• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

This paper discusses Carmine Di Martino’s last work Viventi umani e non umani. Tecnica, linguaggio e memoria (Edizioni Libreria Cortina, Milano 2017, pp. 204). The book deals with two main questions, i.e. the anthropogenesis and the comparison between human and non-human living beings (notably, anthropomorphic apes), with reference to three topics: technology, language and memory. In particular, these pages highlight the phenomenological bon sens that the author chooses to approach the vexed question regarding the relation between “the two cultures”. That is to say, besides encouraging an authentic (i.e. radical and equal) dialogue between philosophy and sciences, he vindicates the epistemological peculiarity and the consequent irreplaceable role of the philosophical thought.

An attempt is made to determine when humans have had a soul. For this purpose, mind and soul are distinguished from each other. This clarification of terms makes it possible to criticise the emergentist view, which assumes that the soul arises naturally from the biological organism. The existence of a soul is inferred from the mental activities of humans, which are directed towards the transcendent. Special significance is given to burials. Burials have been practised for at least 448 000 years. Not only Homo sapiens, but also Homo naledi, Homo heidelbergensis steinheimensis and Homo neanderthalensis buried their dead. Therefore, there is good reason to assume that Homo heidelbergensis and all its descendants possessed (and still possess) a soul. Moreover, one can suppose that Homo erectus and Homo naledi also possessed a soul. Contribution: The clear distinction between the immanent mind and the transcendent soul makes us aware that we humans are beings equally at home in immanence and transcendence. Humans have possessed a soul for a very long time, and not only Homo sapiens but also his ancestors and related species.

Neanderthals have been traditionally described to be at the very top of the food chain, with a diet consisting almost exclusively of meat. On the other hand, anatomically modern humans (AMH) are thought to be a more flexible species with the exploitation of various food sources. Here we analyze dental macrowear of a large sample of Neanderthal and AMH postcanine teeth from different chronological and geographical areas of Europe and the Near East, applying a well-established method called Occlusal Fingerprint Analysis (OFA). This digital approach is based on the identification and analysis of attrition and abrasive occlusal wear facets (defined as polished homologous areas with well-defined borders) with the aim to reconstruct the jaw movements responsible for their formation. Thus, it enables to obtain information on dietary and non-dietary habits of these populations. Wear facet size and distribution seem to correlate well with diet, showing a large variation within Neanderthals and AMH, which mostly depends on the habitats they inhabited. We found ecomorphological signals distinguishing populations who lived in cold habitats from those who inhabited warm climatic conditions, suggesting an increase in meat consumption at the northern latitudes. In contrast, wear facet inclination is strongly influenced by the environmental abrasiveness accidentally introduced in the mouth through food preparation methods. In addition, we have also identified non-dietary wear on the postcanine dentition in Mediterranean populations that suggests the use of teeth as tools for daily task activities.

We argue that the phenomenological or ‘agnostic’ approach to evolutionary systems advocated by Thomas Henry Huxley is applicable in anthropological archaeology and show how agnosticism helps defuse the tension between humanists, natural philosophers and natural historians in integrative research. We deploy problem-framing methods from policy-relevant research in a palaeoanthropological context, developing a model of complex (scale-dependent, irreversible) causality and applying it to the problem of human-landscape interaction and primate foot anatomy. We illustrate this process with a single iteration of the ‘project cycle’ focussed on human-landscape interaction. Modern humans are co-operative resilience feeders, exploiting complex causality by perturbing stable, unproductive landscapes and feeding on the fluxes of energy and resources released as they spring back. Is it possible that this resilience-feeding is older than Homo sapiens?

El propósito de este ensayo es llevar a cabo un ejercicio de reflexión sobre qué es lo que nos hace humanos, tomando como guía dos conceptos clave: la hominización y la humanización. En el proceso de singularidad humana y su sustrato evolutivo, hominización y humanización son las dos caras de una misma moneda. Sin hominización no puede haber humanización; sin humanización no puede haber conciencia de nosotros mismos desde la perspectiva de interrogación de quiénes somos y hacia dónde vamos. La humanización tiene muchas maneras posibles de ser definida, pero todas las posibilidades expresan la manera en cómo se manifiesta la singularidad de género y de especie. Lo biológico en muchos casos ha podido determinar lo que es cultural, pero la síntesis representa una forma de integración sin la cual la humanización hubiera sido una quimera. Sin una teoría social de la evolución, la humanización sería un concepto vagamente explicado y poco definido a pesar de su intensidad analítica. The aim of this essay is to reflect upon what makes us human, taking into account two key concepts: hominization and humanization. In the process of human uniqueness and its evolutionary substrate, hominization and humanization are two sides of the same coin. Without hominization, humanization could not occur; without humanization, awareness of who we are and where we are going is impossible. Humanization may be defined in many ways, but all possibilities express the ways in which the uniqueness of our genus and species are manifested. In many cases, the biological has been determinant to the cultural, but the synthesis is a form of integration without which humanization would have been chimera. Without a social theory of evolution, humanization would be a concept vaguely explained and poorly defined despite its analytical intensity.

El propósito de este ensayo es llevar a cabo un ejercicio de reflexión sobre qué es lo que nos hace humanos, tomando como guía dos conceptos clave: la hominización y la humanización. En el proceso de singularidad humana y su sustrato evolutivo, hominización y humanización son las dos caras de una misma moneda. Sin hominización no puede haber humanización; sin humanización no puede haber conciencia de nosotros mismos desde la perspectiva de interrogación de quiénes somos y hacia dónde vamos. La humanización tiene muchas maneras posibles de ser definida, pero todas las posibilidades expresan la manera en cómo se manifiesta la singularidad de género y de especie. Lo biológico en muchos casos ha podido determinar lo que es cultural, pero la síntesis representa una forma de integración sin la cual la humanización hubiera sido una quimera. Sin una teoría social de la evolución, la humanización sería un concepto vagamente explicado y poco definido a pesar de su intensidad analítica. The aim of this essay is to reflect upon what makes us human, taking into account two key concepts: hominization and humanization. In the process of human uniqueness and its evolutionary substrate, hominization and humanization are two sides of the same coin. Without hominization, humanization could not occur; without humanization, awareness of who we are and where we are going is impossible. Humanization may be defined in many ways, but all possibilities express the ways in which the uniqueness of our genus and species are manifested. In many cases, the biological has been determinant to the cultural, but the synthesis is a form of integration without which humanization would have been chimera. Without a social theory of evolution, humanization would be a concept vaguely explained and poorly defined despite its analytical intensity.