A JOURNEY'S LESSONS

What does a walk across the world teach about navigating our troubled century? TREAD LIGHTLY upon the Earth. SHARE what you can. But most of all, REMEMBER.

- PAUL SALOPEK

NO ONE KNOWS PRECISELY WHY, AFTER KNOCKING ABOUT AFRICA FOR ROUGHLY 240,000 YEARS, ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMANS BEGAN WALKING IN EARNEST OUT OF THE MATERNAL CONTINENT AND CONQUERED THE WORLD.

Our dominion was hardly fated. After all, as everyone knows, life is mostly accidental.

This question preoccupies me because for nearly nine years as part of a storytelling project, I've been trekking along our ancestors' Stone Age trails of dispersal out of Africa. I've reached Southeast Asia. Eventually, the plan is to slog to the tip of South America, where Homo sapiens ran out of continental horizon. My aim has been simple: to foot-brake my life, to slow down my thinking, my work, my hours. Unfortunately, the world has had other ideas. Apocalyptic climate crises. Widespread extinctions. Forced human migrations. Populist revolts. A mortal coronavirus. For more than 3,000 mornings, I've been lacing up my boots to pace off a planet that seems to be accelerating, shuddering underfoot, toward historic reckonings. But until Myanmar, I'd never walked into a coup.