Tracing humankind’s journey out of Africa

IN 2013 PAUL SALOPEK, an American journalist, began a trek around the planet. His aim was to follow Homo sapiens’ first migration, out of Africa, across the Middle East and Asia, by boat to Alaska, then down to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of the Americas, the place humans arrived last, around 8000BC. He called it the “Out of Eden” walk. He guessed it would take seven years. Eleven years later, he is still walking.

Mr Salopek has trekked across deserts and mountains, river plains and cloud forests, along pilgrim paths and ancient trade routes, in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Mao Zedong. He has been shot at in the West Bank, held up by Kurdish gunmen, detained for two days and deported from Pakistan, and stopped by police so often that he logs these encounters on a “freedom of movement” map. He has led camels and mules and pack horses across the Arabian sands and Central Asia’s endless steppe. He buried caches of water at 25km intervals to traverse the KyzylKum desert in Uzbekistan, got caught in a snowstorm in the Pamir mountains and helped a man who had severed his leg in a rockslide. “The man was so cheerful, he was making jokes as we tied a tourniquet.”

Mr Salopek halts often to write and explore. He waited eight months in Georgia for an Iranian visa that never came and ended up falling in love and marrying a documentary-maker. He was marooned for over a year in Myanmar by covid rules and then had to leave when the besieged junta became too threatening.

The Out of Eden walk is backed, in large part, by National Geographic, which oversees the project’s web

site, where Mr Salopek posts dispatches. Now 62, tall and rangy (“My hair turned white in China”), he says his walk “is not an expedition”, but a way of slowing down to collect stories, “like beads on a string”. He has written several hundred thousand words so far, about archaeological digs and vanished civilisations, about industry and craftsmen, pollution and conservation. He has done what many journalists would envy: invented his perfect job. He calls it slow journalism. The Economist joined him in Japan.

We set off from Fukuoka, a city on the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, at 7am on a Tuesday. It was mid-September, but the temperature was broiling. Your correspondent shouldered a small pack, “no more than 5-6kg”, Mr Salopek advised, containing notebooks, a rain jacket, a change of clothes, two pairs of underpants and minimal toiletries, but no laptop, make-up or spare shoes. We were accompanied by Koriyama Soichiro, a photographer who doubled as a translator, interlocutor and guide. In our hiking gear we stood out among the neatly dressed commuters.

Mr Salopek is an ascetic; he owns almost nothing but the clothes on his back and the tools of his trade: laptop, mobile phone, camera. He has no home and little money. Out of Eden is a non-profit; his “salary” goes into a back-up account for operational expenses. “We are often in the red.” His manner is calm, humble, almost saintly, as he bends his head to listen intently to the people he meets along the way. But his mildness belies a certain steel. He is the kind of person who always takes the stairs over the escalator, never mind the weight of a pack, climbing two at a time.

BORN TO RAMBLE

His wanderlust was inculcated in childhood. In 1968, when he was five, his father moved the family to a small village near Guadalajara in Mexico. He and his four older siblings grew up among poor farmers and went to local schools. “My Dad was a bit like the father in ‘The Mosquito Coast’,” he says, referring to a novel and film about an American who grows disillusioned with consumerism and seeks a simpler life in Latin America. After graduating from the University of California, he did various jobs: farm hand, cowboy; shrimper, gold miner. Still in his 20s, he was working two jobs in Roswell, New Mexico, when his landlady, a former magazine editor, persuaded the local newspaper to hire him as a police reporter.

He went on to win two Pulitzer prizes. One was for writing about the human genome. (“Basically, we are all the same,” he concluded.) The other was for covering a gigantic war in Congo, where combatants firmly believed we are not all the same; that the tribe next door are the enemy. After a decade in Africa he decided to change the way he wrote about the world; to focus on ordinary people who live away from the headlines but whose stories illustrate big issues.

He is walking through “a golden age of migration”, he says. Almost everywhere, he has seen people on the move. He stumbled over the bones of migrants in the desert on the Ethiopia-Djibouti border; met Syrian refugees picking tomatoes in Jordan; noted the numbers of Punjabis who have left their villages. Today, he points out, one in seven people live or work far from their birth places, and “the push-pull factors for human

Walking with someone is very intimate. You become friends quickly

movement remain basically the same as back in the Stone Age”: scarce resources, changing weather patterns, the search for greener pastures.

It is partly by looking at genetic evidence that scientists have been able to map early migration routes, to show how humans colonised the planet after leaving Africa between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago. When he gives talks about the project, Mr Salopek likes to remind people that we all share very similar genetics and concerns: Why am I not loved enough? I hate my boss! I worry about my children.

We walked 12-25km a day in 35-degree heat, past a banal parade of car dealerships, shopping centres and pachinko (pinball) parlours. There were few trees and little shade. We stopped often for water from the many vending machines and to cool off in convenience stores. “I feel like my head is in the mouth of an animal,” said Mr Salopek after a few days. When your correspondent developed blisters, he bought her sticking plasters. “Every culture has their blister cure,” he said, “chacha liquor in Georgia, camel fat in Saudi Arabia.”

We trudged on, sweaty, sticky. Cars went by, trains went by; there were almost no other pedestrians. People travelled from air-conditioned boxes to air-conditioned boxes in air-conditioned cars. We were, literally, outsiders. The heat kept people inside, precluding the chance encounters that Mr Salopek relishes.

In Fukuma, a dormitory town, we arranged to meet Tone Shiori, a local activist running for mayor (“I am the only female candidate!”), at a tempura restaurant. Ms Tone was impassioned, bemoaning Japanese conservatism and the lack of women in public office.

Bias against women is “one global thing we share”, says Mr Salopek. Women wake up early to do chores, and go to bed late. Men dominate public spaces, own most property and bully their wives. Several times, in remote parts of Central Asia, a woman would wait for Mr Salopek on the road outside her village and tell him, weeping, of the injustices she endured. Such women “entrusted us with their secrets because we were walking away”. In South Korea, where an unprecedented number of women are opting out of marriage and children, he found the casual misogyny—the way men talked about women when they were sitting

around a table with some beers—“breathtaking”.

It has been hard to find female walking partners, Mr Salopek laments. He has walked with more than 100 people: journalists and jihadis, camel herders, biologists, historians, artists and a judge who had been sacked for graft. In Korea he walked with an expert on frogs. Some people join him for a few days, others for weeks. His wife meets him on the road, as do friends and family. “Walking with someone is very intimate,” says Mr Salopek. “It unlocks something in your heart; you become friends very quickly.”

Over the years, a network has grown up around Out of Eden. Mr Salopek encourages his walking partners to contribute their own stories to the website. Several have garnered National Geographic and other grants for projects. A Saudi walking partner has become an online storyteller with hundreds of thousands of followers; an Indian walking partner has set up a charity to fund conservation. One woman he walked with is trying to establish a national hiking trail in China.

SLOW DOWN AND LISTEN

Along the way, Mr Salopek often gives workshops on slow journalism. Don Belt, a journalism professor at Richmond University in Virginia and friend of Mr Salopek, sends his students walking in poorer parts of Richmond to discover different kinds of stories. The Harvard Graduate School of Education, a sponsor of the project, has developed a six- to eight-week curriculum called “Open Canopy” for schools. Over 70,000 children in 30 countries have followed Mr Salopek’s progress, written up their own projects and shared their work with classes in other countries.

Over time and distance, Salopek’s dispatches have evolved, from journalistic to more impressionistic. “It’s like layers on a pearl, with my memory and my experience, the stories get deeper.” Themes recur and overlap. “A story about health is connected to ecology which is connected to education which is connected to economics. The water crisis in India, where half the population doesn’t have access to clean sufficient water, is connected to a story I wrote about women working in a brick kiln because they have had to leave their homes because of the water shortage.”

On our sixth day together, a sweltering Sunday, we stopped, exhausted, at a McDonald’s to mainline sugar and sodium. A man at the next table was wearing a puffy shirt, fitted with fans that inflated it and kept him cool. Suddenly it dawned: all along we had been walking through the story. The story was the heat.

It had been Japan’s hottest summer ever recorded. More than 50 people had died, thousands had been hospitalised. Globally, 2024 is predicted to be the hottest year on record.

“I’ve walked through climate change,” said Mr Salopek. “Here in suburban Japan, it’s just an inconvenience for most people, but in many places, it is already existential.” In Ethiopia, where he began his odyssey, he had to skirt fighting over dwindling pasture between Afar and Issa tribesmen. In Kazakhstan he saw the steppe bloom after unusually heavy rains with grasses unknown even to the oldest locals. In Georgia he watched a whole neighbourhood of Tbilisi slide into the river. In Afghanistan he found villagers enjoying bumper apricot harvests, because the summers

People everywhere share similar genetics and concerns

had become warmer and the glaciers were melting. He couldn’t make them understand that in a few years the glaciers would be gone and their land would become desert. Everywhere, Mr Salopek said, farmers are worried; the weather is getting weirder.

On our last day together, we talked to farmers tending pocket-handkerchief fields girded between roads and tower blocks. “Every year it’s getting hotter,” said Takami Tsunehiro, 81 years old, who had been farming the same land with his wife for over 50 years. He paused digging up sweet potatoes and laid his scythe on the ground. “There used to be four seasons, now there is just summer and winter. There is either too much sun or too much rain.” Other farmers concurred; the heat was hard on rice plants, and working outdoors was becoming increasingly perilous.

Walking for days had tattooed the sensation of an overheating world into our consciousness. “Of course I know about climate change intellectually,” said Mr Salopek as we stopped in a Joyfull diner to rehydrate. “But I hadn’t felt it in my body, the way I have over the past three months. Walking through the summer in South Korea, there was no one on the streets. It was like a ghost landscape. There were cooling stations, with mist; and I thought, for the first time, OK this is really dystopian. I thought it would be cooler in September in Japan but it’s not, and now I can feel it’s affecting me. It’s hurting me.”

At the end of the day, we ditched our packs and went for a stroll among the rice paddies. The sun was low and gold. Egrets stalked the verges, squadrons of dragonflies flitted “like glitter”, said Mr Salopek, and we walked beside an irrigation canal full of fish, turtles and ducks. The fizz and crackle of cicadas coming from a bamboo forest was ferocious. It was the only countryside we walked in.

All the local hotels were full, so we slept in cubicles in a cyber-café, an ingenious and impeccably clean gaming facility often used by homeless people, with a gym, showers and a giant manga library. The next morning, I took the bullet train back to Fukuoka, where we had started eight days earlier. The train sped past a blur of grey-block suburbs, through black tunnels. It took just 30 minutes. ●