapiens' evolution there simply hasn't been enough time to split peoples into "races", but the human species does contain within it an extraordinary cultural diversity. Guido Barbujani and Marco Aime will be illustrating the [...]

We constantly refer to the word "race" when we discuss mankind, but in fact that's a mistake. Olga Rickards and Gianfranco Biondi will be discussing how racial classification is simply the result of an error in the process of explaining biological variability, which is the very basis of life itself.

A lecture and a show, with Telmo Pievani and Antonio Guerci
How many ways are their of saying "bread" or "love" in the dialects and tongues spoken in Italy? And why is our country so overflowing with diversity? Patrizio Roversi will be taking Telmo Pievani and Antonio Guerci on a sardonic journey exploring the Italians' most unexpected differences.

Languages tell the story of the world as seen through our eyes, because they only describe what we see and what is meaningful for us. Nicoletta Maraschio and Nicola Grandi will be showing that languages adapt and change, that they relate to their surroundings, to diversification and to extinction: in other words, that they evolve.

Fabrizio Rufo will be talking to Paolo Rossi, a leading expert in the history of science and of ideas who recently decided to tackle an unusual theme, producing an updated philosophy and anthropology of eating, exploring needs, desires, obsessions, differences and unexpected developments.

Introduced by Fabrizio Rufo
An encounter devoted to the central message of the Homo Sapiens. The Great Story of Human Diversity exhibition: we're human precisely because we've never stopped moving, shifting, migrating, spreading or changing the areas we settle in, simultaneously splitting apart and forging hybrids.

Putting fossils and genes together to figure out where we come from, how we've evolved and what relations we've entertained with other human species: three of the most celebrated Italian scholars at the international level will be accompanying the audience on a fascinating journey into the most recent discoveries regarding our past.

From the moment man and the animals first began to exist side by side right up to today's swine or avian influenza epidemics, our relationship with infectious agents carried by domestic animals has influenced the scenarios of human diversity, fostering gloomy asymmetries between the peoples of the Old World and those of the "new worlds".

with the participation of Francesco Cavalli-Sforza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
The LANGELIN (LANguage-GEne_LINeages) project is the result of a joint initiative involving linguists and geneticists, which has been under way for several years now and which aims to pursue a line of research originally devised by Luca Cavalli Sforza some 25 years ago, seeking to establish the [...]