Man Begins 7-Year Walk on Path of Ancient Humans

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Journalist Paul Salopek plans to spend the next seven years retracing human's migration out of Africa. (Image credit: Becky Hale, National Geographic)

Paul Salopek has a long walk ahead of him. The 50-year-old journalist left a small Ethiopian village on foot today (Jan. 10), planning to retrace the steps of humans' migration from Africa until he gets to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Chile.

The 21,000-mile (34,000-kilometer) journey — which will cross 30 borders and dozens of languages and ethnic groups — will take Salopek seven years.

By today's standards, that's a long time, but the same trek took ancient humans many generations and thousands of years. When and how our ancestors dispersed out of Africa has long proven controversial, though it is generally believed that they slowly spread into the Middle East about 60,000 years ago, and while some branched off and headed to Europe, others migrated eastward into Asia, crossed a land-ice bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait and traveled down the length of the New World.

Besides getting in a vessel to take him from Russia to Alaska, Salopek will mimic this epic voyage on foot. He started out in Herto Bouri, a village in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley, which has the longest and most continuous record of human evolution of any place on Earth. Though he's using the past as a road map, Salopek has emphasized that his goal is to report on current global stories at a slower pace and from a different perspective than they are usually covered.

"Often the places that we fly over or drive through, they aren't just untold stories, but they are also the connective tissues between the stories of the day," Salopek told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

National Geographic, one of the backers of Salopek's "Out of Eden" walk, says it will publish his dispatches from the journey. The journalist is carrying just a backpack with some camping equipment and high-tech communications' gear, including a lightweight laptop and a GPS device.

Salopek told CBC Radio last week that he is planning to use some social media throughout the walk, though he won't be microblogging. In his last tweet before starting the trip, Salopek posted a picture of his house keys.

"Existential question before a 7-year walk: Take or leave house keys?" he wrote.

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Megan Gannon
Megan Gannon
Live Science Contributor
Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.