Project

Afrique; Homo sapiens; Histoire du peuplement; Evolution humaine; Diversités biologique et culturelle; Migrations humaines; Adaptations aux environnements; Génétique; Archéologie préhistorique; Anthropologie; Innovations techno-économiques

Lead
Tous les humains actuels ont une origine unique en Afrique, comme l’attestent la découverte de fossiles très anciens sur ce territoire et de multiples résultats de la génétique. La première population de notre espèce, Homo sapiens, apparue il y a quelques 300'000 ans, se serait d’abord largement multipliée et disséminée en Afrique, puis ces humains auraient migré également dans le reste du monde. C’est aussi dans le continent africain que les humains auraient connu une extraordinaire diversification par leurs migrations, leurs échanges et leurs adaptations, à la fois biologiques et culturelles, à toutes sortes d’environnements. Cette longue histoire du peuplement explique que l’Afrique renferme aujourd’hui une étonnante diversité humaine, tant génétique que linguistique et culturelle, la plupart du temps méconnue ou sous-estimée.
Lay summary
Contenu et objectifs de l’exposition Cette exposition est destinée à raconter à un large public les résultats les plus récents des recherches scientifiques portant sur l’histoire du peuplement africain. Plusieurs équipes d’anthropologues, d’archéologues et de généticiens, en collaboration avec des partenaires spécialisés dans la création d’expositions et la communication scientifique, mettent en scène l’évolution humaine depuis ses origines en Afrique et expliquent comment cette évolution a conduit à l’étonnante diversité que l’on observe aujourd’hui dans ce continent. Cette exposition doit aussi contribuer à défaire les nombreux préjugés hérités d’un passé colonial à propos des populations africaines. Présentation de l’exposition L’exposition « Afrique : 300'000 ans de diversité humaine » sera présentée, dans un premier temps, dans le contexte universitaire (salle d’exposition de l’Université de Genève), puis au Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de la ville de Genève où elle accueillera un large public.

Direct link to Lay Summary

Last update: 05.04.2019

Natural persons

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

Number	Title	Start	Funding scheme

This project aims at presenting a scientific exhibition entitled “Africa: 300’000 years of human diversity” to a large, non-specialist public, including schoolchildren and middle and high-school/professional-school students from Geneva and surrounding regions. The African origin of all current humans is, indeed, a scientific paradigm nowadays largely conveyed in medias and school textbooks, but there is a huge gap between this basic information and the understanding of what happened on this continent since our origins, around 300’000 years ago, and how it gave rise to the enormous diversity of African peoples and cultures existing today. The exhibition to be setup under the frame of this project, in parallel with a scientific conference, intends to precisely fill in this gap.The content of the exhibition is directly related to the scientific research carried out by the four applicants (who are all principal investigators at the Anthropology Unit (UA) of the Department of Genetics and Evolution of the University of Geneva) within the frame of their SNF granted projects. It consists of presenting the current biological and cultural diversity observed within and among human populations in Africa and of explaining how this diversity built up through multiple innovations, migrations and adaptations to heterogeneous environments during the evolution of our species Homo sapiens since its origin in this continent. The exhibition thus displays information related to several disciplines, namely human population and evolutionary genetics and genomics, physical anthropology, prehistoric archaeology and ethno-archaeology, based on their most recent scientific results.The exhibition will first be shown in the Carl-Vogt exhibition room of the University of Geneva during 3 months, from June to August 2019, and then at the Natural History Museum (MNH) of Geneva during 5 months, from September 2019 to January 2020. In addition to the four applicants of this proposal, who are responsible for the general design, scientific content and animation of the exhibition, the project includes four Partners: an expert in communication (working both at UA and MNH) and the Communication Service of the University of Geneva will take care of the museological aspects and dissemination, the 'Publics et Expositions' Service of the Museum of Natural History of Geneva will take care of the pedagogic material and organise guided visits for different target groups (including children), and a member of the 'Institut Universitaire de Formation des Enseignants' (IUFE) will coordinate inn-house training to prepare secondary school teachers of Geneva to organise guided tours for their students. Several collaborators, post-doc researchers, PhD and master students of the Anthropology Unit, coming from both Europe and Africa, will also take part in various parts of the process. This exhibition is of crucial importance for the society in general, as it will raise awareness that Africa embraces a huge human biological, linguistic and cultural diversity as a result of its long history, contrarily to a widespread belief or prejudice that Africans constitute a homogeneous « race » outside of history and progress. It will also put Africa into the larger context of the evolution of our species Homo sapiens, which will highlight its role as the cradle of all modern humans and their extraordinary diversity. The content of the exhibition, which is based on the most recent results of several disciplines, will also help updating the scientific knowledge to be taught within the frame of middle and high-school/professional school programmes in biology (e.g. genetics, human evolution), which will be most beneficial, in the long term, for public education in Geneva and its surroundings. The exhibition is also conceived to be easily implemented in the future to other institutions, in Switzerland and abroad.