Aux marges de la notion d'humanité : fossiles et restes humains

Description

In 1921, miners in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia discovered a hominin skull. Known today as Kabwe 1 or Broken Hill skull, it belonged to a Homo heidelbergensis who lived in modern-day Zambia around 300,000 years ago. The skull remains on display at the Natural History Museum in London, despite return claims from Zambia since the 1970s. In a session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation in 2024, the representative of Zambia claimed the skull as the remains of an ancestor of the people who live in Kabwe today. This unprecedented claim to the remains of an individual outside the species Homo sapiens raises the question to what extent hominin fossils can be considered human remains in a legal sense. This lecture will tackle that question. On a doctrinal level, it will assess comparatively where hominin fossils fit in the variety of legal frameworks that govern human remains on the international level and across domestic jurisdiction. On a conceptual level, it will use hominin fossils as a case study of the challenges legal classification faces when confronted with an ambiguous substance.

Period	2 Oct 2025
Held at	Art-Law Centre, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Degree of Recognition	Local