Fifty years ago I began dedicating my attention to the study of human evolution, and it gradually became my only interest. In this chapter, I summarize my personal experience in this venture. As a student and shortly after my degree I worked in bacteriology, bacterial genetics, immunology, Drosophila genetics, and plankton populations. Between 1948 and 1950 I went back to microbial genetics in Cambridge (UK), at the invitation of R. A. Fisher, but my earliest training with Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, and early contacts with N. W. Timofeeff-Ressowsky had already given me a taste for population genetics. Fisher was, with J. B. S. Haldane and S. Wright, one of the three fathers of the mathematical theory of evolution, so in my stay at Cambridge I divided my time between bacterial genetics and evolutionary theory.

The role of random genetic drift in human variation

My specific interest in human evolution began as a sideline when I was introduced to documents of the Roman Catholic Archives by Father Antonio Moroni, a student of my first course in Genetics at the University of Parma, Italy, in 1951–52.