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GIORGIO MANZI Sapienza University of Rome Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei National Academy of Sciences known as the XL Trying to understand humanity through paleoanthropology, that is, through our history in deep time, is one of the most fascinating challenges of scientific knowledge. It is there that we rediscover our place in nature, it is from there that we can draw the genesis of human biodiversity. A story before history, reconstructed from fossil bones, artifacts, prehistoric sites and bio-molecular data. It is a story that starts from the world of primates, monkeys, and takes us back to that group of bipedal anthropomorphs that in Africa, millions of years ago, undertook the branched evolutionary path that then gave rise to our species. We will meet Lucy, we will witness the emergence of the Homo genus, we will see the Neanderthals evolve and finally Homo sapiens appear on the scene, the species that today has the responsibility of managing its dominion over the entire planet.