GUELPH — To promote humankind’s African origins, local scientist Christopher diCarlo is embarking on a cross-Canada tour that begins next Tuesday in Kitchener.

“I’m trying to raise awareness . . . and let people do with it what they will,” Carlo said Saturday from his Guelph home.

He’ll be speaking Tuesday afternoon at a secular summer camp for children called Camp Quest, operated at Bingemans by the Waterloo-based Society of Ontario Freethinkers.

“Christopher diCarlo has always been a supporter of critical thinking and humanism,” said camp organizer Kathy Meidell of Kitchener. “We find him to be a very eloquent speaker.”

The lecture tour takes diCarlo, a University of Ontario Institute of Technology professor known for debunking the paranormal, from Kitchener to a Prairie stop in Saskatchewan, then on the Calgary, Kelowna and finally Vancouver.

Some of the public engagements are sponsored by the Centre for Inquiry Canada, an educational charity that describes itself as a voice for reason.

Meidell agreed with him about our African origins.

“The evidence certainly points in that direction,” Meidell said.

DiCarlo maintains the same, though he concedes the fossil record has been “very difficult” for scientists to discover because only some fossils survive and the area to explore is vast.

“A lot of it’s just luck — being in the right pace at the right time,” diCarlo said.

Still, he hasn’t been discouraged.

“I think what we do have is very impressive,” said diCarlo, who was named TV Ontario’s “big ideas” best lecturer two years ago, at about the same time he was named Humanist of the Year by Humanist Canada.

DiCarlo said what is emerging is a wealth of evidence concluding human ancestry around the world has a common African origin. That includes fossil and genetic evidence that converges on this conclusion, he added.

It suggests humans spread from the African continent roughly 60,000 years ago to all areas of the planet, diCarlo continued. At the time, he said, humans may have numbered only 2,000-10,000, which makes populating the globe a remarkable feat.

“Out of that very small group, the entire world was populated.”

Of course, that is in direct conflict with some religions, which hold, for example, that the world is only several thousand years old and/or was created by one or more of the gods worshipped around the world in the past and present.

Well-known skeptics like British biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, contend the scientific evidence directly conflicts with religion.

“I take a much softer approach,” diCarlo said, stressing he’s merely presenting a scientific alternative for people of faith to consider.

“You have to somehow marry that with your religious beliefs,” he said of the faithful. ‘I don’t want to rock the boat of religion too much. I’m just going to put it on the table.

They can’t ignore it,” he said of science.

He calls scientific evidence “a field leveler” to religious tenets, citing one example. ‘If you’re Jewish and you think you’re chosen people, well, guess what? Not really,” diCarlo said.

Scientific evidence suggests “we are all exactly equal,” diCarlo said, adding it points to a common origin.

That contention has cost him dearly in the past. He lost a job at a southern Ontario university when his African origins teachings were hotly disputed by an Aboriginal student, he said.

That hasn’t stopped him. In fact, DiCarlo serves today as a fellow and advisor for the Toronto-based Centre for Inquiry Canada.

Di-Carlo’s tour doesn’t include a speaking engagement in Guelph because he’s given the African-origins lecture in the Royal City in the past.