Light would be thrown: l’evolució humana cent cinquanta anys després de Darwin

In 1871 Charles Darwin published The origin of man and selection in relation to sex, his first major contribution to the natural explanation of the origin of mankind, a subject deliberately omitted in his best-known work The origin of species. Convinced that the right time had come to deal with such a thorny issue in public, Darwin spawned a book that, in form and substance, is deeply Victorian. It reflects his class, gender and national (imperial) prejudices, while at the same time lays the foundations of our contemporary view of human evolution without any supernatural intervention. The commemorative monograph of the journal Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Biologia offers us a wide and diverse panorama of current knowledge about the origins of humanity.
Keywords: Victorian era, sexual selection, human races, scientific image, human phylogeny.