Where man begins. Hybrids and Migrants: A Brief History of Human Adventure

Understanding Homo’s uniqueness (not its superiority) also helps us better understand ongoing evolutionary trends, health and environmental challenges, and future scenarios.

Our species is just the last twig in a tree intricate with shapes that have succeeded one another and coexisted over the last six million years. But forty millennia ago, at least five different human species still cohabited on Earth, and Homo sapiens interacted and hybridized with at least two of these. But why all these human species around?

Each was the descendant of one of the many migrations of forms of the genus Homo out of Africa. And it should be remembered that between 900 and 800,000 years ago we also risked extinction when dramatic climate change reduced human populations by more than 98%. Why did we remain, then, the only human species on the planet? Two of Italy’s finest science writers, an evolutionist and a physician, take stock of the discoveries that in recent years have profoundly changed what we thought we knew about ourselves and tell the bumpy and unpredictable story of a conscious and intrusive species that, perhaps first, questioned the meaning of the world.

Since 2018, Giuseppe Remuzzi has been director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, an Italian physician and writer. Having graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Pavia in 1974, he subsequently specialized in hematology and nephrology. In 1999 he became Primary. He collaborates as a professor of Nephrology for various Italian, British and American universities, and in 2013 he became president of the International Society of Nephrology. With Solferino he published The Footprints of Mr. Neanderthal (first edition 2021), Roosevelt’s Coins (2022) and Juliet’s Leeches (2024).