What are the first narratives we ever hear?
A parent’s lullaby? Children’s books read to us by our kindergarten teachers? Tales spun by playmates on an American porch—or in a Turkish shepherd’s hut, or on a park swing in China?
A common feature in all such experiences: the shape of sounds, the breath of words, the orchestra of memory. For hundreds of thousands of years, our garrulous species has absorbed and shared our knowledge about who we are, and who we wish to be, through oral storytelling. The taproot of every modern book, film, ballad, and TikTok post stretches back to some campfire where hunter-gatherers chattered away the night under Pleistocene stars. So it’s only appropriate that the Out of Eden Walk, a project based on retracing the footsteps of the first ancestors who discovered the continents, should convert its written archives into audio format.
And that we’ve finally done.
Tools of the trade for walking the globe: new books, a new phone, and a new audiodigital recorder to capture sounds along the 24,000-mile trail.
Paul Salopek
More than half a million words of storytelling collected along the 24,000-mile walking trail between Africa and South America—we’ve reached China so far—have now been professionally voice-recorded by our colleague Lucie McNeil, who spent many days speaking the walk’s dispatches into a microphone in a rural sound studio in the United Kingdom.
Lucie McNeil has voiced the audio versions of the walk’s hundreds of dispatches from a studio on the north coast of Cornwall in the U.K. She also develops audio in Northumberland for New Writing North: luciemcneil@newwritingnorth.com and Insta@loadsofwalks.
Our sprawling audio library will grow over time, but right now you can hear stories from the beginning of the walk, in January 2013, through the end of 2022. You can hear stories about the walk’s first thirsty encounters in the deserts of Ethiopia—cadging cups of salty water from Afar nomads. You can listen to Kazakh folk beliefs about wolves and genies as we inch along 2,000 miles of faded Silk Roads through Central Asia. Or you can eavesdrop on an eccentric group of solitaries picking tea on a remote hilltop in Sichuan, China.
More than 350 audio stories are organized by geographic chapters in our project Soundcloud account. They span the African Horn, the Middle East, Turkey and the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, and now China.
And if that’s still not enough, we'll soon include the short audio recordings of our Milestones—narrative stops made exactly a hundred miles apart along the planetary walking route. Ultimately, there will be hundreds.
My own favorite auditory memento of the walk?
It’s the very first audio snippet I logged on this long journey, a homage to the enduring power of oral history, recorded as my walking partners and I sweated through 120-degree heat across a lava plain in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. I can hear the parched tuff crunching under my boot soles a distant 13,000 walked miles ago. And yet listening, I instantly taste the coarse Rift dust on my lips once again. Such is the power of sound, echoing in memory.
Lucie McNeil has voiced the audio versions of the walk’s hundreds of dispatches from a studio on the north coast of Cornwall in the U.K. She also develops audio in Northumberland for New Writing North: luciemcneil@newwritingnorth.com and Insta@loadsofwalks.
Our sprawling audio library will grow over time, but right now you can hear stories from the beginning of the walk, in January 2013, through the end of 2022. You can hear stories about the walk’s first thirsty encounters in the deserts of Ethiopia—cadging cups of salty water from Afar nomads. You can listen to Kazakh folk beliefs about wolves and genies as we inch along 2,000 miles of faded Silk Roads through Central Asia. Or you can eavesdrop on an eccentric group of solitaries picking tea on a remote hilltop in Sichuan, China.
More than 350 audio stories are organized by geographic chapters in our project Soundcloud account. They span the African Horn, the Middle East, Turkey and the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, and now China.
And if that’s still not enough, we'll soon include the short audio recordings of our Milestones—narrative stops made exactly a hundred miles apart along the planetary walking route. Ultimately, there will be hundreds.
My own favorite auditory memento of the walk?
It’s the very first audio snippet I logged on this long journey, a homage to the enduring power of oral history, recorded as my walking partners and I sweated through 120-degree heat across a lava plain in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. I can hear the parched tuff crunching under my boot soles a distant 13,000 walked miles ago. And yet listening, I instantly taste the coarse Rift dust on my lips once again. Such is the power of sound, echoing in memory.
