Universit� degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Unimore organises public conference ‘The world's oldest child’

As part of the initiatives organised to celebrate Unimore's 850th anniversary, on Thursday 28 November at 5.30 p.m., the Aula magna of the Palazzo del Rettorato (via Università 4, Modena) will host the public lecture ‘The World's Oldest Child’, a multi-voice dialogue to talk about human evolution starting from an important palaeoanthropological rest, exactly 100 years after its discovery: the ‘Taung Child’.

The meeting, organised by the Unimore Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences and the Museomore Museum and Botanical Garden System, in collaboration with Smart Life Festival and the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo, will involve Prof. Damiano Marchi of the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa and Prof. Iacopo Moggi Cecchi of the University of Florence.

In November 1924 Professor Raymond Dart, an Australian scientist working at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, received two crates full of fossilized mammal remains collected in a stone quarry near Taung, Botswana. The anthropologist only realised later that he was faced with a discovery that was decisive for palaeoanthropology: an endocranial cast, a face partially encased in rock and a jawbone.

The exemplar is of exceptional value: Dart realises that the face and the cast of the brain belong to a child ‘over 2.3 million years old’. The dentition consists of milk teeth, but permanent molars were growing in, which suggests that at the time of death, the ‘Taung child’ was just over 3 years old. Other clues indicate that the child had an upright posture and bipedal locomotion very similar to ours, was about one metre tall and weighed just over 10 kg.

Exactly one hundred years after his discovery, the meeting aims to retrace the steps that led to the development of modern man, to understand how the study of the past is the key to understanding the present. 

Categorie: International - english, Notizie_eng