Man, was not there before and now he is here. It is a matter of fact for each of us, and this is true for human race in its whole.
Man does not exist from ever, he has made his entrance in the world at a certain time, relatively recent, and in a certain environment. At what time is it originated the presence of man on Earth? Which forms have preceeded it or prepared it? Of what type is “the clay” from which we are made? What signs can we trace back to our primordial past? The exhibit “The dawn of man”, realised by Euresis, intends to present the facts and the experimental evidences that the scientific enquiry has placed in light in the attempt to rebuild some of the passages of the prodigious historical occurrance that has accompainied the emergence of man on the scene of the world.
In the facing of the problem of the appearance of man it is posed in inevitable way the question: who is a man? What characterises him and distinguishes him for the rest of nature? Between the human race and the animal world there is a sort of biological continuity, even if there are fundamental news on the physiological level, like the celebral development (both quantitative as qualitative) or the bipedism. But certainly it is not all here: the human being does not reduces himself to his biological reality nor to the evolution that has made it possible. To that it is accompained an element of different nature: each single man is liberty and self-consciousness. Man is the level of nature where nature becomes conscious of itself: this is the distinctive trace of the human being, even more profoundly of how much it were his anathomic form. Thus, from the course of the exhibition it will appear clear how the study of the seeming of man did not only ragard the analysis of his physical characteristics (though crucial element), but also he research of hints that maight more directly testify the emergence of the human self-conciousness. Man inauguates a perception of nature and of himself without precedents: he perceives reality as sign and he manipulates it according to an order and a scope. Paleo – anthropologists try to discover and interpret hints of a projectual capacity, and of a symbolic capacity, through fragments and reperts (the stoneware industry, the first sepultures, the dawning of roughcraft art) often difficult to decifrate.
The exhibit does not intend certaily to resolve the problem of the identification of “how and when” the human threshold has been crossed, a problem perhaps destined to remain oper for ever: Teilhard de Chardin has writen that man makes his entrance in the world on his toes, yet when we see him he is already a crowd. Main scope of the exhibition is more than anything else to bring to light the principal facts and elements of the problem. We will touch with our hands the successes and even the enormous difficulties with which paleo – anthropologists impact in rebuilding that thread which in the last four million years has seen the sucession of diverse forms of men species, from the Australopithecus up to the Homo Sapiens.
Through an interdisciplinary course, the exhibition illustrates the different factors that have accompained the sorrowful story of primitive humanity, from drastic climatic changes to the conquering of food resources, from the organisation of the territory to migrations. The appearance of man represents the climax of a dramma which sinks its roots in the profoundities of the history of our planet and of the entire universe. So subtle is this thread, to induce several researchers to retain that it were a unique story in the entire cosmos.