Premessa al saggio di Ian Tattersall

[Autom. eng. transl.] The preface to Ian Tattersall’s essay introduces a revolutionary vision of human evolution, based on the hypothesis of punctuated equilibria. Contrary to the traditional idea of a single and gradual line, Tattersall proposes an evolutionary “bush” composed of multiple hominid species, often contemporary and geographically distributed. This perspective, which recognizes the sudden and combined emergence of distinctive traits such as language and symbolic thought, contrasts with the gradualist explanations of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and opens new questions about the meaning and origin of our humanity.