Francesco d’Errico is Director of Research of exceptional class with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Bordeaux and Professor at the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour, University of Bergen. His academic interests focus on the evolution of human cognition and the emergence of symbolic cultural practices in Africa and Eurasia, the evolution of bone technologies, the impact of climate change on cultural evolution, ethnoarchaeology, and the application of innovative analytical techniques to cultural heritage. He has published hundreds of articles in high impact academic journals and is the author or editor of several research monographs. Included between 2014 and 2021 by Clarivate Analytics in the list of the world's most cited researchers, he was between 2011 and 2015 the co-project leader of an Advanced ERC grant to investigate the origin of cultural modernity in Africa and Europe. He has been awarded in 2021 with three other colleagues a large ERC Synergy Grant to investigate the origin of numerical cognition. He is co-leader of the University of Bordeaux funded large scale project Human Past, devoted to the identification of tipping points in biological and cultural evolution. He was the recipient in 2014 of the Silver Medal of the CNRS and the Premio Frassetto for Anthropology of the Italian Academy of Science. 

Born in Arzignano (VI) in 1975, Christian Greco has been Director of the Museo Egizio since 2014.  Trained mainly in the Netherlands, he is an Egyptologist with vast experience working in museums. He curated many exhibition and curatorial projects in the Netherlands (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Teylers Museum, Haarlem), Japan (Okinawa, Fukushima, Takasaki and Okayama museums), Finland (Vapriikki Museum, Tampere), Spain (La Caixa Foundation) and Scotland (National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh).  While at the head of the Museo Egizio, he has set up important international collaborations with museums, universities and research institutes all across the world.  Greco is also a dedicated teacher. He is currently teaching courses in the material culture of ancient Egypt and museology at the Università di Torino, Pavia, Napoli, the Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Archeologici of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and the New York University in Abu Dhabi.  Fieldwork is particularly prominent in Greco’s curriculum. For several years, he was a member of the Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in Luxor. Since 2011 he has been co-director of the Italian-Dutch archeological mission at Saqqara. Greco’s published record includes many scholarly essays and writings for the non-specialist public in several languages. He has also been a keynote speaker at a number of Egyptology and museology international conferences.

Educated at Cambridge and Yale Universities, Ian Tattersall is a paleoanthropologist and primatologist who is currently Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.  His current research interests lie in how we recognize species and the relationships among them in the human fossil record, the systematics and ecology of the lemurs of Madagascar, and how human beings became the extraordinary cognitive entity they are.  He has done fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Vietnam, Yemen, Mauritius, and Surinam, and in addition to over 400 scientific papers and books he has written extensively for the public, his most recent books being Understanding Human Evolution (2022), Distilled: A Natural History of Spirits (2022, with Rob DeSalle) and Understanding Race (2022, also with Rob DeSalle).   As a museum curator his whole career he has also curated numerous exhibitions at the AMNH and elsewhere, from Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity (1984) and Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life in Ice Age Europe (1986) to the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins (2007).