Storia e identità etnoculturale: le radici dei popoli europei

Summary. We can approach the study of the identity of today's European peoples with a multidisciplinary method, which includes paleoethnography, cultural anthropology, comparative linguistics, the study of migratory flows and state organizations. The paleoethnographic study shows that the current population consists only of Sapiens Sapiens, but in the not remote past (up to about 9000 years ago) other human races were co-present, such as the Neanderthal, Denisoviensis, Floresiensis which all transmitted a small amount of genes in the current population. There is no fossil evidence that confirms Darwin's extended evolutionary theory (eg: evolutionary passage from one species to another and the transmission of acquired characters) but only confirmations of a micro-evolution within the same species by adaptive selection. Furthermore, the cultural and technological evolution has no parallelism at all with the encephalization or with the non-existent bio-genetic evolution. The history of the identity of the peoples of Europe is also the history of migratory processes, cultural assimilation and evolution of language. There is evidence of regular exchanges (linguistic, mercantile and normative) in Paleolithic and Upper Neolithic times between populations of the extreme geographical areas of the European continent. Linguistics and toponymy provide various evidences of mass migratory processes dating back up to 25 thousand years ago and of a unitary evolution of almost all of today's European peoples, with the sole exception of the Basques and Albanians.