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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

In January 2013, American journalist Paul Salopek started walking. He
had roughly 21,000 miles to go, in a journey (still ongoing as of January
2018) that would take him from Ethiopia to the southern tip of the Amer-
ican continent, via Asia and North America. The itinerary is not arbitrary:
Salopek is retracing the footsteps of generations of Homo sapiens as they
spread from East Africa—where our earliest ancestors lived, more than
100,000 years ago—to the other continents, reaching Patagonia around
10,000 years ago. Salopek’s journey mirrors the route followed by groups
of Homo sapiens as they slowly marched across our planet, changing it
dramatically as they established increasingly populous and complex civ-
ilizations. Salopek calls it the “Out of Eden” walk, a title that adds a myth-
ical dimension to a project informed by scientific models of human evo-
lution. The walk is chronicled—by Salopek himself and his team—on a
1
website sponsored by the National Geographic Society. It is explicitly
framed as a story and told in chapters. It is also, as one might expect, pre-
sented in deeply affective language: this is one individual’s a empt to
connect with the deep history of human evolution, providing today’s hu-
manity, fragmented along national, cultural, and economic lines, with
something of an origin story, a common idea of ‘the human’ to cling to.
Obviously, this is a politically loaded project, which articulates
an ideologically charged vision of humanity, as Salopek demonstrates
through his empathetic account of the communities he encounters
across the Global South. The West, to which Salopek undoubtedly be-
longs, has often aspired to identify the essence of humanity—what it
means to be human, what it is like to be human; typically, these claims
have ended up reinforcing the centrality of one particular culture, one
particular group. “Out of Eden” complicates these blanket theoretical
statements by foregrounding the physical, embodied performance of
humanity: readers remain aware that, behind the wri en words of the
website and companion articles, Salopek is reenacting, and at the same
time performing, the evolutionary history of humankind by moving
his body. This is how Salopek himself thematizes the embodiment of
walking: “Walking is falling forward. Each step we take is an arrested

1 See h ps://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/.

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