The origin of the species investigates one of the oldest stories still told on Earth: the Myth of the Theft of Fire.
Myths belong primarily to the field of ethnology. They are also the subject of philosophy, the history of religions, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and other branches of knowledge. What, then, does a novelist, a storyteller like Alberto Mussa, do in the realm of myth? He answers: "Myths are, ultimately, just another narrative genre; although, for me, it is the genre par excellence—the most exuberant, the most perfect of all, for condensing the maximum content with the minimum expression."
The Origin of Species is a literary essay that reconstructs the characters and the framework of the original plot of the Myth of the Stolen Fire—a powerful ideological program, a code of the fundamental values of primordial humanity, which includes: cooked food; hunting as an expression of intelligence; the incest taboo; and the "shamanic" power, according to which "to be fully human is to be not merely human." Thus reconstructed and interpreted, the Myth of the Stolen Fire also sheds light on the controversial question of the origin of language, which likely arose in hominids older than Homo sapiens .
Like a philologist who studies and compares several ancient and anonymous manuscripts of the same poem or narrative, Alberto Mussa writes here, in his most radically personal work, what he thinks — or what he feels — about the theft of fire, as well as about the understanding of the true notion of humanity , conceived in the Paleolithic era, or that of society , as it exists today.
In the author's words: "Myths, in fact, are older than languages; they are older than populations. It is high time to give them a voice."