Background

Alberto Carlo Blanc was born on July 30, 1906, in Chambery, France. Blanc was the son of Gian-Alberto Blanc, a distinguished naturalist, professor at the University of Rome, and descendant of an old and prominent Savoyard family. When a part of the Duchy of Savoy voted for France in 1860, the Blancs chose to become Italian out of loyalty to the Prince of Savoy. These origins endowed the Blanc family with a double culture, French and Italian.

Education

From a young age, suffering the influence of his father, Blanc showed a keen interest in studies palaeontological humanity Pleistocene. He then majored in geology in Pisa.

Career

Blanc was called to the University of Rome in 1939, where he taught ethnology and human paleontology. In 1957 he was appointed to the chair in paleopathology. A member of numerous academies and scientific societies, he also was invited to lecture at more than twenty foreign universities.

Toward the end of 1958, while on a field trip in Apulia in southern Italy, Blanc experienced the first attacks of the disease that proved fatal. But to his very last hours, according to his pupil Georges Laplace, he “retained his extraordinary clarity of spirit, his marvelous smile, and the calm strength which he radiated.”

An industrious and efficient worker, Blanc published 164 works in the span of twenty-six years. When he started his work in 1934, European prehistory was dominated by the great if a somewhat authoritarian figure of the Abbé Breuil. With the latter’s aid and advice, yet always preserving his independence, Blanc addressed himself first - and properly so - to the severe but beneficial school of empirical study.

He participated in some hundred digs, most of which were performed under his direction. In Italy, he discovered some fifty prehistoric deposits and six of the seven known human Neanderthal fossils of that country. Wisely, he studied the geology of these deposits with great care so as to be able to link up their history with that of the rest of Europe. The flora and fauna, which were interpreted by specialists, revealed changes during the course of time, a development to which Blanc turned his attention.

In 1939 Blanc was asked to give a course in the ethnology of presently existing populations, particularly the most primitive peoples.

Achievements

• Blanc's major important research was conducted in the thirties, the time when he started a series of studies in the channels of the Pontine coming to, in the channel called High Water (Mussolini Canal), a stratigraphic sequence of reference fauna and flora fossil and Paleolithic industry. His major achievement during this time came in 1935, when (together with Henri Breuil) he found the second skull Saccopastore, which marked the beginning of a series of investigations of the geological basin of the Tiber and Aniene and specific studies in any area of Rome and Agro the Roman Empire.
  
  Another success came in 1939, the time when he recovered, Circeo, the skull cave Guattari. In 1954 he initiated the exploration and the subsequent excavation of the site of Torrimpietra.
  
  Also, he was a founder in 1954 of the journal of paleontology "Quaternary". Among his most important publications were recorded: "The paleantropi of Saccopastore and the Circeo" (1942) and "The origin and development of the peoples of hunters and gatherers" (1946). The Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology and Man "Alberto Carlo Blanc" established in 1974 by the City Council, was created to expose prehistoric finds from archaeological sites in the north-western Tuscany.
  
  He was elected president of several international commissions and of the Sixth Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoire Sciences.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Dall'astrazione all'organicità 1958
  • L'arte pre - figurativa nella paletnologia, nell'etnografia e nel bambino 1961
  • Il Bove della stipe votiva del Niger Lapis nel Foro Romano 1959
  • Dipinto schematico rupestre nell'arnalo dei bufali sotto Sezze Romano 1939

• pamphlet

  • Rinvenimento di una mandibola umana fossile nella breccia ossifera esterna della Grotta Guattari a S. Felice Circeo 1954

Religion

Blanc's family was affluent, owning extensive property, and like almost all Savoyard families they were Catholic.

Views

In comparing the type of life with that of the prehistoric man of the advanced Paleolithic age, with which he was familiar, Blanc was struck by a clear deterioration in techniques and an ever-narrowing specialization as the transition from ancient to present limes was followed. This led him to a new theory concerning the formation of ethnic groupings which he termed ethnolysis starting from an ancient polymorphous ethnic grouping, present ethnic groupings are differentiated by a loss of characteristics:

"...their centrifugal diffusion, which occurred in very special conditions varying for each people, resulted necessarily in widely differing specializations; certain cultural elements persisted (and developed) in certain peoples while disappearing in others, who in turn preserved certain elements which the former had lost. Thus, by alternative elimination, there occurred a separation, segregation, lysis of cultural elements which had coexisted originally."

Blanc immediately recognized the potential affinities and generalizations of his idea. What he had assumed concerning ethnic groupings, he very soon extended to animal and plant associations, to the evolution of species, and in particular to the appearance of the human races: from ethnolysis he passed to cosmolysis, which embraced the entire physical, biological, and the human universe:

"Cosmolysis is that universal modality of evolution through which heterogeneous archaic entities and groupings, which in the stale of primary blending contain a great number of characteristics and elements, are resolved into more and more homogeneous and distinct entities, through lysis (from the Greek luo, “separate, dissolve”) and segregation in each case of characters and elements which coexist in a mixed state in the above mentioned archaic entities and groupings."

Objections were raised to Blanc’s views on the grounds that human prehistory, like the evolution of the species, shows inverse examples, where we pass from the simple to the complex and more varied elements. Indeed, Blanc himself recognized these phases of growing complexity, for instance, between the beginning and the last part of the Stone Age, between the Abbevillian and the upper Paleolithic periods. From the point of view of ethnology, he placed them within a two-phase cycle, complexification-simplification - the cycle that was to be repeated several times in the course of the ages. Evidently, however, he was far more interested in the second phase, that of simplification, or lysis, which he had invented himself. Even if, contrary to Blanc, it is supposed that the first phase, i.e., acquisition of new characters and their formation, plays just as important or even more important a role in the evolution of animal and especially plant species, we must recognize that the idea of cosmolysis explains certain facts.

But there was more to it. Like his contemporaries, Blanc saw clearly that his hypothesis and the facts supporting it agreed quite well with Neo-Darwinism, with the mutation-selection theory, and with the corpuscular theory of heredity that has been confirmed by so many other works since his death. In this respect, he was a precursor.

Given to bold generalizations, Blanc went even further and speculated about the hydrogen atom and its components. Its then apparent simplicity seemed to him deceptive and he saw there “the simplified product of a history proceeding from a fundamental complexity of matter”. Even if one finds Blanc’s theory of cosmolysis a less than complete explanation for the evolution of the cosmos, life, and mankind, Blanc’s idea must still be given credit for its intrinsic strength and greatness.

Membership

Alberto Carlo Blanc was a member of the Roman Society of Anthropology.

Personality

Like his father, Alberto-Carlo spoke and wrote the two languages with equal perfection.

Connections

Blanc married in 1939.

Father:

Gian-Alberto Blanc

1879 – 1966

collaborator:

Henri Breuil

colleague:

Sergio Sergi

Sergio Sergi (Messina 1878 – Rome 1972) is an internationally acclaimed, eminent exponent of morphology and paleoanthropology.

References

• Dictionary of scientific biography
  1981