Paul Salopek
has a long walk ahead of him. The 50-year-old journalist left a small
Ethiopian village on foot today (Jan. 10), planning to retrace the steps
of humans' migration from Africa until he gets to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Chile.
The 21,000-mile (34,000-kilometer) journey — which will cross 30
borders and dozens of languages and ethnic groups — will take Salopek
seven years.
By today's standards, that's a long time, but the same trek took ancient humans many generations and thousands of years. When and how our ancestors dispersed out of Africa
has long proven controversial, though it is generally believed that
they slowly spread into the Middle East about 60,000 years ago, and
while some branched off and headed to Europe, others migrated eastward
into Asia, crossed a land-ice bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait
and traveled down the length of the New World.
Besides getting in a vessel to take him from Russia to Alaska, Salopek
will mimic this epic voyage on foot. He started out in Herto Bouri, a
village in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley,
which has the longest and most continuous record of human evolution of
any place on Earth. Though he's using the past as a road map, Salopek
has emphasized that his goal is to report on current global stories at a
slower pace and from a different perspective than they are usually
covered.
"Often the places that we fly over or drive through, they aren't just
untold stories, but they are also the connective tissues between the
stories of the day," Salopek told the Associated Press on Wednesday.
National Geographic, one of the backers of Salopek's "Out of Eden"
walk, says it will publish his dispatches from the journey. The
journalist is carrying just a backpack with some camping equipment and
high-tech communications' gear, including a lightweight laptop and a GPS
device.
Salopek told CBC Radio
last week that he is planning to use some social media throughout the
walk, though he won't be microblogging. In his last tweet before
starting the trip, Salopek posted a picture of his house keys.
"Existential question before a 7-year walk: Take or leave house keys?" he wrote.
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