Excerpt
SUMMARY: On a years-long hike across the globe, journalist Paul Salopek is following the path humans took after the Ice Age. One of the most important human migration sites in the world is in Dmanisi, Georgia, where people have walked for nearly 2 million years. Hari Sreenivasan joins Salopek in learning more about the first pioneers to wander that part of the world.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The fog-shrouded fields and rolling hills of Southern Georgia are much more than a waypoint for Paul Salopek. We were nearing the ancient city and archaeological site of Dmanisi.
PAUL SALOPEK, Journalist/National Geographic Fellow: So, Dmanisi is finally in sight and this is probably one of the most important human migration sites outside of Africa proper.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Salopek is following the path humans took after the Ice Age, 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. But here in Dmanisi, that path is much older.
Along these green and jagged river gorges, we have walked in one form or another for nearly two million years. The history here is stacked high, part of what Salopek calls the layer cake effect of the Caucasus. With a happy dog welcoming us, we passed what was likely an outer defensive tower of the 1,400-year-old city of Dmanisi.
This has been a crossroads for a long time.
PAUL SALOPEK: From day one. And pretty much everybody invaded it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And was this a trading route?
PAUL SALOPEK: This was a Silk Road trading route city, a big shining city on the hill, very rich, until the Mongols came and plundered it. And then they were here a few hundred years until the Georgians and Armenians pushed them out.
HARI SREENIVASAN: It’s an archaeological gold mine. With the summer digging season finished, we arrived at a sort of bunk house for archaeologists to rest for the night.
PAUL SALOPEK: If we did, by some miracle, get a clear sky, it really will change everything completely.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The next morning, a miracle had indeed swept away the fog. Within what you’re seeing is nearly two million years of history, the medieval city, whose walls still stand, built on top of a Bronze Age settlement that’s 5,000 years old, and still beneath that, the 1.8 million-year-old remains of one of modern human’s earliest ancestors.
Salopek, Dima Bit-Suleiman, his walking partner in Georgia, and I were joined by the director of Georgia’s National Museum, David Lordkipanidze, for the walk up to the hilltop dig site.
Journalist goes on a walk around the world to find the story of humanity
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