http://www.controcampus.it/2013/02/ritrovamenti-di-ominidi-in-eritrea-italiani-protagonisti-di-ritrovamenti-di-ominidi-in-eritrea-intervista-al-prof-coppa/
20/02/2013 (software translation)
Hominid discoveries in Eritrea - Italian protagonists of hominid finds in Eritrea - Interview with Prof. Cup
Homo! Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, Homo habilis, are just some of our most famous ancestors.
The past of man is the center of research and our questions since the dawn of our species. Knowledge and explanations of our origins have had many jumps emancipation, through steps such as inescapable religiosity liturgical and natural polytheistic mythology, theology - mostly Christian - and the monotheistic religions up to the current scientific theories. Each stage was a different attempt to understand and explain the birth of the world and, in particular, the development of human civilization. Then, something changed.
Not more than 10 days ago, is celebrated around the world on Darwin Day, the 204th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the famous English naturalist. About 140 years ago, saw the light of one of his works became paradigmatic of biology and science tout court: "The Descent of Man and sexual selection." These are the concluding words: "The man is excused for feeling some pride for having high, though not for his thrust, at the height of the organic scale, and being thus risen, instead of be was placed in the origin can give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future [...] and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble prerogatives, with the sympathy which feels for the most degraded beings, with the benevolence extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his almost divine intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these high
powers - Man still in his body the scaffold indelible stamp of his lowly origin. " This time, unlike in the most famous "The Origin of Species" - in which there was more than a hint - the argument more difficult that his revolutionary theories were involved was addressed clearly and without frills: the Like all living things, including man derives from ancestral species through a slow and steady process, now called evolution.
Of course, not surprisingly, these works aroused great scandal at the time of Darwin, because, in addition to being highly counterintuitive, going against the religious sentiment that he preferred a connotation size for the species and a cosmogonic vision of God and anthropocentric. What is surprising, if anything, is as obsolete even today this orientation is widespread and defended by the most extravagant theories, whether dogmatic (intelligent design) or pseudo-scientific (theory of ancient astronauts). The only theory that struggled just to sedimentation in the popular imagination was the Copernican theory of heliocentrism. Since it was made (unless you count the previous version of Aristarchus, dating back even in the third century BC), spent more than 150 years before it became the scientific orthodoxy. On closer inspection, the two theories have a common substratum: permanently deny the uniqueness and centrality (even physical) of man for which it
was created the world, a bulwark of faith this time of intellectualism anthropocentric. However, as today no longer believe that the earth is at the center of the universe, we may hope that before long even the most skeptical can recognize the genuineness of evolutionary theory.
Charles Darwin
It should be noted that often those who oppose it do not have any knowledge of its contents and that the objections are, in most cases, simplistic, generalist, direct more like a caricature of Darwinian theory. Among the most common are: "No one has ever seen a monkey becoming a man", "there are a lot of missing links", "there is no experience, it's just a theory", "not even the scientists agree on some points ". Given that Darwin himself addressed the majority of the objections which still offer almost decisive, it is clear that these people, they were a little 'back. From the time of the great naturalist, have been refined many weak parts of the initial theory was completed by ancillary theories and arrived a lot of experimental confirmation. To begin with, you add the Mendelian inheritance, which has found its natural place in the theory of synthesis contemporary, born in the early thirties of the last century, thanks to scientists like Ronald Fisher,
JBS Haldane and Sewall Wright. The discovery of DNA in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick helped to clarify other important aspects. But recently, the sciences of complexity and artificial intelligence have come important information about the ability of self-organization of complex systems. It is true that there is still much debate within the scientific community on some specific issues such as adaptation, natural selection, altruistic genes, development modules, dynamic and statistical interpretations. But this must be said, is just one of the features that distinguishes a scientific theory from a non-scientific discussions of specialists, the fact that it can not explain the presence of weak and incomplete. Where these elements are missing, it is ad hoc theories provided for 'plug' artificially every hole and deceive the gullible that everything can be explained in a simple and linear, perhaps by a single theory that everyone agrees.
The evolution, however, does not explain everything, but it explains a lot and, last but not least, it has received confirmation from everywhere: from genetics, biogeography, from statistics and mathematics, embryology, paleontology, geology, and who so on and so forth. Not only that, contrary to what is often said, you can see its effects in real-time is what they did Peter and Rosemary Grant, monitoring the beaks of Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands during periods of flood and drought, and Richard Lenski, with an extraordinary long-term experiment that monitored more than 50,000 generations of E. coli. Apart from these, other monitoring were performed (remember that the moth Carbonaria) and have always given support to the theories of evolution.
Among the various fields of research, paleontology and paleoanthropology are a particularly fascinating branch, put us in touch with extinct species, with reality very different from those of today as well as our ancestors. From the birth of the discipline, the discoveries of fossils have occurred in dozens, going well beyond the famous Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis specimen discovered in 1974.
The scientists involved in the finds of hominids and of these documents are many, including many Italians. Among these there is also a team led by Alfredo Italian-Eritrean Cup department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Rome. The team is currently concentrated at the site of Muhuli Amo, known as the "sanctuary of the tonsils", located in the Danakil Eritrea, an area particularly rich in finds.
Prof. Cup, once again Eritrea shows a land that can tell us about our past. The team led by her recently has become the protagonist of a number of important discoveries of hominid finds. He wants to talk about it?
The mission coordinated by me in Eritrea, now for three consecutive years, continues to uncover human remains of Homo ergaster dated to about 1 million years ago, this is a truly exceptional circumstances, made even more significant because the chronological horizon referred to by the fossils we have discovered is represented in Africa by a limited number of exhibits. The amount of artifacts that we discovered first in Wadi Aalad, the famous skull UA31 which is the most comprehensive exhibit of the late stages of H. ergaster and remains associated with the atria (the two teeth, a bone of the pelvis and a pubic symphysis), and then to Mulhuli I love the site known by the evocative name of "sanctuary of the tonsils", are almost the majority of African artifacts from that period . A Mulhuli love in 2010 we discovered a fragment of a bull front, as well as pieces of a front, absolutely identical to that of UA 31, in 2011 we found five fragments that were
part of a single left parietal, as well as a fragment of wall right and a left temporal, which we believe belong to the same individual in the parietal complete, but probably not to that of the front found the previous year, and finally a tooth, for his age, could be compatible with the findings of the same year. Finally in 2012 the discovery of another fragment that completes the parietal found last year and allows a more detailed analysis, as well as other artifacts which, being covered by a thick sediment, have yet to be cleaned and restored before being able to say with certainty membership remains of Homo particularly significant.
How to fit the recent finds of hominids with previous findings made by his team and, more generally, the paleoanthropological research?
The discovery of the new finds in Mulhuli Amo, a site that is only a few kilometers from Wadi Aalad, are particularly important because due to their strong resemblance to the artifacts found there, for the first time give us the opportunity to say that some of the features found in UA31, some of which make a finding that even with very archaic character still has traits of modernity, were not related to a single, particular findings, but seem to be related to a population of hominids. Around a million years ago in Africa, Homo ergaster is ending the long evolutionary journey, which began at least a million years ago, which led him to evolve, just in that part of Africa where we are conducting our research, a few hundred of thousands of years later to the new forms of Homo heidelberghensis who are our direct ancestor. Given the scarcity of finds from that period remains Eritreans are probably the most important point of reference to know this crucial
moment of human evolution.
What is the overall picture of human history that is emerging in 2013, after more than 100 years of excavations targeted?
Talk about targeted excavations is actually a bit of a stretch, certainly our investigations Mulhuli love after the first discovery I'm sure, but in general the findings of human remains is pretty random at first. This is the great charm and at the same time the major limitation of paleoanthropological research. Discovery of new fossils are in fact in recent years allowed us to get to change ideas and concepts previously given almost for granted. Just this fact is often based criticism of those who would question the theories of evolution, the problem of paleoanthropology is that it is not like chemistry where you can learn about an item even before having discovered what is expected on the basis of laws precise. We are trying to reconstruct a picture like a jigsaw puzzle of 10,000 pieces we had to survive on less than 20 pieces, of course every new piece allows us to have a greater capacity for analysis, but the overall picture is still far from being
fully understood. We know the general laws of biology, but we must also consider that the evolution of man is an event that is subject not only to biological laws even those, far more complex and difficult to analyze, relating to its cultural evolution. Indeed say that our work is to analyze the evolution of man in its bio-cultural aspects that have marked clearly its natural history. Recently, even one of the paradigms accepted, that the hominids, to be regarded as such, should be fully bipedal, has been revised, sometimes went still on the trees. There are still aspects that need further study and certainly the transition from Homo ergaster to Homo heidelberghensis is one of the least known, and it is one on which we have the good fortune to work.
Finally, what are your plans for the future and what is expected by the advancement of research?
The last findings and the data that they will arise and especially the possibility that future campaigns
International exhibition Homo Sapiens
excavations still provide us with new elements will allow us to clarify whether the findings of the Eritreans to Buya, the village in which we have our base camp, are, as we think, directly involved in the evolutionary line to the forms of Homo sapiens are one of the many dead branches of human evolution, extinct without leaving descendants. Our ability to analyze, but especially new findings will allow us to clarify this important element. Obviously in this context is also part of a practical problem that can become an insurmountable obstacle, our field research, but also in the laboratory, are very expensive and unless adequate funding is little or nothing we can do. For the moment, funding from both of our Ministry of University and Research, and of some of the universities involved in the project, mainly that of Rome "La Sapienza", and Florence, as well as Turin, Padua, in addition to Pigorini Museum in Rome, and finally Ministry of Foreign Affairs
gave us the basis to work, but without the constant and significant contribution of the Eritrean authorities and research organizations with which we work closely together for years, both in terms of human and financial resources would not have been possible to continue our work and reach the important discoveries that we could achieve.
Received on Wed Feb 20 2013 - 14:00:25 EST
