with the «Corriere» the series directed by Alessandro Barbero-time.news

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Of TELMO PIEVANI

Tuesday 31 January on newsstands with the newspaper the title that inaugurates the series: the first steps of the various civilizations that have arisen in the Mediterranean basin

A sheltered sea, with a mild climate, with islands and peninsulas that favor travel, right there between Africa, Europe and Asia. It is rooted in this geographical privilege the anthropological and historical centrality of the Mediterranean, which was once a piece of ocean, the Tethys.All human migrations have passed along its coasts in one way or another, since there have been human species on Earth. For the same reasons, the Mare nostrum is also a biodiversity hotspot: together with the Amazon, Indonesia, the Caribbean, West African forests and another twenty or so natural paradises, the basin is a treasure trove of animal and vegetable wealth.


As Giorgio Manzi explains in the first volume — entitled The origin of humanity — from the La Storia series. Italy, Europe, the Mediterranean, the cradle of humanity, notoriously Africa, of course, but sooner or later everyone has passed through the Mediterranean. The initial geographic expansions of the genre Homowhich began around two million years ago, led the first humans to explore the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Three hundred thousand years later we find them already in the Caucasus and a little later in the Far East, in Java, on the one hand, and in Europe with the species Homo antecessor (even in England), on the other. These ancestors of ours, unaware explorers, passed along the coasts and traveled northward along the corridor of the Levant, along the Jordan valley.

Why move? Perhaps to adapt to an environment in constant transformation due to the alternation of glacial and interglacial phases, perhaps due to population growth, or out of curiosity to see what was on the other side of the hill every time. The fact is that they took a liking to it and these wildfire expansions outside Africa continued, with several waves, always starting from the sub-Saharan belt and crossing a desert that in certain phases turned into an inviting green prairie crossed by fertile valleys. A second great diaspora brought another human form, A man from Heidelberg, to disperse throughout Eurasia and around the Mediterranean. The descendants of these immigrants in Europe gave rise to the Neanderthals, who inhabited the Mediterranean for at least 200,000 years, from the Iberian peninsula to Puglia, from Croatia to Galilee.

Our sea also saw the coexistence of different human species, because when the third wave arrived from Africa, around 120,000 years ago if not earlier – this time in the form of tall, dark-skinned men with a globular head, i.e. A wise man —, the Neanderthals cohabited with our direct ancestors on the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean and with some of them they also had children, healthy and fertile. The last handful of Neanderthals survived at the foot of the rock of Gibraltar, feeding on fish and molluscs, until 40,000 years ago. They did not know they were at the Pillars of Hercules and apparently they did not take refuge in Africa, which was opposite.

In a site near Plakis, on the southwest coast of the island of Crete, a deposit of more than two thousand stone tools was found, dating back to as much as 130,000 years ago. It could be the indication of an ancient sea population of the Aegean by such a species Homo, capable of moving at sea with rudimentary boats or transited unintentionally from island to island. And who knows how many other traces of ancient Mediterranean voyages still escape scientific investigation. After all, Europe is the closed-ended western offshoot of Eurasia. Here, along the Mediterranean or descending from the Asian steppes, multiple migratory flows from the east have stratified, which today make up the melting pot of European DNA.

At the end of the last glaciation, history repeats itself and the Mediterranean remains a barycentre, an attractor. Between the plains of the Fertile Crescent, the Anatolian peninsula and the Jordan valley developed one of the major centers of domestication of plants and animals. The Neolithic people, with their cultures, entered the Mediterranean and mingled with the hunters and gatherers who lived there. Other miscegenations, trades and conflicts appeared in history, now also written. Ports and cities flourished in our sea, and you will find a compelling synthesis of all this in this first volume of the work.

Further on, in number 26 of the series, we will talk about transformations of the environment and migrations. It is striking that today, thousands of years later, other migratory flows — with different ways, times and reasons — travel the same ancient geographical routes that from sub-Saharan Africa arrive in the Middle East and, as always, seek an outlet in the Mediterranean. We think it’s an invasion or an emergency, but it’s been happening for two million years and it’s what made us human.

The series in thirty issues


The volume comes out on Tuesday 31 January on newsstands with Corriere della Sera
The origin of humanity, at the price of 7.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper. the first title in the La Storia series. Italy, Europe, the Mediterranean directed by Alessandro Barbero and produced in collaboration with the Salerno publishing house. Co-directors of the work, which includes thirty volumes and extends from antiquity to the era of globalization, are Stefano de Martino, Maurizio Giangiulio, Giusto Traina, Sandro Carocci, Roberto Bizzocchi, Gustavo Corni. The first volume opens with a general introduction by Barbero, followed by a foreword by Stefano de Martino. It then comes to life with an essay by Manuela Montagnari Kokelj on theoretical archeology and with the contribution of Giorgio Manzi on the appearance of the first men. then the turn of Margherita Mussi, who deals with the Paleolithic and Mesolithic. Isabella Caneva writes of Egypt before the pharaohs, Marcella Frangipane of the protohistory of the Near East, Alessandra Manfredini of the Neolithic in Europe, Alberto Cazzella of the Eneolithic in Europe. In his introduction Barbero insists on the importance of historical studies Only an impartial consideration of the past in all its complexity, he writes, can equip us to respond to the challenges of our time by deciphering the complexity of the present – and without frightening us in the face of that of the future. The second volume of the La Storia series. Italia, Europa, Mediterraneo will be released on newsstands on February 7th. It’s called The first higher civilizations. Sumerians and Egyptians and deals with the events of the third millennium BC.

January 30, 2023 (change January 30, 2023 | 20:41)

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