“My mother wanted me to be an accountant, my daughter says she’ll throw away my computer if I’m not with her”- Corriere.it

“Accounting, you have to do accounting”, my mother always said. But I didn’t like it, he says Sarah Thalamus. When I came of age, I decided to do my own thing and to study what I wanted from the age of 10, when on a school trip to the prehistory Zoo Park in Rivolta d’Adda I was fascinated by the reconstruction of a Neanderthals: I didn’t enroll in economics as my mother wanted.

The Radio Dating Expert

Perhaps we have lost an accountant reluctantly, but in exchange we have gained an expert in radiocarbon dating of fossil finds, who has signed, the only one in Italy, the international and multidisciplinary study in which an entire group of Neanderthals was analyzed for the first time , and not a single individual as has been the case up to now. The task of the complicated but decisive dating of the Neanderthal bones, discovered in Siberia, was given to Talamo by Svante Pbo, the world’s leading authority on Neanderthal studies and Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2022. I met Svante in 2007 in Leipzig, where at Max Planck Institute on the study of Human Evolution he was the director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics. My task was to create the radiocarbon laboratory (C14) and make it a point of excellence. Svante always believed in me, who at the beginning was only a PhD student, and he entrusted me with important bones to date such as Denisova’s, she recalls.

The experience with the Nobel Pbo

Before arriving in Leipzig, I worked for 7 years in the C14 laboratory of the University of Heidelberg, and I had never seen a Neanderthal bone, I was dealing with tree dating and calibration curve. In Leipzig I set to work with my head down. In 2009 I got pregnant, the first pregnant PhD student at Max Planck. At the institute they told me that, in my condition, I could not work in the laboratory and continue my studies. I replied that I was not sick, I was just pregnant. For Sahra Talamo it was the second victory against the prejudices and convictions of those who didn’t believe she was up to her. The Leipzig department is an incredible place thanks also to the intuition of Pbo, a person of exceptional scientific and human value, who treats everyone with the same respect: from the luminary to the least of the students. He wanted the institute to remain open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Svante at his expense had a sauna built available to all researchers, a climbing wall, table football and a terrace overlooking Leipzig. According to him, the strategy for studying, working and living without leaving the institute: a bubble that gives extraordinary results.

EU funding and the return to Italy

Thanks to the work in Leipzig, Talamo obtained European funding of 1.5 million euros and suddenly became sought after by all continental universities and institutes. In the end she got the idea from Bologna, which offered her the chair of full professor of Chemistry in the G. Ciamician department. My family and I are happy to be back. My daughter says I work too much and never get off. Last summer at the beach he said to me: mum, if you don’t come to swim with me, I’ll throw your computer away. You have created a new laboratory C14 Brahvo (Bologna Radiocarbon Laboratory Devoted to Human Evolution), a new challenge. Mostly women work in the laboratory, many from abroad. In a recent publication it was argued that girls with a female supervisor will never make important careers, but I want to prove otherwise.

The H at the right point

Sahra, Brahvo… are you sure you have all the accas in the right place? The one in the name depends on the Taranto Registry Office, where my father went to notify my birth. They wrote it wrong, but I took it as a distinctive sign and I also wanted it in the name of the laboratory. And then also in my surname marked my destiny: Such as at the end of Neaderthal and Amo. I couldn’t do anything but study them and every time I have one of their finds in my hand, a great emotion for me.