Episode 27: Out of Eden the Long Way
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2017
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the big questions in the study of human evolution is the question of how our ancestors spread across the world.
Our species evolved in Africa and migrated around the world from there. Most people on earth today are mixed descendants of multiple migrations to different places.
Somewhere in almost everyone's family history, whether it was last year or thousands of years ago, there was someone who left the place they were born and set out into the unknown, looking for a new life somewhere else. For most of humankind's time on this planet, we all did it the same way. We walked.
Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Explorer who is on an epic ten-year journey around the world on foot, tracing the path of early human migration out of Africa. Along the way he is talking with people and sharing their stories through his writing, and through educational programs for students. His project is called the Out of Eden Walk.
You can learn more at leakeyfoundation.org.
The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach. The Leakey Foundation funds cutting-edge research about how and when humans spread around the world. Support this show and the science we talk about with a tax-deductible donation. Thanks to a generous supporter, your donation will automatically be doubled!
Links
Articles by Paul Salopek:
- The Glorious Boneyard: A Report From Our Starting Line
- Gona: First Kitchen
- Borders Matter
- No Reply
- The Natural History of Compassion
Articles about early human migration:
Credits
Editor: Julia Barton
Host and Series Producer: Meredith Johnson
Associate Producer: Shuka Kalantari
Sound Design: Katie McMurran
Theme Music: Henry Nagle
Intern: Yuka Oiwa
Additional Music: Tech Toys by Lee Rosevere
Sponsors
This season of Origin Stories is made possible by support from Dixon Long.
We are also brought to you with support from Audible.com, the internet's leading provider of spoken-word entertainment. Our listeners get a 30-day free trial and free audiobook download at audibletrial.com/originstories
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:14.5 | There are more than 7 billion people alive right now, and we live on every continent. |
| 0:21.6 | The human story is a story of migration and adaptation and survival. |
| 0:40.3 | How and when did early people first migrate out of Africa and into the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. |
| 0:49.3 | We evolved in Africa and spread around the world from there. Most people on Earth are mixed descendants of multiple migrations to different places. |
| 0:59.0 | The question of how that happened is a big one, |
| 1:02.0 | a question that's investigated through fossils and through studying the DNA of living people. |
| 1:08.0 | The earliest hominins known outside of Africa are the 1.8 million-year-old early members of |
| 1:15.0 | Ardenas Homo that were found at a fossil site at Diminisi, Georgia, in the Caucasus, |
| 1:21.1 | a very long way from Africa. |
| 1:24.1 | There were Neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe, and another extinct species called Denisovans, ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia. |
| 1:33.3 | DNA from both of these extinct relatives is found in modern people living today. |
| 1:39.3 | And when it comes to early Homo sapiens, what we call anatomically modern humans, recent discoveries |
| 1:47.2 | about our early migration out of Africa are hard to keep up with. |
| 1:51.7 | New research shows people were in Australia around 60,000 years ago, 20,000 years earlier |
| 1:57.9 | than previously thought. |
| 2:00.1 | A Leakey Foundation grantee, Julian Loyes, |
| 2:02.6 | just published research that shows humans had reached the jungles of Indonesia |
| 2:06.6 | by 63,000 to 73,000 years ago. |
| 2:10.6 | That pushes back the known dates for modern human occupation of Southeast Asia |
| 2:15.6 | by about 20,000 years. Somewhere in almost everyone's family |
... |
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