Creation Story

Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistoric caves, fossils that help us understand the origin of our species. Her recent hit BBC / PBS series Human follows her around the globe trying to piece together the unlikely story of how early humans conquered the world. But Ella’s own origins as an evolutionary biologist are equally unlikely. She sits down with us and tells us a story she has rarely shared publicly, about how she came to believe in evolution, and how much that belief cost her. Special thanks to Misha Euceph, Khalil Andani, and Hamza Syed. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif NasserProduced by - Jessica Yung and Pat Walterswith help from - Sarah QariFact-checking by - Diane Kellyand Edited by - Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - “Human” (https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/human), Ella’s show on the BBC and PBS Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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  Okay.

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  You're listening to Radiolab.

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  Radiolab.

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  From...

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  WNYC.

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  See?

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  Yep.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Latif, how do I pronounce your name? Because I'm pronouncing it the Yemeni way.

• 0:23Speaker 03

  You pronounce it the Yemeni way? I'm like, I'm excited about you pronouncing it the Yemeni way.

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  Because it's used heavily by Yemenis. Latif.

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  Like, just to mean, like, something's nice or something?

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  Yeah, or, "How's your day going, Latif?"

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  Oh, yeah, I love it. Oh, that makes me feel so warm. Wait, now pronounce your name for me, so I know what...

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  Oh, my God, it's unpronounceable. Ala?

• 0:46Speaker 03

  Ala?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab, and I'm talking with Ala Al Shamahi. She's a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and she's like, honestly, the modern-day Indiana Jones. She 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.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Thing is, as well, our story is kind of epic, man. Our story's epic.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  We lived in a world that was a bit like Lord of the Rings. There was, obviously, the Neanderthals, which so many people have heard of. But there were all these other species, including one of my favorites, Homo floresiensis, who were basically these hobbit-like humans. They were really short, they 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.

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  And at the same time that you had the Neanderthals and these penguin people, there were also other groups like the Denisovans.

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  The Neanderthals of Asia.

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  There was a species called Homo nolleti, another one called Homo luzanensis.

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  This was the world that, you know, we were born into.

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  A world where our little tribe was competing with these other little human-ish tribes and often losing.

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  We were constantly not succeeding.

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  And then we did, and we did so in the biggest way possible.

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  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.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so what you're referring to there is something which I guess, um, I have not really known how to talk about. 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.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Wow. Why, why is, why was, why has this been so tender?

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  I, you come from a religious background, right?

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  I was very devout.

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  No way.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then I went off to, uh, 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.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  I did not know that.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

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  I never get to have this conversation with people who have any kind of religious background, let alone, um, a Muslim background.

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  Yeah.

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  I, I think my fear is that I do not want my story.

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  Yeah.

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  To be a stick. To beat people who are in religious communities with.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  The community was incredibly tight. It was incredibly protective. It was absolutely overprotective as well, you know, like.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  As a woman, I'm sure, yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yeah. Like, I didn't wear trousers. I didn't want makeup. It was it was an ultra conservative community.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Where were you again? Where did you grow up?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Birmingham, England.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Birmingham, yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 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.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Like, for me, this, 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. It feels like you didn't have that. Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  No, clearly, you know, your family, clearly, there were families and individuals who did explain things like that.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

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  But there was no space for evolution in my family. And there was absolutely none in the missionary world.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  And what did you believe? Like, what was the creation story that you believed?

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  Yeah.

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  How did you think people came to be?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  It's weird. I feel like I know the Christian creationist story better than I know the Muslim creationist story in a way, or is it?

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  Very similar.

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  Very similar.

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  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.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  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.

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  Yeah, I became a missionary at the age of 13 and like traveled the UK being a missionary.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  And missionary means like you were going to, who were you going to talk to?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Well, I was speaking to more lapsed Muslims.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  But also to the wider public.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  That was a hard, what years were these like?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Basically, you know, in the 90s, I was basically certainly in the 2000s.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Cause I was thinking like after 2000, that would have been a much harder job talking to the lay public about Islam.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  You were more like hard, hard edge about it maybe than your siblings.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I think I was more hardcore.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Hardcore. You were more hardcore than your siblings.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, if you were to speak to them and I don't want to put words in their mouth, they, 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, you still don't have chill. Like you just went from one extreme to the, you know, it's just really funny because they're not wrong. Like I, I could have just, you know, they're just relaxed.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  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. It was like, because like a bunch of my friends, like they would, they would go to the mosque, they would go to mosque and then they would like, but then it's like afterwards, like it's like Friday night, like we're going to go drinking and we're going to have fun. Like, and it was like that kind of thing.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  We would have had thoughts about you.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  No, no, I didn't do that. 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 any of these things.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So I was so strict that those guys wouldn't have even been my friends.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

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  Except that I might have taken them on as projects.

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  Right.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So, okay. Imagine you're a missionary and you're that age and you're good, right?

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

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  Your big thing that's hanging over you is what you're gonna do at university.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Because that was a big deal in your family?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, in our family, having a master's degree is the equivalent of a high school education.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Wow. Okay, so and who were, what are all these people? What did they study?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Other people from her community had studied science to go into medicine or engineering, but Ella had a different idea.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  I was like, I'm gonna go study evolution because I'm gonna destroy Darwin's theory.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, tackle the underlying assumptions of things.

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  And then to expose them and then to persuade them and then to like, like.

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  To, to, to basically proselytize my version of it.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  You know, okay, so you're saying it's like this. Well, actually, have you considered it's actually like this?

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  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Have you considered the data could actually fall into this interpretation instead?

• 9:27Speaker 03

  And, and why that? Like, why was that the thing you fixated on?

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  Because I'm a missionary. My whole, my whole purpose is like to bring people to the message, to bring people to God.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Right.

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  And, and one of the biggest reasons why they're not is that they, they believe that God doesn't exist. And, and, and the reason for that is that evolution exists.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  So it's like, it's, it's a really is like, like for you, I mean, it feels like it's, it's like the same debate from like Darwin's time. Like, it's like, oh, we're like.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  You think we came from apes? We came from God.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that whole monkey story, I ain't gonna fly kind of thing.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  So, so, okay, so, so when you applied, like, what did you say? Or what did they?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  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 gonna be destroying your theory from the inside.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. What did you say?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  None of that. I just was like, I really wanna study genetics. I think it's amazing. I love all the evolution classes, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  But you were lying. That was a lie.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Was it?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I guess so. I'm, I'm not happy with the fact that you used that word, but I guess it was.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Because it was, it was a lie of omission.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Did you, was this like a private mission? Or did you talk to people about this?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  My, my, the other missionaries all knew about this.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so, but it wasn't, you know, I was never turning around telling the, you know, other classmates who were.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  You were a double agent, basically.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I, I like the sound of that.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  I mean, if you'd have known me at the age of 18, I was a dork. So.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  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 university to have like allowed non-Church of England.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  People to, to kind of join up. And I, I went to the Darwin Building because Charles Darwin himself, he, he lived there.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  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, so I wasn't just in the head covering. I was in the full jilbab, which is like that full cloak.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  They weren't kind of doing what I was kind of, what I was covertly up to.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  I remember there was one girl who was also kind of vaguely associated with my world kind of thing.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  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, like I'm just thinking that actually there's a different interpretation that you can have for this data, blah, blah, blah. And 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.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Like she had a firewall up.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  But for Ella, there was no wall. Like, she was pushing these two worlds right up against each other.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So there's like two things going on, right? So I'm just living my life, being a missionary. I have an arranged marriage and like, uh, via my Imam, by the way, my, my dad wasn't even involved.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  That started in, in university or in grad school or?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Oh my, it was my first semester at university. Um, the Imam suggested to me that, yeah, he, he wanted me to marry one of his other, um, students and I was like, okay. And so that took a while.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Excited about? Were you flattered? Was, was that, did that feel good or did that feel icky?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  You know what? Like I, 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. And at the same time, it's like, it's just constantly like picking at this, this, 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.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And I'm coming along being like, hell, don't.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Hold on, we can put these pieces together another way.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  We can just, we haven't thought of something. Give me a minute. And by the way, some people do that to great success.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Some people have won Nobel prizes on the back of this. I just picked the wrong puzzle, man.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  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. And 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?

• 14:45Speaker 03

  And then one day, she's sitting in class and the professor starts talking about this experiment.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  The Drosophila fruit fly experiment?

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  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 timeframe, you're just kind of separating them.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  And, um, oh, 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.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Because if we're watching them become new species, we're watching evolution, which I don't think happened.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  But my, my only comfort with that experiment was that it was being done in the lab. And I just thought, okay, but that might not be happening in nature.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Maybe it's being forced in the lab, maybe in nature that wouldn't be happening.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  But she keeps going to more lectures and eventually she's running into other problems like.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  You just do. It's really, really hard.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  It's like you dig deeper, you see simpler things, kind of, generally.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  You know, it is, forgive my language, you can't, you're like the BBC, right? You can't broadcast swearing.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  No, we can broadcast swearing. Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Oh, nice. Sorry, I've been cleaning up my language.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  No, go for it.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, like you would, you would be looking at these, um, stratigraphic, uh, sequences. And it was, um, 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.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  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?

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Right, right. So you're like, okay, so you gave a little ground. You were like, this makes sense.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I can give- A lot of ground. All other species but us, yeah. All the other billions.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  That's right. But not us.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  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, within every-

• 17:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  The pattern of mutations within the retrotransposons that we have-

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Align on a family tree with what you would expect from evolution if you then looked at those same retrotransposons within chimps.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  How does that, like, the only interpretation for the mutations that you find in retrotransposons is that it's evolution through descent with modification over, you know, hundreds of thousands. There's no other interpretation.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Like, like God would have had to copy paste or something?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is the thing, because one of the arguments that, for those of you who don't know, the one of the arguments that creationists use to explain, well, why is our DNA so similar?

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  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, and there's so many mechanisms, blah, blah. And on a level, on one level, you're like, oh, okay, that is actually, like, there is some logic to that.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Retrotransposons-

• 19:02Speaker 01

  They're not functional.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  It's not like, oh, it's a bit of DNA that helps me process, um, for example, water or helps me process, um, carbohydrates. It's a non-functional bit of DNA. And yet its mutation pattern fits almost perfectly with

• 19:22Speaker 01

  an evolutionary family tree.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And it was just like, ah, it's just, sorry, that's the noise that you make when your whole life is about to fall apart.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  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?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Were you living with this guy at that point? Or what, what?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  With this guy, my ex-husband, yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  You're married?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  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. Um, you're also, you know, bluntly naked and, and you're very exposed, but you're in a safe place, right? And I, and I kind of, I basically, I basically tell myself that I have to find the strength to be honest, that I just, I believe in evolution.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  And I just fell to the floor, like, I just, I was like hysterically crying.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  I was just so, so distraught. And the, the reason I was so distraught at this point was that I knew

• 20:55Speaker 01

  that meant I was gonna have to leave my world.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  How do you leave your whole world and try to join another one? And what does it do to you if you do that?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 21:28Speaker 04

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• 22:11Speaker 03

  Radiolab is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone Trade-In, any condition. It has the ultimate Pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro. Requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit an AT&T store for details.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  After some actual fake polls came to light, pollsters are in the hot seat. But they say, "Don't be too quick to dismiss the entire industry."

• 22:56Speaker 02

  People want to raise taxes on the rich. I can tell you that definitively because we know it from polling. And if we lose trust in polls, we have no way to understand what Americans want to be done.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  On this week's On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radiolab. I'm talking with Ella Al Shamahi, who went into college as a creationist and came out an evolutionary biologist. A 180 that she feared would basically destroy her life as she knew it.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I had no idea what was going to happen with my family. Because, you know, it hadn't happened in my family before, right? But what I did know is it was going to drive a massive wedge.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Because it's such an extreme thing in my world. And say that you believe in 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.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Thank God my siblings came through in the way that they did.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Wow. How did they come through?

• 24:24Speaker 01

  They decided to embrace me regardless.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  They decided that I was their sister regardless. Oh, it makes me want to cry.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  And what about like your friends and other people in the community?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  I didn't tell people. I just disappeared. I didn't tell people.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  You just ghosted people?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  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, falls, you go collect them, basically. 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 didn'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. This is awful.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  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. It was like you went into the bathroom with a left foot, you left it with a right foot, you wrote with your right hand.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  The prophet would have done this in this situation.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like every single thing is prescribed and suddenly it was like, good luck. I didn't make eye contact with men.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I literally never made eye contact with men. I, I, I took my headscarf off and I basically, I turned up to the, to like a gas station.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And it was the most anticlimactic.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And 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,

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  you've got to cover up because it's a fit now, it's like, it's corrupt, it's like, it corrupts the earth if you, um, it's a bad 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.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Cause it's like raw, it's like raw sexuality. It's like that kind of thing. Is that the feeling of it?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  I don't know what it was, cause 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 pale anthropologist. You know, you kind of go and, and sit with these exotic and inverted commas tribes and you kind of learn their ways.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I had this one friend who was just like, Oh, you must be so relieved to be free.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Like, now, ten, thirteen years later, I can look back and go, I'm glad that, you know, I'm not constrained by dogma unless I pick that dogma. But, you know, let's not pretend that this is a fun world. I mean, I'd definitely rather be here, but let's not pretend it's perfect. Like, I think the community thing is such a...

• 27:59Speaker 01

  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?

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I will never, ever, ever be in a community like that again. I think religious communities are warm, they engulf you, they embrace you. Your hot water goes off.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Everybody offers you their place. Somebody ends up in hospital and people get angry with the hospital administration because they're like, what are you talking about? Only 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...

• 28:38Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, I feel that 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, I, I yearn for that.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  It's so difficult. It was like, it was like I, I didn't know who I was anymore. And the people that are around me that would normally love me and knew who I was, they were all new too.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  And in the midst of all this upheaval, Ella was still going to school and starting to become obsessed with the thing she would spend her entire career studying, our origin story. That 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.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Getting it on.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, having sex with a Neanderthal. So there's a scandal in the family, basically. Now, usually, right, the way this would be presented is, oh, there's some Neanderthal DNA. So that means that there was, there was some kind of intercourse, blah, blah, blah. All 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, like, one of my, and your ancestors.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Was half, half.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm not mixed race, but I'm mixed heritage, so I'm a British Arab, right?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  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?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  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, she doesn't want them to get teased.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Like pregnant, like, like that mom is sitting there pregnant, like, thinking about what her baby, whether her baby's gonna have a brow ridge or a chin or something.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Seriously.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Is there any evidence to suggest that crossovers like Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, us couplings, made us more successful? Like, that, those.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we were the new kid on the block. And for example, when we entered into Neanderthal territory.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  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. So 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?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  No, tell me.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  So Tibetans live 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.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Like we drank their superpowers kind of thing.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Okay, so now, so there are these sort of hybrid people.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  So are you.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  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. What did you gain from that crossover?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  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. Because I understand that I am, when I am trying to persuade somebody of a scientific point, nine times out of 10, I'm not trying to persuade them of one scientific point. I'm effectively taking apart their worldview.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  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, but I just fundamentally at my core. Understand that when somebody has that belief, it's not one belief, it's a belief system.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  And showing them who I am and me seeing their humanity. That's why it gently does it for me in terms of methodology.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And also fundamentally in my mind, accepting that they may never believe me.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  They may never accept my version of events, and that's okay.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Ella Oshamahi. 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 Yung and Pat Walters with help from Sarah Kari. It was fact-checked by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Hamza Sayed and Misha Youssef. And you for listening. We will be back soon with another episode. I just, I just have to kill this tiny elephant first.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Catch you later.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Monica, and I'm from Mexico City. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrot and is edited by Zoran Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lateshun Nazar are our co-hosts. Dylan Kifli is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pazutierrez, Sindhu Jan Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Carey, Sarah Sanbach, Anissa Pitsche, Arianna Waack, Todd Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Yung, with help from Rebecca Rams. Our fact checkers are Diane Keely, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujolmasini, and Natalie Middleton.

• 36:20Speaker 06

  Hey, Radiolab. Michael, Tacoma, Washington. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation

• 36:30Speaker 04

  and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder that Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/BankGuy. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.