This TED Talk features paleoanthropologist and stand-up comic Ella Al-Shimahi, recorded live at TED 2019.

So I've got something that I'm slightly embarrassed to admit to.

At the age of 17, as a creationist, I decided to go to university to study evolution so that I could destroy it.

I failed. I failed so spectacularly that I'm now an evolutionary biologist.

So I'm a paleoanthropologist. I'm a National Geographic explorer specialising in fossil hunting, in caves, in unstable, hostile and disputed territories.

And we all know that if I was a guy and not a girl, that wouldn't be a job description. That would be a pickup line.

Now here's the thing. I do not have a death wish. I'm not an adrenaline junkie.

I just looked at a map. See, frontline exploratory science does not happen as much in politically

unstable territories. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is a tragedy if we're not doing

frontline exploratory science in a huge portion of the planet. And so science, science has a geography

problem. And so as an undergraduate, I was repeatedly told that humans, be there ourselves,

homo sapiens, or earlier species,

that we left Africa via the Sinai of Egypt.

I'm English, as you can probably tell from my accent,

but I'm actually of Arab heritage.

And I always say that I'm very, very Arab on the outside.

You know, like I'm really, really passionate.

I'm like, you're amazing, I love you. But on the inside, I'm really English, so everybody irritates me.

It's true. And the thing is, my family are Arab from Yemen, and I knew that that channel, Berbel Mendab, is not that much of a feat to cross.

And I kept asking myself this really simple question. If the ancestors to New World monkeys

could somehow cross the Atlantic Ocean, why could humans cross that tiny stretch of water?

But the thing is, Yemen, compared to, let's say, Europe,

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