UOMO, ORIGINE DELL'. — The problem of human origins is the principal subject of research in human paleontology and has been the source of interminable and not always serene controversies ever since C. Darwin, with the publication of his work The Origin of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), explicitly opposed the traditional ad litteram interpretation of the Mosaic passages in Genesis concerning the creation of man. The increasingly frequent discoveries of fossil remains belonging to extinct human races very different from those of today and often possessing pithecoid characteristics have supplied arguments that appear valid in favor of the evolutionary hypothesis, so that today most anthropologists and paleontologists believe that the origin of the human body is the result of an evolutionary process.
Various authors who continue the nineteenth-century materialist school even maintain that the human soul too derived from that of the beasts through gradual transformation, parallel to bodily transformation. But in the present state of science it can be affirmed that no concrete evidence supports this hypothesis, since whereas the anthropoid apes prove incapable of any abstraction or invention, even the most primitive human fossil remains (with the exception of Pithecanthropus, whose human nature is uncertain) are accompanied by traces of fire and stone or bone implements that testify to distinctly human intellectual faculties in these very remote ancestors of ours. The same cannot be said, however, regarding the origin of the human body, since the scientific evidence does not permit us to exclude its derivation from some extinct primate (ape or prosimian). Indeed, the most recent paleontological discoveries have revealed that many thousands of years ago (v. GENERE UMANO, ETÀ DEL, ETÀ del), on the one hand there existed human races whose morphological characteristics approached those of the anthropoids much more closely than do those of present-day races, and, on the other, anthropoid apes that were—anatomically speaking—appreciably closer to man than those living today (v. PALEONTOLOGIA), so that there is an almost perfect morphological transition between present-day man and fossil anthropoid apes. To the observation of this anatomical continuity must be added the certainty that considerable evolutionary phenomena occurred in fossil man. It is in fact evident that in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene there were men who, while fully human in their psychic endowments, differed considerably from present-day 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), 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 very ancient form, very different from those of today. It must further be observed that, broadly speaking, the chronological order of the various fossil human forms also corresponds to the aforementioned anatomical transition. It is true that fossil humans are also known from relatively very ancient periods (Fontéchevade, Swascombe, etc.) who display characteristics very close to those of present-day human races; but the fact remains that the oldest fossil humans known to date (Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Mauer, proto-Neanderthals) are decidedly pithecoid, and that pithecoid human forms become increasingly frequent the farther back one goes in time. It may therefore be concluded that the most recent paleontological discoveries do not permit us to exclude the possibility that the human body derived from that of some fossil primate and indeed seem to provide strong arguments in favor of this derivation.
Naturally, admitting the evolutionary origin of the human body does not mean accepting the materialist concept of “natural creation,” that is, admitting that the origin of man and his progressive transformation are due to purely fortuitous causes or, in any case, to causes independent of a special divine creative action. On the contrary, it can be affirmed that modern paleontological and biological research, and particularly studies of orthogenesis, demonstrate the teleology of evolutionary phenomena and therefore the correspondence of evolution to a grandiose creative plan, of which the evolutionary origin of the human body would represent the worthy culmination. In any event, it must be objectively recognized that the latter has not yet been scientifically established, because when one passes from the general observation of the morphological analogy between fossil humans and anthropoids to the search for a particular ape or prosimian with which even the most primitive human forms can be placed in a direct genealogical relationship, the difficulties still remain considerable. It must honestly be admitted that, to this day, the possible direct ancestor of man is still unknown, and we must await further discoveries which, by making new fossil human forms known to us, will make it possible to fill the many gaps that currently undermine our knowledge in this field.