The Glorious Boneyard: A Report From Our Starting Line

... Berhane Asfaw, the distinguished Ethiopian paleoanthropologist, was walking in the desert of his sepia-toned country, in the Rift Valley of Africa, near the steamy banks of the Awash River. He was surveying the site of one his team’s most famous discoveries: the fossil remains of Herto man, considered by some scientists to be the oldest fully recognizable human being ever found. A thick-wristed ancestor. A maker of moderately improved stone axes. A tireless eater of hippo meat. About 160,000 years old.

“These people didn’t move around much,” Asfaw reminded me. “It was greener here back then, kind of swampy, with open woodland. They had plenty of resources, plenty of food.”

Asfaw and his two colleagues, Tim White and Giday WoldeGabriel, had invited me to this anthropologically famous spot to begin walking across the world. I was setting out that very afternoon, in fact, on a long foot journey—seven years—whose object is to recreate, step by step, the transcontinental voyage of the first modern humans who dispersed successfully out of Africa. [...] outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.com/

Related: Middle Awash Project