-
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, 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 made 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 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 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.
-
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.
-
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 Edstrom 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,
-
look, 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
they 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 Edstrom
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 ??,
-
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.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)