The new book by Luigi Grassia published by Mimesis Edizioni is a real surprise, “That baboon bone thrown into the Universe“, a title that goes without saying and is capable of evoking the famous Kubrickian scene from the film 2001-A Space Odyssey, accompanied by a subtitle that reads “An anecdotal story of how we discovered the Cosmos”. From someone like him, who in the past had told us in volumes like “The Italians conquering the West” o “Balla coi Sioux” or “Savoy corsairs and kings of Madagascar” a completely different type of story, we did not expect this foray into territories so distant from those explored previously, in an essay very rich in information and at the same time entertaining, which delves into questions and episodes relating rather to subjects such as physics and astronomy, philosophy and paleontology.
And instead, page after page and with the attitude of a seasoned popularizer, Grassia takes us for a walk on the Moon seen through the telescope by Thomas Harriot four months before Galileo, and through the Garden of Eden inhabited by the San tribe – the most similar to our ancestors – passing through Hugh Everett and his theory of paths that bifurcate infinitely as in a drawing by Escher or a story by Borges, or even through the “string theories” of Gabriele Veneziano, who hypothesized how the Universes arise infinitely from each other.
«The first astronomer in prehistory was a woman», writes Grassia. «We don’t know for sure, but it’s probable, because that person 43 thousand years ago counted and chipped 29 notches on a baboon bone, one for each day of the lunar phases and the average menstrual cycle, something of female interest rather than male. But how do we know that that certain baboon bone does not count, for example, 29 antelopes captured, but rather the days of the lunar phases and the menstrual cycle?”. In this case it is anthropology that comes to our aid, because in southern Africa, that is precisely where that bone was found, the aforementioned San (also called Bushmen) continue after 43 thousand years to use calendars on bone made exactly in that way, so as to take into account both the phases of the moon and menstruation. «An uninterrupted thread, which has never been broken» connects that very remote past to our present.
And Grassia pulls out so many threads, all of them interesting. What can we say, for example, about the theory of two scholars, Cara Wall-Scheffer and Timothy Taylor, according to which 3 million years ago an australopithecus invented the baby sling using a simple leaf with a knot to tie the baby to the mother’s chest ? «Thanks to the newborn sling, human children, unlike baby monkeys, who have to get by right away, have the possibility of being born and surviving as immatures, with the bones of the skull not yet fused». Thanks to that rudimentary band, the very long evolutionary transformation from monkeys with a four-ounce brain to human beings with a one and a half kilo brain was possible: and so Grassia takes us from prehistory to robots, passing through Einstein and quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, it is impossible to give an account here of the countless gems contained in this book. Which is why you absolutely need to read it.