Man, Origin of

MAN, ORIGIN OF. - The problem of human origins is the principal object of research in human paleontology and has been a source of interminable and not always serene controversy ever since C. Darwin, with the publication of his work The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), explicitly opposed the traditional ad litteram interpretation of the passages of the Mosaic Genesis concerning the creation of man. The increasingly frequent discoveries of fossil remains, belonging to extinct human races very different from present ones and often endowed with pithecoid characteristics, have brought forward arguments that appear valid in favor of the evolutionist hypothesis, so that today the majority of anthropologists and paleontologists hold that the origin of the human body corresponds to an evolutionary process.

Various authors who continue the nineteenth-century materialist current even maintain that the human soul too would derive from that of beasts through gradual transformation, parallel to the bodily one. But in the present state of science it can be affirmed that no concrete proof favors this hypothesis, given that while the anthropomorphic apes prove incapable of any abstraction and invention, the most primitive human fossil remains (with the exception of Pithecanthropus, whose human nature is not certain) are accompanied by traces of fire and of lithic or bone tools that testify in these our most distant ancestors to genuinely human intellectual faculties. The same cannot be said, however, with regard to the origin of the human body, since the scientific documentation does not allow us to exclude its derivation from some extinct primate (monkey or prosimian). In fact the most recent paleontological discoveries have revealed that many thousands of years ago there existed (v. GENERE UMANO, ETÀ del) on the one hand human races whose morphological characteristics approach much more closely than in present races those of the anthropoids, and on the other hand anthropomorphic apes appreciably closer to man - anatomically speaking - than the present ones (v. PALEOANTROPOLOGIA), so that there is an almost perfect morphological transition between present man and fossil anthropomorphic apes. To the observation of this anatomical continuity must be added the certainty that in fossil man there occurred evolutionary phenomena of considerable magnitude. It appears in fact that in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene there were men who, while showing themselves fully human in their psychic endowments, differed notably from present human races in their anatomical characteristics, especially as regards the morphology of the skull. And since the unitary origin of humanity is admitted (v. MONOGENISMO UMANO), it is also necessary to admit that all recent and ancient human forms, so different from one another, derive through successive transformations from a single most ancient form very different from present ones. It must further be observed that to the aforementioned anatomical transition there corresponds, in broad outline, also the chronological order of the various human fossil forms. It is true that human fossils are known even from relatively very ancient times (Fontéchevade, Swanscombe, etc.) that present characteristics quite close to those of present human races, but the fact remains that the most ancient human fossils so far known (Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Mauer, pre-Neanderthals) are decidedly pithecoid, and that pithecoid human forms are all the more frequent the further back one goes in time. One can therefore conclude that the most recent paleontological discoveries do not allow us to exclude the possibility of a derivation of the human body from that of some fossil primate and indeed seem to bring forward good arguments in favor of that derivation.

Naturally, to admit the evolutionary origin of the human body does not mean to accept the materialist concept of "natural creation," that is, to admit that the origin of man and his progressive transformation are due to purely fortuitous causes or in any case independent of a special divine creative action. One can on the contrary affirm that modern paleontological and biological research, and particularly studies on orthogenesis, demonstrate the finalism of evolutionary phenomena and therefore the correspondence of evolution to a grand creative plan, of which the evolutionary origin of the human body would represent the worthy crowning. However, one must objectively recognize that the latter is not yet scientifically established, because if from the generic observation of the morphological analogy between fossil men and anthropoids one passes to the search for a determinate monkey or prosimian with which even the most primitive human forms can be placed in direct genealogical relation, the difficulties are still considerable. One must honestly admit that to this day the possible direct progenitor of man is still unknown, and we must wait for further discoveries, by making known to us new fossil human forms, to allow us to fill the too many gaps that currently vitiate our knowledge in this field.

Pietro Leonardi