Selwa, a trusty cargo
mule, accompanies Sal-
opek across challenging
terrain near the ancient
ruins of Petra, in south-
ern Jordan. Camels and
horses have helped him
carry supplies during
his quest to trace
humans’ migration.
The National Geographic
Society, committed to
illuminating and protecting
the wonder of our world, has
funded Explorer Paul Salopek
and the Out of Eden Walk
project since 2013 and Explorer
John Stanmeyer’s work on
human migration. Learn
more at natgeo.org/impact.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOE MCKENDRYOur dominion was hardly fated. After all, as everyone knows,
life is mostly accidental.
This question preoccupies me because for nearly nine years
as part of a storytelling project, I’ve been trekking along our
ancestors’ Stone Age trails of dispersal out of Africa. I’ve reached
Southeast Asia. Eventually, the plan is to slog to the tip of South
America, where Homo sapiens ran out of continental horizon.
My aim has been simple: to foot-brake my life, to slow down my
thinking, my work, my hours. Unfortunately, the world has had
other ideas. Apocalyptic climate crises. Widespread extinctions.
Forced human migrations. Populist revolts. A mortal corona-
virus. For more than 3,000 mornings, I’ve been lacing up my
boots to pace off a planet that seems to be accelerating, shudder-
ing underfoot, toward historic reckonings. But until Myanmar,
I’d never walked into a coup.
In Yangon, I woke one morning in a quarantine hotel and
hurried to fill the bathtub with rusty drinking water. It was the
first of February. A murderer in uniform had announced on TV
that the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi had just been
arrested. Soldiers and police roamed the streets. Soon enough,
they would start shooting protesters—men, women, children—
in the head. Poets would later be declared subversive, arrested,
and killed. (The body of one, Khet Thi, was returned to his family
with signs of torture.) That first morning of the putsch, however,
my concerns were myopic. I searched the trash bin for yester-
day’s leftover rice. What to do with the mini-fridge? Barricade
the door? Or drop it on the heads of the Visigoths below? (I was
on the ninth floor.)
Hypotheses abound about why we scattered from Africa.
Some researchers contend that a gigantic hunger pang slung
us, like two-legged locusts, into the larger world: We’d eaten
holes through our native savannas. Other experts say “green
Arabia,” a lusher version of the Middle East, lured our long-
legged forebears into new hunting grounds. Still others claim
we took up beachcombing and strayed from our African comfort
zone along shorelines newly exposed by dropping sea levels (the
coastal migration theory).
My preferred hypothesis for the origins of human restlessness
involves the voice of memory. It goes like this:
For the longest time, archaic humans tottered at the cliff edge
of extinction. Our presence was vanishingly rare in antique
lands. Someone might invent, say, a new tool, yet that innova-
tion became lost when her clan died out. Advances never got