Creation Story

0:28Wait, you're listening. Like just to mean like something's nice or something? Yeah. Or how's your day going? Oh, yeah. I love it. Oh, that makes me feel so warm. Wait, now pronounce your name for me. So I know what, how to say your name in Yemen anyway. Ala. Ala. Ala. It's like at the end, it's too much. Everyone kept calling me Ala. And I was like, I know I'm great, but you know. I think that's too far, guys. Hey, I'm Latif Nasr. This is Radiolab. And I'm talking with Ella Al-Shamahi. She's a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist. And she's like, honestly, the modern-day Indiana Jones.

1:13She travels all over the place collecting fossils. Sometimes this takes her into active war zones or through pirate-infested waters. And she does all of this to help piece together the story of how humans came to be. thing is as well our story is kind of epic man our story's epic she's got a new tv show out now on the bbc and pbs and in it she explains that the origin of our species is kind of surreal we lived in a world that was a bit like lord of the rings there was obviously the neanderthals so many people have heard of but there were all these other species including one of my favorites homophiloresiensis who are basically these hobbit like humans They were really short.

1:57They were about three and a half feet tall. Now, that means humans the size of penguins were living on this island in Indonesia called Flores. And on this island, there were giant rats and elephants the size of cows. So humans the size of penguins were hunting elephants the size of cows. And at the same time that you had the Neanderthals and these penguin people, there were also other groups like the Denisovans. The Neanderthals of Asia. There was a species called Homo noleti, another one called Homo luzonensis. This was the world that, you know, we were born into. A world where our little tribe was competing with these other little human-ish tribes and often losing.

2:41We were constantly not succeeding. And then we did. And we did in the biggest way possible. And the fact that we did, that it was us and not one of these other groups, Ella says that was extremely unlikely. The story of how that happened is amazing. It's what her TV show is all about. But what I wanted to talk to Ella about was this other very unlikely thing, her origin story. And the fact that she's the one telling us about all this stuff in the first place. okay so what you're referring to there is something which i guess um i have not really known how to talk about um god up until quite recently in fact one of my friends turned around and said just last year you said that you might go to your grave with this wow yeah why why is why was why has this been so tender i you come from a religious background i do i was very devout No way.

3:43And then I went off to high school, I went off to college, and I was like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was. And the... Yeah, I don't know. I did not know that. Yeah. I never get to have this conversation with people who have any kind of religious background, let alone a Muslim background. Yeah. I think my fear is that I do not want my story to be a stick... to beat people who are in religious communities with. I don't want that either. And actually, I feel like hearing Allah's story in her own words and how surprising and insightful and moving it is, like, I think it'll do the opposite. So I just asked Ella to tell me about it, starting from the beginning.

4:31The community was incredibly tight. It was incredibly protective. It was absolutely overprotective as well. As a woman, I'm sure, yeah. Oh my God, yeah. like I didn't wear trousers I didn't want makeup it was it was an ultra conservative um community where were you again where did you grow Birmingham England Birmingham yeah so um my parents are Yemeni but the community was kind of quite pan-Arab and regardless of the denomination you came from or the sect or whatever you were pretty much anti-evolution and I really really took to it Like, for me, okay, so the way when I grew up, it was this feeling of, okay, evolution is true, but Allah is this invisible hand guiding evolution.

5:18It feels like you didn't have that. Yeah. No, clearly, you know, your family, clearly there were families and individuals who did explain things like that. Right, right, right. But there was no space for evolution in my family. And there was absolutely none in the missionary world. And what did you believe? Like, what was the creation story that you believed? Yeah. How did you think people came to be? So I personally believed that we were created in a week, basically. God created us in a week, as in the whole world, including Adam and Eve. It's weird. I feel like I know the Christian creationist story better than I know the Muslim creationist story, in a way.

6:02Or is it very similar? They're very, very similar. The one difference is that the Christians give God a day off. Muslims are like, God doesn't need a day off. Anyway, so Ella was all in on this version of Islam. And before she even learned how to drive, she started sharing it with other people. Yeah. I became a missionary at the age of 13 and like traveled the UK being a missionary. And missionary means like you were going to, who are you going to talk to? Well, I was speaking to more lapsed Muslims. Okay, yeah. But also to the wider public. That was a hard time. What years were these like? Basically, you know, in the 90s, I was basically certainly in the 2000s.

6:43Because I was thinking like after 2000, that would have been a much harder job talking to the lay public about Islam. Well, except that we felt like we had clearly been misrepresented by these lunatics, right? By these terrorists. And also remember our communities were therefore under more attack. Right. I'll say I was really young. I it was kind of the world I knew and I guess I have always been an all or nothing kind of person like I clearly do not know how to do things in halves and so I was like okay so this is the world around me I'm not going to just do it in the calm chill that way that I should have done it like my siblings you were more like hard edge about it maybe than your siblings I think I was more hardcore hardcore you were more hardcore than your siblings I mean you know if you were to speak to them and I don't want to put words in their mouth they're just like you just didn't have any chill you know so it's really funny so they look at me now and they're like yes still don't have chill like you just went from one extreme to the you know right it's just really funny because they're not wrong like i i could have just you know they're just relaxed was it one of those things like i remember for us like it was like like and i was i feel like i was somewhat similar as you like because like a bunch of my friends like they would they would go to the mosque they would go to masjid there and then they would like but then it's like afterwards like it's like friday night like we're gonna go out drinking and we're gonna have fun like and it was like that kind of thing we would have had thoughts about you no no i i didn't do that all no but my my buddies did that and i was the straight edge kid who was like no no no i'm not drinking i'm not i'm not i'm not smoking weed i'm not doing anything so i was so struck that those guys wouldn't have even been my friends yeah except that i might have taken them on as projects right so okay Imagine you're a missionary and you're that age and you're good, right?

8:30Yeah. Your big thing that's hanging over you is what you're going to do at university. Because that was a big deal in your family? Yeah. In our family, having a master's degree is the equivalent of a high school education. Wow. Okay. So what are all these people? What did they study? All kinds of things. Historians, some legal, but like theology kind of legal minds. And my dad was very encouraging of us going into the sciences. Other people from her community had studied science to go into medicine or engineering, but Ella had a different idea. I was like, I'm going to go study evolution because I'm going to destroy Darwin's theory.

9:04Wow. Yeah. I tackled the underlying assumptions of things. And then to expose them and then to persuade them and then to like... To basically proselytize my version of it. Yeah. You know, okay, so you're saying it's like this. Well, actually, have you considered it's actually like this? Have you considered the data could actually fall into this interpretation instead? And why that? Like, why was that the thing you fixated on? Because I'm a missionary. My whole purpose is like to bring people to the message, to bring people to God. Right. And one of the biggest reasons why they're not is that they believe that God doesn't exist.

9:44And the reason for that is that evolution exists. So it's like, it really is like, for you, I mean, it feels like it's like the same debate from like Darwin's time. Like it's like, oh, you think we came from apes, we came from God. Yeah, that whole monkey story ain't gonna fly kind of thing. So when you applied, like, what did you say or what did they? Yeah, somebody asked me this recently. They were like, hold on, hold on. So you sat there in the interview and you were like, yeah, so I'm just going to be destroying your theory from the inside. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, what did you say? None of that.

10:17I just was like, I really want to study genetics. I think it's amazing. I love all the evolution classes, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you were lying. That was a lie. I mean, I... Was it? I guess so. I'm not happy with the fact that you used that word, but I guess it was. Yeah. Because it was a lie of omission. Right. For sure. Yeah. Well, actually, I guess it must have been a lie because when they ask you, why do you want to study this? The actual answer is because I want to destroy this. And I clearly wasn't saying, ah, damn it. did you was this like a private mission or did you talk to people about this my my the other missionaries all knew about this yeah so yeah so but it wasn't you know i was never turning around telling the you know other classmates who were a double agent basically i i like the sound of that i mean if you'd have known me at the age of 18 i was a dork so yeah the idea of being a double agent is somewhat hilarious look i was obsessed i was a woman on a mission and so i turn up to university college london which for those of you in the know is known as the godless place on gower street because it's the first um university to have like allowed non-church of england people to kind of join up um and i went to the darwin building because charles darwin himself he uh he lived there yeah and that was my department and by the way like it's kind of hilarious because i was like dressed in very very conservative muslim garb i wasn't even just in a hijab i was in the full um so i wasn't just in the head covering i was in the full jilbab which is like that full cloak yeah um not by the way not that there's anything wrong with like with with dressing however you want i'm like man you just be you you know there were a few girls in hijab actually but they were interested in more medical genetics they weren't kind of doing what i was kind of what i was covertly up to right i remember there was one girl who was also kind of vaguely associated with my world kind of thing yeah um and she was there and i was so excited because i thought i'd found like a partner in her i was like oh my god and i was sitting there and i was like right so this bit of the theory uh like i'm just thinking that actually there's a different interpretation that we can have for this data, blah, blah, blah.

12:30And she just freaked out. And she looked at me and she was just like, look, I'm here because this is a mandatory course. I have to pass this evolution class. Otherwise, I don't get my degree. Like she had a firewall up. Yeah. But for Ella, there was no wall. Like she was pushing these two worlds right up against each other. So there's like two things going on, right? So I'm just living my life being a missionary. I have an arranged marriage. Via my imam, by the way. My dad wasn't even involved. That started in university or in grad school? It was my first semester at university. Really? The imam suggested to me that he wanted me to marry one of his other students.

13:09And I was like, okay. And so that took a while. Excited about it? Were you flattered? Did that feel good? Or did that feel icky? You know what? I didn't know him. I had three chaperoned meetings with him to decide if I was going to agree to marry him. And then we basically never talked ever. I can't explain it enough. I just didn't know him, you know, and like we had to get my dad to agree. And so that took a while because dad didn't want me getting married before I'd finished my first degree. And so we had to wait. And so, you know, all of this was going on. I was, you know, traveling up and down, like doing this, doing that.

13:43And at the same time, it's like, it's just constantly like picking at this theory of Darwin's, right? I mean, effectively, what I was doing was trying to unpack a massive puzzle. Now, everybody else had already unpacked it 150 years ago. And I'm coming along being like, hold on. Hold on, we can put these pieces together another way. We can just, we haven't thought of something. Give me a minute. And by the way, some people do that to great success. Yes. Some people have won Nobel Prizes on the back of this. I just picked the wrong puzzle. So Ella is going to class every day, learning about the evidence for evolution and the story the scientists say that that evidence tells us.

14:26And of course, she's looking for holes in that story. and one of the first holes that ella had always noticed was that particular moment in evolution when one species somehow like poof becomes another like how does that happen and then one day she's sitting in class and the professor starts talking about this experiment the drosophila fruit fly experiment yeah so basically because the because drosophila live for such a short amount of time you can basically like you know um instead of it being you know a mountain pops up between two animals and it takes like you know hundreds of thousands of years for them to evolve you're doing it with drosophila in a lab and you're kind of doing it in a much shorter time frame you're just kind of separating them yeah oh and um without getting into it they were starting to see the process of speciation in the lab and i was like oh that's not good because if we're watching them become new species, we're watching evolution, which I don't think happened.

15:31Yeah. But my only comfort with that experiment was that it was being done in the lab. And I just thought, OK, but that might not be happening in nature. Maybe it's being forced in the lab. Maybe in nature that wouldn't be happening. But she keeps going to more lectures and eventually she's running into other problems like stratigraphy, just the layers of earth and that kind of sequence of animals that you get in them. And they are broadly chronological. And you do see an evolutionary process there. You just do. And it's really, really hard to explain. It's like you dig deeper, you see simpler things, kind of, generally.

16:13Yeah. You know, it is, forgive my language, you can't, you're like the BBC, right? You can't broadcast swearing. No, we can broadcast swearing. Yeah. Oh, nice. sorry i've been cleaning up my language no go for it um yeah like you would you would be looking at these um stratigraphic uh sequences and it was a you know forgive my language but it was a motherfucker because you were just like right we we haven't gone from complex to simple by and large we go from simple to complex um or more complex um and it was just a consistent pattern and it's very very hard to explain that so then i was like okay theologically the real real issue is adam and eve right so technically speaking i can believe in evolution as long as it's not adam and eve as long as it's not us we're the exception right right right so you're like okay so so so you gave a little ground you were like this makes sense i can give A lot of ground.

17:13All other species but us. All the other billions. That's right. But not us. Yeah. And then what happened was I came across retrotransposons, which are very, very complicated to explain. But basically, it's like a foreign organism's DNA within our own bodies. So retrotransposons, they're little bits of DNA from, for example, a virus that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and just like got stuck in our genome and passed on from generation to generation. They're like this little historical record of something that happened to us a long, long time ago. And the reason Ella remembers this is that when she was learning about retrotransposons in a lecture, the professor mentioned this weird fact about these little bits of DNA.

18:01The pattern of mutations within the retrotransposons that we have align on a family tree with what you would expect from evolution if you then looked at those same retrotransposons within chimps. In other words, these little bits of DNA, I mean, there are hundreds of them, are lodged in the chimp genome in exactly the same places that they're lodged in our genome. How does that, like the only interpretation for the mutations that you find in retrotransposons is that it is evolution through descent with modification over, you know, hundreds of thousands. There's no other interpretation. Like God would have had to copy-paste or something?

18:37This is the thing, because one of the arguments, for those of you who don't know, one of the arguments that creationists use to explain, well, why is our DNA so similar? Yeah. Right? Like, why is our DNA so similar to chimps? They're like, yeah, but they look similar. And they have so many similar behaviors. They have so many mechanisms. And on a level, on one level, you're like, oh, okay, that is actually, like, there is some logic to that. Yeah. Retro-transposons, they're not functional. It's not like, oh, it's a bit of DNA that helps me process, for example, water or helps me process carbohydrates.

19:12It's a non-functional bit of DNA. And yet its mutation pattern fits almost perfectly with an evolutionary family tree. And it was just like... it's just sorry that's the noise that you make when your whole life is about to fall apart that that exact noise is the noise you make and i was just in hell like i was in hell um there'd be times where i'd just be looking out my window just going oh my god like what is this like what am i gonna do were you living with this guy at that point or what what with this guy my ex-husband yeah you're married yeah our marriage wasn't doing great um partly because we had an arranged marriage and we didn't know each other but partly for a number of different reasons one of which was this issue like you know he like i was clearly struggling and then there was a moment just an awful moment which was kind of i was just in the shower and as you often do in the shower you're kind of just having a conversation with yourself you're also you know bluntly naked and and you're very exposed but you're in a safe place right and I kind of I basically I basically tell myself I have to find the strength to be honest that I just I believe in evolution and I just fell to the floor like I just I was like hysterically crying I was just so, so distraught and the reason I was so distraught at this point was that I knew that meant I was going to have to leave my world

21:04How do you leave your whole world and try to join another one? And what does it do to you if you do that? We'll be right back.

21:40evolutionary biologist. A 180 that she feared would basically destroy her life as she knew it. I had no idea what was going to happen with my family because, you know, it hadn't happened in my family before it. But what I did know is it was going to drive a massive wedge. And why did it feel like why did it feel so existential? Like like like you these things could not coexist. There was no room for you to believe in evolution and still be a part of your community because it's such an extreme thing in my world and say that you believe evolution and um you know that's just we just didn't do that and by the way all cases where that did happen like let me tell you loads of those girls got cut off um thank god my siblings came through in the way that they did um how did they come through they decided to embrace me regardless um they decided that i was their sister regardless oh it makes me want to cry and what about like your friends and other people in the community i didn't tell people i just disappeared i didn't tell you just ghosted people yeah i literally just disappeared and that's because um i was a missionary and i knew the training and the training is if somebody you know right falls you go collect them basically yeah and i did not have the energy and also this is the strange thing i didn't want anyone else to follow me because i don't want them to go through what i was going through i was like no you know what you don't need to learn about evolution you just stay where you are yeah this is awful yeah um it was truly awful time i had no idea how to exist in a secular world suddenly every single thing did not have a rule attached to it which you might think is freeing except if that's the only thing you've ever known that's terrifying yeah it was like you went into the bathroom with the left foot you left it with the right foot you wrote with your right hand you you are you the prophet would have done this situation yeah it's like every single thing is prescribed and suddenly it was like good luck i didn't make eye contact with men yeah i literally never made eye contact with men i i i took my headscarf off and um i basically i turned up to the to like a gas station yeah and it was the most anti-climactic

24:09and has probably informed a huge part of my personality since because no man cared like i had been told my whole life that like you know my hair was like and and you know right you got to cover up because it's a fit night it's like it's corruption it like it corrupts the earth if you um it's about translation but like you know isn't it's it's all these things that you these things you've got to do to not um because it's like raw it's like raw sexuality it's like that kind of thing is that the feeling i don't know what it was because let me tell you nobody cared like nobody cared nobody i cannot express this enough there were no men dropping from my sheer beauty nobody was fainting nobody was doing anything like nobody cared and it was so funny but it was you know it was quite an adjustment it was like i've i've got to now learn to fit in and it's funny because i think anthropologists traditionally and as you know i'm a paleoanthropologist you know you kind of go and sit with these exotic and inverted commas tribes and you kind of learn their ways right and i was like my exotic tribe is just central london you know that's it me and i would sit there studying people's behavior and like going all right so this is how they act okay so this is okay all right so that's um you know i wrote a book about the handshake right writing a book about the handshake does not come because somebody is like just casually not questioning writing a book about the handshake comes when you are obsessively reading the behavior of every person around you because in your culture you never shook hands with men right i had this one friend who was just like oh you must be so relieved to be free and i was just like do you understand the trauma that i've just been through like i don't want this this isn't what i wanted certainly like now 10 13 years later i can look back and go i'm glad that you know i'm not um constrained by dogma unless i i pick that dogma but you know let's not pretend that this is a fun world i mean it's i'd definitely rather be here but let's not pretend it's perfect like i think the community thing is such a i think this is what i have found really really really difficult to explain to so many of my secular friends who are basically my tribe now let's be honest right yeah uh i will never ever ever be in a community like that again i think uh religious communities are warm they engulf you they embrace you your hot water goes off um everybody offers you their place um somebody ends up in hospital and people get angry with the hospital administration because they're like, what are you talking about?

26:41Only two people during visiting hours. And what's this visiting hours? This person needs us all around the clock. And it's just kind of... Oh my God, I feel I'm raising kids right now and I'm not raising them in the mosque that I grew up in. And it's like, it's sad. It's, I yearn for that. It's so difficult. It was like, it was like, I didn't know who I was anymore. And the people that were around me that would normally love me and knew who I was, They were all new, too. And in the midst of all this upheaval, Ella was still going to school and starting to become obsessed with the things she would spend her entire career studying, our origin story.

27:23That moment when there were all these little groups of proto-humans living together on the planet at the same time, but also very much separate from one another. I think it is no surprise that having gone through what I've gone through, that when I look at our story, the science of our story, that I feel something. Like, I feel something. We know that everybody from outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and even some people within Sub-Saharan Africa, have some Neanderthal DNA in them. And that can only be explained by basically one of our great-great-great-grandparents having sex. Getting it on. Yeah, having sex with a Neanderthal.

28:00So there's a scandal in the family, basically. now um usually right the way this would be presented is oh there's some neanderthal dna so that means that there was uh there was some kind of intercourse blah blah blah right we take a moment and instead it's like hold on a second right that means that one of our ancestors not like a theoretical one of my and your ancestors yeah was half half right and i'm i'm i'm uh not mixed race but i'm mixed heritage so i'm a british arab right right let me tell you that was confusing growing up at times right at times i was like it's a bit weird i'm like what would it be like to not just be mixed heritage don't be mixed race but mixed species like what would that have been like um and what would the mother have felt like how would she have felt would she have been sitting there hoping that the child would look more homo sapiens than neanderthal because, you know, she doesn't want them to get ostracized.

28:59She doesn't want them to get teens. Wow. Like pregnant, like that mom is sitting there pregnant, like thinking about what her baby, whether her baby's going to have a brow ridge or a chin or something. Is there any evidence to suggest that crossovers like Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, us, couplings, made us more successful? Like those... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we were the new kid on the block. And for example, when we entered into Neanderthal territory, Neanderthal territory being kind of Europe and Northern Asia, we would not have had immunities to local diseases. So when we interbreed with those people, it's effectively like a cheat.

29:42So suddenly we end up with immunities to things that would have taken us, ourselves, tens if not hundreds of thousands of years to evolve for. There are some really, really good examples, actually. And the best one is the Tibetan example. Are you familiar with this one? No, tell me. So Tibetans live at obviously very high altitude and the mechanism, the genetic mechanism by which they are able to exist at high altitude is very different from the genetic mechanism that exists in other populations who exist at high altitude. And the mutation is actually one that they inherited off Denisovans. Like we drink their superpowers kind of thing.

30:24Yeah, yeah. Okay. So now, so there are these sort of hybrid people. Yeah. And, and you are kind of like, in a way you're, you're one of these crossover people. I mean, this experience, this ordeal that you went to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, what? So, okay. So if this is, if that's the value of the crossover person, it's like, oh, I can get, I, I now have superpowers from both worlds or something um what did you gain from that crossover i i would say i was so traumatized by it and still am like within a like a second i could get quite upset about it um and i think when you've been through that you are much more patient with people who deny the science don't trust the science um because i understand that i am when i am trying to persuade somebody of a scientific point nine times out of ten i'm not trying to persuade them of one scientific point i'm effectively taking apart their worldview yeah and because i've gone through that i approach that with empathy by and large doesn't mean that every so often i don't get irritated um but i just fundamentally at my core understand that when somebody has that belief it's not one belief it's a belief system and um i then approach it as such so then what's what i find myself doing is i actually have less interest in debating that point with them and more interested in bonding with them as a person and showing them who I am and me seeing their humanity.

32:23That's why it gently does it for me in terms of methodology. And also fundamentally in my mind, accepting that they may never believe me. They may never accept my version of events and that's okay.

32:54Ella Al-Shamahi Again, her show is called Human. It's on PBS and the BBC. Man, she's so good in it. And it really features the full menagerie of proto-humans. The team of fully human humans who put this episode together, not even one Neanderthal among them, was Jessica Young and Pat Walters with help from Sara Kari. It was fact-checked by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Hamza Syed and Misha Youssef. And you for listening. We will be back soon with another episode. I just have to kill this tiny elephant first.

33:34Catch you later. Hi, I'm Monica. And I'm from Mexico City. And here are the staff credits.

34:11Sarah Sandbach, Anissa Bitser, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Keeley, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Massini, and Natalie Middleton. Hey, Radiolab. Michael, Tacoma, Washington. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.