Alberto Carlo Blanc (30 July 1906 – 3 July 1960,

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

) was an Italian paleontologist who studied human evolution. He was a professor at the University of Pisa, Rome and is best known for the discovery of the Circeo

neanderthal Neanderthals (, also ''Homo neanderthalensis'' and erroneously ''Homo sapiens neanderthalensis''), also written as Neandertals, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. While the ...

skull in February 1939. Blanc was born in

Chambéry Chambéry (, , ; Arpitan: ''Chambèri'') is the prefecture of the Savoie department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of eastern France. The population of the commune of Chambéry was 58,917 as of 2019, while the population of the Chamb ...

(Savoy) to Gian Alberto, professor of geochemistry and Maria Menotti. His father Gian Alberto Blanc had also been interested in paleontology and had explored the Romanelli Cave in Salento. Gian Alberto Blanc was a fascist supporter and in 1912 had worked with the anthropologist Aldobrandino Mochi to found a group that worked on human paleontology which became the Italian Institute of Human Paleontology (Istituto Italiano Di Paleontologia Umana) in 1927. Alberto Carlo Blanc graduated in geology from the University of Pisa in 1934, trained under

Giuseppe Stefanini Giuseppe is the Italian form of the given name Joseph, from Latin Iōsēphus from Ancient Greek Ἰωσήφ (Iōsḗph), from Hebrew יוסף. It is the most common name in Italy and is unique (97%) to it. The feminine form of the name is Giusep ...

following which he spent three years as a researcher at the Pisa Institute before a stint at Sorbonne in 1936-37. On 25 February 1939, Blanc and

Abbé Breuil Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (28 February 1877 – 14 August 1961), often referred to as Abbé Breuil, was a French Catholic priest, archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He is noted for his studies of cave art in the Somme an ...

discovered the Circeo skull in a cave on

Monto Circeo Monto was the nickname for the one-time red light district in the northeast of Dublin, Ireland. The Monto was roughly the area bounded by Talbot Street, Amiens Street, Gardiner Street and Seán McDermott Street (formerly Gloucester Street) in ...

. He interpreted the damage on it as evidence of ritual cannibalism (although a 1991 study suggests that the skull damage is not unlike that caused by hyenas) in neanderthals belonging to the Mousterian and Aurignacian cultures. Blanc became a lecturer in paleo-ethnology in 1940 and taught ethnology and human paleontology at the University of Pisa, Rome. Blanc applied Rosa's rule to cultural evolution and came up with what he called the theory of ethnolysis (later as cosmolysis ), the loss of certain characters, which he tried to explain using an incomplete understanding of genetics, did not find much following. The association, along with his father, with the fascist movement led to his being largely isolated within Italian science. In 1954 he founded the journal ''Quaternaria''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blanc, Alberto Carlo 1906 births 1960 deaths Italian paleontologists