Ella Al-Shamahi

Once upon a time many human species walked this Earth, it was like "Lord of the Rings." We were born into this world, and we weren’t remarkable - we weren’t the smartest, nor the strongest, just the latest in a long line of human species. Somehow, today we are the only ones left, we became the explorer species, the only global species of human and the most dominant form of life on this planet.

Ella Al-Shamahi specializes in fossil hunting in caves in hostile territories, but her origin story is also an unlikely one. She went to university at the age of 18 to study human evolution so that she could destroy it. She was a creationist; today, she is an evolutionary biologist and so this is the story of us, told by a convert. Ella weaves in stories of exploration, her own difficult journey and cutting-edge science to argue that our story is the most remarkable of all. It is forged in our DNA – explaining so much about our strengths and weaknesses; after all, can we really know who we are, if we don’t know where we come from?