Here's the project:
On January 10th, 02013, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Paul Salopek will begin a seven year journey on foot from Ethiopia to Patagonia, following the footsteps of the first migration of humans across the planet 60,000 years ago. The journey will not be an easy one. It consists of 21,000 miles of wildly varying terrain and environments, with only what Salopek can fit in his backpack. Salopek will be writing “narrative core samples” every hundred miles to get an embedded, on-the-ground look at the issues that are defining our age.Progress will be posted at this link (currently at mile 0 in Ethiopia).
More details and links here, in the blog of the Long Now Foundation, which "hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years" and where you can learn how geologic processes in the Cretaceous period helped determine voting patterns in the last presidential election:
Explained here.
I've always believed that this idea of ancient people walking over Alaska and Russia, etc-- this that you've mapped out- must be some sort of scientific fallacy which will someday be explained as incorrect. Now, this is just fascinating. I am subscribed to the email updates. It's a seven year commitment, apparently!
ReplyDeleteSome of the travel is now thought to have been in skin boats, esp along the Pacific Northwest. And it wasnt' individuals going the distance; it was a migration over thousands of years, probably with families or groups going only short distances in a lifetime.
DeleteToo bad sea levels have risen since then and left much of the proof (campsites etc) underwater now.