In 2003, the remains of a small woman who probably lived 18,000 years ago were found on the island of Flores, Indonesia. The event is evoked by Professor Frank Westerman, on the Plain of the Meuse (Netherlands), where he takes his students for an interesting exploration.
A few miles away, the crew of the Texel lighthouse are facing a storm that has nothing to do with the sea.
These are two stages of the journey into the culture of Northern Europe organized by the Iperborea publishing house from 29 April to 1 May, at the Parenti theater in Milan (also in streaming) and on 28 May in Urbino. Information here
The protagonists of the Festival The Borealis are writers, directors, musicians and observers of social changes including references to the production of films, video games and serials on Norse mythology and Viking history.
The covers of books translated by Elisabetta Svaluto Moreolo
Concerns about the lighthouse ship
The inauguration is entrusted to Mathijs Deen, author of “Per antica strada” a reportage on the routes trodden by migrations, trade and conquests that have marked European culture over the millennia info here
His new book, The Lighthouse Ship, is a permanent voyage on the Baltic Sea. The boat, chained to the sea, struggles like an angry animal when the storm shakes it and sways lightly among the placid insidious mists: its powerful eye of light is an indispensable reference for navigators in transit and, sometimes, the his crew brings help to fishermen in distress.
The ship’s cook decides to cook “gule kambing”, an Indonesian dish from his childhood. He gets a kid that roams freely on the deck and in the hold. His presence, apparently harmless, awakens dangerous anxieties in the crew when malaria forces the cook to bed and someone has to take care of the animal.
The reclamation excavations for the construction of the Maasvlakte 2 near the port of Rotterdam
We Humans
Frank Westerman, author of ‘We Humans’, departs from the Meuse Plain near the Maasvlakte, an artificial extension on the North Sea where land reclamation excavations have unearthed fossils of tropical animals. It is the pretext for the exercise he knows how to entrust to his students in the Reportage course: the search for clues obtained from the excavations, the interpretation of the finds, the reading of the landscape.
We travel far in space and time during this exploration, commenting on the feats of paleontologists such as Eugéne Dubois, Theodor Verhoeven, Teuku Jacob, José Joordens, Hanneke Meijer. Westerman focuses in particular on the discovery of Mike Morwood and his team who, excavating on the island of Flores in Indonesia in 2003, found the skeleton of Homo floresiensis. She was actually a woman (but the classification foresees Homo) of 25 kilos, 104 centimeters tall.
The cave where the Floresiensis skeleton was found in Indonesia
The discovery called into question the African origins of humanity, the dating, the supremacy of one theory over others, igniting controversy among scholars engaged in the desperate enterprise of climbing the geneaological tree of humanity to add or tear down branches and roots.
Westerman’s lesson also focuses on the strange design that has allowed humanity to distinguish itself from other living beings: “The human being is an animal who has freed himself from the chain and escaped from the natural kingdom … Since then we have spread over the sphere terrestrial as hooligans who, after breaking down the gate, invade the field ».
Would this be the winning goal of man over other animals?