As regular “Out of Eden Walk” readers know, one of the project’s storytelling innovations is to take a standardized recording every 100 air miles along the immensely long and winding pathways of the ancestors I am following on foot—the Stone Age people who first discovered the planet 60,000 years ago. These GPS-located stepping stones along my route, called “Milestones,” always include: a panorama photo, images of the sky overhead and Earth underfoot, sound and video captures, and a formal interview about identity with the first human being I meet.
Yesterday, I logged the walk’s 29th such waypoint.
After more than 4,000 miles of plodding out of Africa, the occasion—always charged with ceremony—featured an odd new meta-moment: This Milestone itself was documented by the journalists Hari Sreenivasan, Morgan Till, and Eric O’Connor of the PBS NewsHour. As rain clouds dragged their heavy bellies over the dripping green hills of southern Georgia, one storyteller was recorded by other storytellers … listening to the story of a bemused local truck driver.
Whatever evolutionary changes our species may have undergone over the past 600 centuries of restless wanderings, our rage for pure narrative—for a plot, for some meaning, in the daily news of our times—must only have deepened. “Everything is held together with stories,” the writer Barry Lopez reminds us. “That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
We’ll alert you when the PBS program airs.
In the meantime, onward—and eastward—from the Caucasus to China.
