Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic fellow Paul Salopek is on a slow journey to retrace, step-by-step, the pathways of the Stone Age ancestors who discovered the world.
Salopek, as part of a project he’s calling the “Out of Eden Walk,” has committed to rambling the planet for seven years until he reaches the last corner of the Earth reached by our species: the southernmost tip of South America. In all, it's a 21,000-mile walk.
Salopek, currently in the country of Georgia, regularly shares stories and stunning photography from his journey on his website, which chronicles everything from the simple joys of tribal living to the sometimes-dire consequences of geopolitics. His latest dispatch from Israel is this month's cover story for the National Geographic.
He's almost two years into the hike, which he said on Monday has been a “humbling experience, and an illuminating one.”
“There's something about moving across the surface of the earth at 3 miles per hour that feels really good,” Salopek said.
Perhaps the biggest hindrance in his worldwide journey has been the geopolitics in play — complicated circumstances entangled within the histories and cultures of each region he crosses into.
"The irony of course is that 60,000 years ago when our ancestors walked this route, there was no such thing as politics," Salopek said. "There were no artificial boundaries called borders. They had different things to contend with like glaciers and predators. But I'm running into abstractions, figments of the human imagination called the political border, and they are proving just as difficult to cross as a glacier."
The walk goes on, and though mountain ranges and civil wars may be rerouting his journey, Salopek is continuing the Out of Eden Walk, sharing the stories of the people he meets along the way. Bullets have sometimes whizzed past his head, but he said that people of the world have mostly greeted him with empathy and stories of their land.
"Generally the gesture that's offered is an open hand and not a fist,” Salopek said.
