I PROGENITORI DI ADAMO. PALEOANTROPOLOGIA E SPIRITUALISMO NEL PRIMO NOVECENTO

The present article focuses on the scholars who in the first decades of 20th century investigated the origin of Mankind, but they did not admit the value of Darwinian theory and cultivated spiritualistic views. Among them, the central personality was Robert Broom, who discovered in Africa the remains of a large number of Australopithecinae. Broom was convinced of the existence of a Superior Plan in history of nature and that Man was the goal of Evolution. His conception was not far from Bergson’s Évolution créatrice and it was inspired by Alfred R. Wallace’s spiritualistic opinions. Paradoxically, the paleoanthropological results reached by Broom were denied by many colleagues, who had an undeclared timor simiae – that means they dislike and loathed the possibility that Man and Apes had a connected evolution. This attitude convinced many scholars, such as Keith, Osborn, Sollas, Leakey, to believe in the authenticity of the finding of Piltdown Man (1912). About the Piltdown Man, both Wallace and Broom did not join the general enthusiasm. They were right, because in the Fifties the Piltdown Man was demonstrated a gigantic forgery. Today, we know – as Darwin hypothesized – that a few million years ago the African savannah was populated by some species of hominids, and we evolved from one of them.