Human evolution: a brief history of the research since Darwin’s time.

“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”: this was the single line that Charles Darwin devoted to human evolution in the Origin of Species, 150 years ago. Despite short, apparently incidental and innocuous, this sentence actually represented a “risky prediction”. In other words, Darwin’s claim was: whether natural selection is the basic mechanism of the origin of species, in general, there is no reason to exclude Homo sapiens from analogous circumstances. As a matter of fact, the debate that followed was focused on the phylogenetic relationship of our species with monkeys and apes. The circa twenty species of extinct hominids that we know at present demonstrate that Darwin’s prediction was correct: light has been thrown. At present, the science of human origin (or paleoanthropology) appears to be able to shed light not only on our evolution, but also on mechanisms and patterns of the evolution in general. This paper contains a brief overview of the most important discoveries that characterised the history of paleoanthropology until about 30 years ago; this synopsis will be followed by an introduction to current methods of research, to briefly discuss the origin of our own species.