OUT OF EDEN WALK

On a steamy January morning in 2013, I shouldered my pack at an early human fossil site in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia and set out on foot for the bottom of South America.

Forty-three days later, I reeled, sunstruck and dehydrated, onto a gray cobbled beach polished by Indian Ocean surf. My walking partner at the time, a Djiboutian desert survival expert named Houssain Mohamed Houssain, hobbled the cargo camels. I feebly boiled tea. And we sat side by side for several hours, Houssain, the camels and I, blinking at an ultramarine horizon that had been wooing and swallowing human beings—migrants out of Mother Africa—for 60,000 years and more.

This week is the 12th anniversary of the Out of Eden Walk, a storytelling project that aims to reconnect, on foot, the string of vanished campfires left by the world’s first Stone Age explorers. Twenty-one countries and 23,100 kilometers after rambling out of Africa, I’ve toed an oceanic margin once more. This time the shore is golden pebbles, poured concrete, and mud. I’ve run out of Eurasian continent. I teeter at the Pacific rim of China, South Korea, and Japan.

The Paleolithic bands of Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers I’m following didn’t stop at the blue wall here, of course. Neither will I. In the spring, I hope to board a cargo ship from Japan to Alaska. And the prospect of this long watery transit across the North Pacific has got me to thinking about prehistoric sailors.

The oldest ship known to archaeology is called the Pesse Canoe. Resembling a three-meter-long cigar, it was hauled in the 1950s from bogs in the Netherlands. The lumpy pine hull has been carbon-dated to about 10,000 years old. Without question, humans were crossing open waters long before that. Daredevils floated to Australia, for example, at least 50,000 years ago. Some experts believe that this passage from Southeast Asia to Oceania took pace aboard bamboo rafts. The classic story of the colonization of the Americas, involving mammoth hunters plodding across the Bering Land Bridge between Siberia and Alaska, is being updated, meanwhile, with new evidence suggesting that inshore canoe migrations also played an important role.

I’ll plumb these antique seafaring migrations in the years ahead, as I inch my way to the Out of Eden Walk’s final ocean: the bitter Antarctic waters off Tierra del Fuego.

Early humans are thought to have beachcombed their way across the unmapped world.

Our ancestors walked the Earth’s continental shelves—the ocean surface was at times 70 meters below its current level—shrewdly tapping the bounty of two adjoining worlds: seafood and terrestrial foods. Shellfish were a favorite on Stone Age menus. These dawn pioneers gorged on healthy Omega-3 fatty acids packed into mussels. Debris from their ghostly feasts still erode today, as pale, crumbling shell middens, from shoreline cliffs.

I struck my first ocean in 12 years at the coast of Dongbei—what used to be called Manchuria—in the frozen northeast of China, almost a year ago. Stuffed inside a parka, I bent to pick up the burnished shingle on an empty shore. I stared at the fire-colored stones in my numbed hand, recalling the shining volcanic cobbles of a long-ago African coast. More than 4,000 trailside sunrises over the Old World lay in between. My Chinese walking partners took selfies. An occasional icy wind gusted in from the Pacific. It screeched like the rusty hinges of a closing door.