«They looked up and perceived the sky»: these are the words that Giambattista Vico used to describe the birth, in the ancestral inhabitants of the great forest, of a human conscience educated by language, by a sense of modesty, by obedience to the laws. How do paleoanthropology and evolutionary science tell us today about the birth of the cultural man? Telmo Pievani and Carlo Sini, in an intense dialogue and an open discussion, retrace the theses and hypotheses of a rich and complex horizon. They do not hide the problems and agree with the need for a revision of some aspects of the philosophical and scientific common sense, in order to make the essential theme of the birth of the human spirit an object of open and concrete research; a research that, in the spirit of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's work, does not boil down to only specialist interpretations and to mutual gaps or misunderstanding.