HOMO SAPIENS

EACH VILLAGE IS A MICROCOSM
THAT TENDS TO REPRODUCE
THE MACROCOSM OF ALL MANKIND,
ALBEIT A BIT DIFFERENT
IN PROPORTIONS
LUIGI LUCA CAVALLI SFORZA
Map of H.Sapiens migration through time based on genetic data analisys
Homo Sapiens. The great history of human diversity is an international exhibition,
conceived entirely in Italy, dedicated to the ambitious interdisciplinary
research project founded, among others, by the Italian geneticist, professor
emeritus at Stanford University, Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza, who for decades
has probed the most hidden recesses of the depths of the history of human
diversity, uniting molecules, fossils, cultures and languages in a coherent
overall framework of evidence.
Today for the first time, an international group of scientists has begun to connect
the paths of ancient history that led our species to leave a small valley in
Ethiopia less than 200,000 years ago to colonize the whole planet, region after
region, spreading to form a wide variety of peoples and different cultures.
This exhibition tells where we came from and how we managed, migration by
migration, to populate the entire planet, constructing a kaleidoscopic mosaic
of current human diversity.
MANY OTHER HISTORIES BEFORE THE “HISTORY”: WE WERE NOT ALONE
What happened in that long and mysterious period of time between the birth
of our genus Homo in Africa and that of the human history written with a
capital ‘H’ that we study in school? Where did the many populations whose
successors are living in every region of the Earth come from? We, as a human
species, have only been on this planet for a very short time.
If an extraterrestrial anthropologist had come down to Earth a few thousand
years before the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, he would have come
across at least five species of the Homo genus: our ancestors of the Homo
sapiens species spread all over the world, along with the robust and intelligent
Neanderthals in Europe and Asia, to perhaps another species of Homo
discovered in 2010 in southern Siberia, to the later form of the species Homo
erectus that survived in the valleys on Java, and the small hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
who lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia: another surprising
and very recent cousin of modern man, discovered in 2004 – small pygmylike
humans with a brain no bigger than a chimpanzee’s, but possessing the
same advanced technology as Homo sapiens.
Yet not long afterward, modern man would remain as the only specimen of
humanity on Earth at the end of a process of diversification of the various
species of the genus Homo that had begun two million years earlier: a process
that had produced the first completely biped exemplars of Homo, such as the
charming little boy of the Turkana, then followed by a series of “out of Africa”
expansions, with sites inhabited by ancient species of the genus Homo in
Georgia, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Spain and throughout the “old world”.
We descend from a history of walkers and small tribes that expanded their
territories to survive. Not only that, but we are the products of six million
years of hominid diversification, adaptations, innovations and explorations
of different biogeographical areas, of a variety of bipedal forms (two of which
already walked on the volcanic ash at the Laetoli site 3.5 million years ago!)
that inspired the paleoanthropologist Tim White to use the metaphor of the
intergalactic bar, borrowed from Star Wars. In the end, however, after a long
period of prehistoric encounters of different types (perhaps with some hybri-