IPB Colloquium by Sofija Stefanovic
The IPB colloquium will be held on Tuesday, 31 October 2017 at 12:00 in the “Zvonko Marić” lecture hall of the Institute of Physics Belgrade. The talk entitled
"How is the past created - Is this the real life, is this just fantasy?"
will be given by Dr. Sofija Stefanović (BioSense Institute, Novi Sad), the recipient of the ERC Starting Grant.
Abstract of the talk:
Researching the distant past, archaeologists find numerous material remains that they consider as facts of the past. Using fragments, they reconstruct whole processes, i.e., reconstruct what they could have looked like on the basis of the 'ancient remains' found. The philosopher Henri Bergson considered this method of scientific thinking, or this scientific research as false evolutionism, as inorganic residue can never represent the imprint of life. He suggests that in the future, reason itself must create a new philosophy of understanding reality in order to overcome its own limitations. The ERC BIRTH project explores the evolution of human fertility, for which there is currently no biological evidence. This project also represents an attempt to overcome the current limitations of understanding the human past. Ignoring life (itself) in the scientific research about fertility is not only reflected in the lack of biological evidence about it, but also in the complete neglect of maternal problems, which placed prehistoric mothers and babies on the very margins of science. For this reason, even the artifacts that directly carry the traces of life of the baby remain unrecognizable in archaeological science.
The goal of the colloquium talk is to point out how false evolutionism of prehistoric fertility has been created, along with the presentation of the preliminary results of the BIRTH project when it comes to the number of babies born by prehistoric mothers in the Balkans between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. The talk will also discuss the direct traces of babies' lives on the examples of prehistoric spoons from the locality of Stračevo, on which we discovered traces of milk teeth that are about 8,000 years old.
In a certain way, this talk is repeating the call that Bergson made to the scientists long ago, pointing to the need to create a new philosophy of understanding reality, i.e., Scaramousche, Scaramousche, will you do the Fandango?
