The fascinating (and dangerous) places scientists aren’t exploring | Ella Al-Shamahi

So I’ve got something that I’m slightly embarrassed to admit to.
At the age of 17, as a creationist,
I decided to go to university to study evolution
so that I could destroy it.
(Laughter)
I failed.
I failed so spectacularly that I’m now an evolutionary biologist.
(Applause)
So I’m a paleoanthropologist, I’m a National Geographic Explorer
specializing in fossil hunting in caves
in unstable, hostile and disputed territories.
And we all know that if I was a guy and not a girl,
that wouldn’t be a job description, that would be a pick-up line.
(Laughter)
Now, here’s the thing. I do not have a death wish.
I’m not an adrenaline junkie.
I just looked at a map.
See, frontline exploratory science does not happen as much
in politically unstable territories.
This is a map of all the places which the British Foreign Office
have declared contain red zones, orange zones
or have raised some kind of a threat warning about.
Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it is a tragedy
if we’re not doing frontline exploratory science in a huge portion of the planet.
And so science has a geography problem.
Also, as a paleoanthropologist,
guys, this is basically a map of some of the most important places
in the human journey.
There are almost definitely fascinating fossils to be found here.
But are we looking for them?
And so as an undergraduate, I was repeatedly told
that humans, be they ourselves, homo sapiens, or earlier species,
that we left Africa via the Sinai of Egypt.
I’m English, as you can probably tell from my accent,
but I am actually of Arab heritage,
and I always say that I’m very, very Arab on the outside.
You know, I can really be passionate.
Like, «You’re amazing! I love you!»
But on the inside, I’m really English, so everybody irritates me.
(Laughter)
It’s true.
And the thing is, my family are Arab from Yemen,
and I knew that that channel,
Bab-el-Mandeb,
is not that much of a feat to cross.
And I kept asking myself this really simple question:
if the ancestors to New World monkeys could somehow cross the Atlantic Ocean,
why couldn’t humans cross that tiny stretch of water?
But the thing is, Yemen,
compared to, let’s say, Europe,
was so understudied
that it was something akin to near virgin territory.
But that, along with its location, made the sheer potential for discovery
so exciting,
and I had so many questions.
When did we first start using Bab-el-Mandeb?
But also, which species of human besides ourselves made it to Yemen?
Might we find a species as yet unknown to science?
And it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who had noticed Yemen’s potential.
There was actually a few other academics out there.
But sadly, due to political instability, they moved out, and so I moved in.
And I was looking for caves:
caves because caves are the original prime real estate.
But also because if you’re looking for fossils in that kind of heat,
your best bet for fossil preservation is always going to be caves.
But then, Yemen took a really sad turn for the worse,
and just a few days before I was due to fly out to Yemen,
the civil war escalated into a regional conflict,
the capital’s airport was bombed
and Yemen became a no-fly zone.
Now, my parents made this decision before I was born:
that I would be born British.
I had nothing to do with the best decision of my life.
And now …
Now the lucky ones in my family have escaped,
and the others, the others are being been bombed
and send you WhatsApp messages that make you detest your very existence.
This war’s been going on for four years.
It’s been going on for over four years, and it has led to a humanitarian crisis.
There is a famine there,
a man-made famine.
That’s a man-made famine, so not a natural famine,
an entirely man-made famine that the UN has warned
could be the worst famine the world has seen in a hundred years.
This war has made it clear to me more than ever
that no place, no people deserve to get left behind.
And so I was joining these other teams, and I was forming new collaborations
in other unstable places.
But I was desperate to get back into Yemen,
because for me, Yemen’s really personal.
And so I kept trying to think of a project I could do in Yemen
that would help highlight what was going on there.
And every idea I had just kept failing,
or it was just too high-risk, because let’s be honest,
most of Yemen is just too dangerous for a Western team.
But then I was told that Socotra, a Yemeni island,
was safe once you got there.
In fact, it turned out there was a few local and international academics
that were still working there.
And that got me really excited,
because look at Socotra’s proximity to Africa.
And yet we have no idea when humans arrived on that island.
But Socotra, for those of you who know it,
well, let’s just say you probably know it for a completely different reason.
You probably know it as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean,
because it is one of the most biodiverse places on this earth.
But we were also getting information
that this incredibly delicate environment and its people
were under threat
because they were at the frontline of both Middle Eastern politics
and climate change.
And it slowly dawned on me that Socotra was my Yemen project.
And so I wanted to put together a huge multidisciplinary team.
We wanted to cross the archipelago on foot, camel and dhow boat
to conduct a health check of this place.
This has only been attempted once before, and it was in 1999.
But the thing is, that is not an easy thing to pull off.
And so we desperately needed a recce,
and for those of you who aren’t familiar with British English,
a recce is like a scouting expedition.
It’s like a reconnaissance.
And I often say that a really big expedition without a recce
is a bit like a first date without a Facebook stalk.
(Laughter)
Like, it’s doable, but is it wise?
(Laughter)
There’s a few too many knowing laughs in this room.
Anyway, so then our recce team thankfully were no strangers to unstable places,
which, let’s be honest, is kind of important
because we were trying to get to a place between Yemen and Somalia,
And after calling in what felt like a million favors,
including to the deputy governor,
we finally found ourselves on the move,
albeit on a wooden cement cargo ship
sailing through pirate waters in the Indian Ocean
with this as a toilet.
(Laughter)
Can you guys see this?
You know how everybody has their worst toilet story?
Well, I’ve never swam with dolphins before.
I just went straight to pooping on them.
(Laughter)
And also, I genuinely discovered that I am genuinely less stressed
by pirate waters
than I am with a cockroach infestation
that was so intense
that at one point I went belowdeck,
and the floor was black and it was moving.
(Audience moans)
Yeah, and at night there was three raised platforms to sleep on,
but there was only — let’s say there was four team members,
and the thing is, if you got a raised platform to sleep on,
you only had to contend with a few cockroaches during the night,
whereas if you got the floor, good luck to you.
And so I was the only girl in the team and the whole ship,
so I got away without sleeping on the floor.
And then, on, like, the fourth or fifth night,
Martin Edström looks at me and goes, «Ella, Ella I really believe in equality.»
(Laughter)
So we were sailing on that cement cargo ship for three days,
and then we slowly started seeing land.
And after three years of failing,
I was finally seeing Yemen.
And there is no feeling on earth like that start of an expedition.
It’s this moment where you jump out of a jeep
or you look up from a boat
and you know that there’s this possibility,
it’s small but it’s still there,
that you’re about to find something
that could add to or change our knowledge of who we are and where we come from.
There is no feeling like it on earth,
and it’s a feeling that so many scientists have
but rarely in politically unstable places.
Because Western scientists are discouraged or all-out barred
from working in unstable places.
But here’s the thing:
scientists specialize in the jungle.
Scientists work in deep cave systems.
Scientists attach themselves to rockets and blow themselves into outer space.
But apparently, working in an unstable place
is deemed too high-risk.
It is completely arbitrary.
Who here in this room wasn’t brought up on adventure stories?
And most of our heroes were actually scientists and academics.
Science was about going out into the unknown.
It was about truly global exploration, even if there were risks.
And so when did it become acceptable to make it difficult for science to happen
in unstable places?
And look, I’m not saying that all scientists should go off
and start working in unstable places.
This isn’t some gung-ho call.
But here’s the thing:
for those who have done the research, understand security protocol
and are trained,
stop stopping those who want to.
Plus,
just because one part of a country is an active war zone
doesn’t mean the whole country is.
I’m not saying we should go into active war zones.
But Iraqi Kurdistan looks very different from Fallujah.
And actually, a few months after I couldn’t get into Yemen,
another team adopted me.
So Professor Graeme Barker’s team were actually working in Iraqi Kurdistan,
and they were digging up Shanidar Cave.
Now, Shanidar Cave a few decades earlier
had unveiled a Neanderthal known as Shanidar 1.
Now, for a BBC/PBS TV series we actually brought Shanidar 1 to life,
and I want you guys to meet Ned, Ned the Neanderthal.
Now here’s the coolest thing about Ned.
Ned, this guy,
you’re meeting him before his injuries.
See, it turned out that Ned was severely disabled.
He was in fact so disabled that there is no way he could have survived
without the help of other Neanderthals.
And so this was proof that,
at least for this population of Neanderthals at this time,
Neanderthals were like us,
and they sometimes looked after those who couldn’t look after themselves.
Ned’s an Iraqi Neanderthal.
So what else are we missing?
What incredible scientific discoveries
are we not making because we’re not looking?
And by the way, these places, they deserve narratives of hope,
and science and exploration can be a part of that.
In fact, I would argue that it can tangibly aid development,
and these discoveries become a huge source of local pride.
And that brings me to the second reason why science has a geography problem.
See, we don’t empower local academics, do we?
Like, it’s not lost on me
that in my particular field of paleoanthropology
we study human origins,
but we have so few diverse scientists.
And the thing is, these places are full of students and academics
who are desperate to collaborate,
and the truth is
that for them,
they have fewer security issues than us.
I think we constantly forget that for them it’s not a hostile environment;
for them it’s home.
I’m telling you,
research done in unstable places with local collaborators
can lead to incredible discoveries,
and that is what we are hoping upon hope to do in Socotra.
They call Socotra
the most alien-looking place on earth,
and myself, Leon McCarron, Martin Edström and Rhys Thwaites-Jones could see why.
I mean, look at this place.
These places, they’re not hellholes, they’re not write-offs,
they’re the future frontline of science and exploration.
90 percent of the reptiles on this island,
37 percent of the plant species exist here and nowhere else on earth,
and that includes this species of dragon’s blood tree,
which actually bleeds this red resin.
And there’s something else.
People on Socotra, some of them still live in caves,
and that is really exciting,
because it means if a cave is prime real estate this century,
maybe it was a few thousand years ago.
But we need the data to prove it, the fossils, the stone tools,
and so our scouting team have teamed up with other scientists,
anthropologists and storytellers,
international as well as local, like Ahmed Alarqbi,
and we are desperate to shed a light on this place
before it’s too late.
And now, now we just somehow need to get back
for that really big expedition,
because science,
science has a geography problem.
You guys have been a really lovely audience.

We’re not doing frontline exploratory science in a huge portion of the world — the places governments deem too hostile or disputed. What might we be missing because we’re not looking? In this fearless, unexpectedly funny talk, paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi takes us on an expedition to the Yemeni island of Socotra — one of the most biodiverse places on earth — and makes the case for scientists to explore the unstable regions that could be home to incredible discoveries.

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The fascinating (and dangerous) places scientists aren’t exploring | Ella Al-Shamahi