Paul Salopek's Out-of-Eden Walk

Saudicaves.com: caves beneath the dunes!

Paul Salopek’s
Out-of-Eden Walk

Photos Courtesy of Out of Eden Walk

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National Geographic features the start of Paul Salopek’s seven-year walk. Each year the magazine will dedicate an issue to the latest results of the project. Image courtesy of Out of Eden Walk.

Paul Salopek begins his 7-year walk in Ethiopia

Paul Salopek and his Ethiopian guide, Ahmed Alema Hessan, leave the village of Bouri in the Afar region of northwestern Ethiopia, at the start of his seven-year walk. PHOTO BY JOHN STANMEYER-VII. Courtesy Out of Eden Walk.

Nabatean Incense Trail through Saudi Arabia

60,000 years ago mankind's ancestors may have followed a route similar to the Nabatean Incense Trail which skirted the edges of lava fields (shown in purple). Caves in these lava fields were natural catchments for water and offered excellent shelter from heat, cold and wind. A good example is Umm Jirsan Cave, Saudi Arabia's longest mapped Lava-Tube system.

Paul Salopek teaching along his long route

Teaching in Ethiopia. On several occasions during the first year of his walk, Salopek visited local schools and offered to work with the children. Courtesy Out of Eden Walk.

The approximate route for Salopek's 33,000 kilometer journey. Click to see a larger version of the map and the article "Around the World in Seven Years" by Karanjeet Kaur.

Top journalist retraces humanity’s greatest voyage

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By John Pint

The three elements of Wadi al Safra: sand, stone, sky. The wadi is located southwest of Medina in Saudi Arabia. Photograph by Paul Salopek . Courtesy Out of Eden Walk. Several years ago National Geographic Magazine published what struck me as an absolutely astounding story. It stated that every single human being on the face of the earth today is a descendant of a rather small number (perhaps only a few hundred) people who emigrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, embarking on a trek that would quite literally take them to the very ends of the earth. This conclusion was based on advances in genetics and DNA samples taken worldwide.

The fact that we are all descended from Africans impressed me, but I was especially interested in the fact that most of our ancestors had crossed the Bab Al Mandeb Strait over to the Arabian Peninsula and worked their way north through what is now Saudi Arabia.

This resonated with my own thirteen-year study of Saudi Arabia’s caves. I knew that the principal sources for water and shelter (from heat, cold and especially from wind) along vast stretches of western Arabia are lava tubes: caves up to twenty kilometers long and 40 meters wide which are located (sometimes in great numbers) among the 80,000 square kilometers of lava fields near which many of those early forebears must surely have passed. Umm Jirsan Cave and the runoff river at the edge of Harrat Khaybar most likely offered shelter and water to those early ancestors of ours.

National Geographic's map of mankind’s great migration must have impacted many people around the globe, among them a man named Paul Salopek, one of the world’s great journalists and two-time winner of the coveted Pulitzer Prize. Salopek really took the story of humanity’s long walk to heart. Following clues provided by DNA studies, he mapped out a route all the way from Ethiopia to Patagonia—21,000 miles—and proposed to walk all that distance (except for a couple short stretches over water) during seven years of his life.

Why does he want to do this?

“Long-term storytelling,” he replied. “It’s not an athletic event… I want to examine the great issues of our day at three miles an hour… to watch the world around me and to get into people’s lives.”

Salopek started his journey in January, 2013, crossed the Red Sea and, accompanied by a Bedu and two pack camels, slowly walked his way north through Saudi Arabia, always talking to local people, listening to their worries, hopes and dreams, and reporting short, fascinating dispatches every few days.

A'urta gets a reassuring head scratch while being loaded for the trail. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN STANMEYER-VII

“I am on a journey,” he says. “I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the Earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage.”

“We know so little about them… They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb—the ‘gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia—and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe.

Millennia behind, I follow.”

At the time of this writing, Paul Salopek is somewhere close to Syria (not too close, I hope), having walked along the Red Sea coast through the ruins of Roman Therms and then past Jordan’s Wadi Rum (through which Lawrence of Arabia sneaked up on the Turks) and the famed Nabatean tombs of the once Lost City of Petra.

By now I hope you are thinking: here is someone I ought to investigate on my own. Believe me, you’ll enjoy what you find! As Ken Armstrong said in the Seattle Times:

“Paul doesn’t take shortcuts. To tell a story of civil war, he took a five-week trip down the Congo River, mostly by canoe. To tell a story of the people in Mexico’s Sierra Madre, he traveled 1,300 miles by mule. He crosses mountain passes, deserts and seas, all to tell us stories.”

Want to read some of those stories? Go to Out of Eden Walk, have a look at Paul Salopek’s latest dispatches, and if you like what you see, sign up right there for regular email notifications of his latest reports. In my opinion, you’re guaranteed six more years of reading pleasure.