Australian Museum, University of Sydney, BreakThru Films
It is after 10pm and I am on a cycleway in Sydney returning from dinner with friends. It is a warm evening in the week before Christmas and people are still out on the streets, gathering for end-of-year drinks.
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As I cycle, I鈥檓 using my Air Pods to listen to a podcast broadcast by Bluetooth from my smartphone. The podcast, downloaded from invisible Wi-Fi, is about the origins of humanity. It strikes me that, while using almost-incomprehensibly-convenient technology surrounded by communally living fellow Homo sapiens in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, it is eminently sensible to ask: How did our species get here?
Answering that huge question was what at the Australian Museum and her team set out to do when they embarked on the podcast I鈥檓 listening to, Blazing the Trail, five years ago.
Way is an engaging presenter. An archaeologist specialising in stone tools, she cut her teeth on ancient Australian sites before completing postdoctoral research at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She and her team wanted to take a big picture perspective of human evolution, she told me, rather than diving into particular subjects. Podcasts like The Ancients, she says, do an excellent job of reporting on specific moments in human evolution and ancient history, but the goal was to produce a series that asked 鈥渨hat are the really big things that make us human?鈥�. 鈥淲e wanted a broad thematic view,鈥� she says.
The first season has just been released. Five shows, ranging from 25 to 45 minutes long, covering 聽how language evolved, what it means to be human, the other species of Homo that are now extinct, when our species left Africa and the implications of harnessing fire.
For the second season, which will be released in 2025, the show will still be fronted by Way, but the research baton will be handed to experts at the University of Liverpool in the UK, who will examine some other big questions like humanity鈥檚 love of music. Also in production is a hand-painted feature film to accompany the podcast, by , the Oscar-winning team that created Loving Vincent.
The production qualities of Blazing the Trail are excellent and I loved the diversity of researchers who were included in the shows, from Wayne Brennan, an Indigenous Australian archaeologist, through to emerging researchers, such as Madeline Robinson, a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, to doyens of the field, like Chris Stringer聽at the Natural History Museum in London.
I did feel that three of the five episodes were too short. I know it can be tough to juggle the balance between listeners鈥� attention spans and the need to give enough time to do proper justice to the profound nature of the questions that the podcast asks, but I thought the material was so absorbing that this was a series that justified hour-long episodes.
One of the most fascinating experts on the show was at the University of the Witwatersrand, who provided, for me, the most unforgettable moment of the series. I was listening on my bicycle as she recounted a claustrophobic, arduous journey to search for ancient hominid fossils at the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa. As I listened, Sydney seemed to vanish as I tried to imagine the reality of the places she ventures for her work.
鈥淭he cave system just outside Johannesburg in South Africa has a deep web of underground chambers which archaeologists have to crawl through to excavate the fossils,鈥� she says in the podcast. 鈥淚n fact, the cave system is so narrow that only 48 archaeologists have ever made it through. One particularly narrow passage is called Superman鈥檚 Crawl. There are some points where the tunnel is so small that you have to put one arm in front of you and the other one behind you, posing like Superman, and that鈥檚 why it鈥檚 called Superman鈥檚 Crawl.鈥�
Surely there is a future season about why humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, have been compelled to make such hazardous journeys?
