Anelli mancanti e altri fraintendimenti sull'evoluzione umana

The announcement of the discovery, in October 2013, in Dmanisi paleontological site, of a strong intraspecific morphological variability in a Georgian population of early Homo coming out of Africa around two million years ago has brought back on stage the old phylogenetically linear interpretation of human evolution. We thought that the “great chain” of progress in human evolution faded once and for all, but we must say that it is gaining continuous success in mass-media thanks to its psychological fascination. In this article we discuss the arguments for and against the idea that the natural history of genus Homo has been held, in its early stages, through the transformation of a single polymorphic species all over the Old World. We argue then the reasons why, in a general sense, a return to progressionistic models in palaeo-anthropology should be excluded. The “missing link” in a chain is a wrong metaphor and it is a non-sense to complain about the alleged absence of these links as an anti-evolutionist argument. An irregularly branched “tree of life” (like the sketch that Darwin drew the first time in July 1837 on his Transmutation Notebooks) is still the most appropriate model to describe the phylogenetic relationships that characterize the hominin sub-family to which we belong.