23/06/2019
"My global foot journey, a project I call the Out of Eden Walk, is an experiment in slow journalism. In six-and-a-half years, I’ve covered nearly eleven thousand miles between my starting point, at an Ethiopian fossil site called Herto Bouri, and my current location, in the jungle hills of northeastern India. Along the way, I have followed old Haj trails grooved into solid rock in Saudi Arabia, slept under canvas with Syrian refugees, been detained nearly a hundred times by police of various nations, and yo-yoed through a peaceful, alpine corner of Afghanistan that is rarely seen by most Afghans themselves. My onward routing—and it should be pointed out that I don’t know exactly where I’ll be walking next Tuesday, much less in a year—involves traversing China and Russia, hitching a ride on a cargo ship across the Bering Strait, to Alaska, and hiking down the Americas to the final continental horizon of our species: the Beagle Channel, in Argentina. Along the way, I’m pausing to record modern encounters along the ancestors’ trail. I try to use the mirror of history to understand current events. I get lost a lot."
One journalist’s effort to retrace, on foot, the path blazed by Homo sapiens as they spread around the world—and to chronicle the perils they face today.
