Before Borders: How Migration Made Us Human

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Today, movement defines the world. Borders, passports, immigration systems, entire political debates built around who gets to move and who doesn't. But the map we recognize today is incredibly new. Most modern borders were drawn in just the last 100 years. For tens of thousands of years before that, none of this existed. And migration wasn't a politicized subject. It was the very thing that shaped human history and our global dominance.

SPEAKER_01 0:32 Progress without migration is not possible.

SPEAKER_00 0:34 That's migration historian Marcus Reisler from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Together, we discuss our species yearning to cross continents into the unknown, into places no human had ever seen before. If you've been enjoying what we're doing on the pod, please subscribe. It is a massive help. So the question today is what did we do before controlled migration? I began by asking Marcus about this surprising fact that formal borders, as we know them, are really very recent inventions.

SPEAKER_01 1:15 Yeah, there is a there is a nice saying from Thor Heydal, who he says, borders, I never see one. But I know that they exist in the brain of human beings. But I think in early days, borders were not fixed. Those in power they had a certain area around which they had control over, and this control evaporates, sometimes is a little bit loose at the end of their kind of kingdom or whatever area they controlled, and the control of another is starting. These borders were not fixed in these beginnings. Or when they try to have them, it's uh with the stones that they marked this is the territory until here, and you have a border stone there, which is easily being evapor uh taken away and moved to another place. So it's uh these borders as a line, as a green line or a line in the on the ground is a modern concept of also uh a state that at the same time has the authority to control the whole territory and obliges all those who live in that territory to be its citizens or its subordinates or its slaves or whatever you call it. But this is a modern concept. Borders were quite fluid, according to power changes or whatever economic uh reasons or others.

SPEAKER_00 2:53 Yeah, we we can actually really see these very strict borders only being what a few hundred years old? Is is is it as recent as that?

SPEAKER_01 3:02 Yeah. In in Africa, for example, there is not one single border that has not been established by the colonialists after independence. All these lines, all these borders are purely artificial. They do not make sense. You are in the middle of the desert, and all of a sudden another country starts. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 3:23 It is crazy because these are all concepts that we've designed in our brains. They don't they don't exist, they're not real, and yet they affect people's lives in a very real way. I mean, the establishment of formal borders must have really changed our view and appreciation of migration. Did did we see that when formal borders began to be established around the world?

SPEAKER_01 3:48 Yeah, I think it's the start from kind of fluid societies or kind of populations that had to live and therefore honor whatever king or whatever powerful guy they had, but they were not bound to that. If they were not satisfied with their life there, they traveled, they they moved away. For example, the Middle Age is full of such migration. Constructing a cathedral, for example, you needed a lot of people. And these people didn't come only from that village or from that town, they came from far away. And you also needed the skills to build such things, and these skills that's the migrants, they brought these skills. The search of these guys they are very important because without them uh you couldn't build these cathedrals, for example, or other things, uh, other techniques. So migration was always kind of linked also with new with inventions and and so on. It's uh or if you did an invention, then this they spread through whom? Those who wandered, those who went to other countries. So migration is also a very inspiring concept, uh so to speak, to human uh to the human society. And this kind of where migration is becoming a problem is very recent in very recent time.

SPEAKER_00 5:23 So migration is the engine that has driven civilizations to grow and thrive, from the trade networks built along the Silk Road to the travellers and wanderers who came from all over to build the cathedrals of the medieval world, cities didn't grow in isolation, they depended on people moving in, bringing skills, ideas, and trade. And while we talk about illegal immigration today, as if movement itself is the problem, when our species was taking its first steps out of Africa, no one was being welcomed to their new destination by law. So, what was migration like for our early ancestors? And why did we, as a species, take such great risk to our lives to explore the unknown world?

SPEAKER_01 6:10 Well, it it always intrigued me um this very early um stage of human of humankind, and that dates millions of years ago, and uh so the early humans were basically hunters and gatherers. There was no civilization as we know it like this. Uh so as hunters normally do, they follow their prey and and they follow the herds of of the cattle of of the animals that they were chasing. It's also an intriguing question when when actually these human beings have become the humans as we as we know a little bit. And it started, as I said, millions ago in in Africa, when for the first time these kind of mix between apes and human beings were walking on two feet. That's the beginning of uh human beings, in my opinion, because it liberated what you do with your hands, but this intrigued also a kind of a growth of your brain. So you have to what do you do with your hands? I saw it with my own eyes, not a real walking, but they're walking after uh outbreak of a volcano and the traces they left in the ground, and that's the proof that three and a half million years ago uh people walked upright on two feet.

SPEAKER_00 7:36 What volcano are you talking about? What evidence is there that this process happened?

SPEAKER_01 7:42 Yeah, that's the older way gorge in uh in Tanzania, uh in the Serengeti uh desert. And it's uh it's a place where archaeologists have searched for uh old bones and so on, and bones alone do not give you the evidence of uh of walking. But the outbreak of a volcano and people fleeing from that, leaving their traces with probably the the one person that I was talking about was most probably uh also carrying uh a baby because of the footprint was deeper than the one, the one the other ones. So it's proof that they are walking on three feet. As the early human beings, they lived in Africa. Africa, the temperature in Africa was always quite moderate or hot. Uh so to explore um other areas of this planet needed some kind of uh also help, clothes and uh to keep warm and so on. So these all these effects are indicators that human beings developed. There was a curiosity not to stay just in the region or where they grew up, but explore new lands because they had the means, the brain, the reflection about what's what's behind the hill. Animals may not reflect on what's behind the hill, but early humans did and explored what is behind the hill. And also we can say that the beliefs and uh religions also have been from the very early um moment on this kind of increased brain, also increased reflection of where we come from, where we go, why we die. All these questions are deeply human questions.

SPEAKER_00 9:33 I've actually done an episode on the history of clothes and um how we came to need them, basically, as we started to venture out of Africa and moving into colder regions. What's interesting to me is it seems as though, you know, we think of a migratory species as a bird. Um, you know, various species of birds migrate every single year. We don't think of humans as a migratory species, but actually, if it was fundamental to our evolution and our progression as a species, then maybe we are migratory, just not in the typical sense that we imagine in the animal world. We we can't just adapt to all sorts of climates. We have to use our brains in order to adapt. So despite all of the pressures that the environment puts on us and the fact that we aren't very well adapted until we've designed things like clothes, could you still argue that humans are a migratory species?

SPEAKER_01 10:27 Yes, I guess as um we still see it in some cultures in Africa where you have the hunter and the gatherer, they do not stay necessarily in the same in the same place for the whole year. They have grounds to follow the um the animals that they are chasing, or uh if there is uh vegetables that grow only during a specific season in a specific area, they wander there to have them and so on. It was more a kind of a seasonal migration uh in the beginning, and not necessarily um a migration to explore things that are unknown to the society.

SPEAKER_00 11:04 So you could argue that the story of migration is the story of humans. And eventually, seasonal migration turned into something more. Humans began to explore, to see what was out there. During the last ice age, sea levels were far lower than they are today, so where the Bering Strait now separates Siberia and Alaska, there once existed a vast landmass known as Bering Land Bridge. This wasn't a narrow crossing, it was hundreds of miles wide, a cold, open landscape of grassland and tundra filled with animals to hunt. And slowly, over thousands of years, small groups of humans moved across it, following herds, searching for food, pushing further into completely unknown territory. We know this happened not just from the landscape itself, but from archaeology and genetics, with some of the earliest human sites in the Americas, like Mont Verde, showing people had already travelled thousands of miles south. By the time they arrived, they weren't just crossing into new land, they were entering an entirely new world. I love this image of ancient migration being like humans visiting another planet, teeming with life and interesting things they've never seen. It's an experience that we can't have really in the modern day. But for our ancient ancestors, it must have been incredible. They just would never have known what was to come 200,000 years later, that humans would be so dominant on the planet, because for them, it would have been a really tough time settling in a new place like that.

SPEAKER_01 12:38 Yeah, and uh what it needed also is a kind of a social structure that is supportive to the survival. And uh to bring a whole group, maybe a couple of them died because of hunger or cold or whatever. So um only a couple survived, and uh this kind of social together helping each other must have been very strong in in these early days, because alone you are lost in uh in pure nature, you cannot survive.

SPEAKER_00 13:11 It always amazes me this moment when humans first reach Australia about 50,000 years ago, maybe more. They had to cross the open ocean on like rudimentary boats. Sometimes um they crossed oceans on logs, which is fascinating, really. Um must have been so dangerous and precarious. But uh, what evidence do we have of some of these earliest migrations?

SPEAKER_01 13:34 Again, um we can only guess what to what to what extent the early human beings were able to, for example, read the stars and orient themselves according to the stars. That's the only thing that you have on an ocean. But apparently they did, because these 50,000 years uh or even even earlier that human beings crossed oceans, it's a reality. They it's one thing to um explore the ocean and find an island, it's another thing to re find it again, and to uh and to travel to these islands on a regular basis. That means that these people are able to kind of orient themselves in the vast ocean. And of course, uh they had the stars, they had also flying birds or uh traveling birds or fish or whales or whatever signals. They were able to read the nature, to read the signs, and to adapt and orient themselves accordingly.

SPEAKER_00 14:36 Yeah, actually, I'd never really considered the fact that most animals, uh most other animals, or or if not all other animals, they don't um travel on a whim because they have some desire to uh explore the unknown. It actually feels slightly counter to our survival to go out and make these tremendous risks, traveling far vast oceans, traveling to countries and continents which are too cold for us to live in that we have to adapt to. It's actually quite a strange uniqueness of humans, isn't it? That migration for us isn't purely because we're searching for the climate that's right for that time of year, or searching for food. We're searching for we've got this sort of longing to see what's out there. And that's quite unique, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:23 Yeah, I would also say this curiosity of what is behind the hill, what is on the other side of the sea, of the ocean, that's something very specific uh to uh to human beings. But again, we also have to see that um these migrations it took centuries until we moved across a continent or we reached another ocean, because our migration was is slow. We are not uh fast runners, we are not fast migrants, but we are consistent looking for new grounds, maybe stay there for I don't know, decades and then explore new new grounds. So that's how I imagined at least the the exploration of of the of the planet. Wherever they found a place where they were easy, uh they could hunt and they could they found food and and so on, water, they settled for a moment. And uh, but it is um, as I said, in our genes that uh some of the people that lived there for maybe for a couple of years or decenies, some of them said, Well, I I not feel I feel not I feel the element in me that is drawing me beyond.

SPEAKER_00 16:38 Marcus mentioned migration is in our genes there, and there are a few threads to pull here. Firstly, when different groups met, they didn't just exchange ideas, they mixed, strengthening the human gene pool, you know, migration essentially creating more resilient humans. And also, while we were chatting, he told me about a book, The Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes. And it reveals something really interesting, that if you trace your DNA back through your maternal line, your mother, her mother, and so on, most Europeans today can be linked to just seven ancient lineages from tens of thousands of years ago. They weren't the only humans alive, just the ones who survived. And what those lineages reveal is not stillness, it's movement, it's migration. Because their descendants crossed continents, followed food, escaped danger, and entered worlds no human had ever seen before. And the ones who didn't move disappeared. So migration is actually locked up in our very DNA. And this reminds me of the people who didn't make it, like the LRJ people, an ancient group of Homo sapiens who tried to migrate to Europe and Asia around 40,000 years ago, but failed. They vanished, leaving no genetic trace in modern humans. And their plight, I guess, shows how early migration wasn't inevitable. It was harsh and prone to failure. But while there was no sense of countries and controlled migration in the ancient world, by the time agriculture started to become established 10,000 years ago, things began to change. But as Marcus explains, even then, migration was an essential part of human progress.

SPEAKER_01 18:23 From a society-wise migration was necessary in order to kind of travel from one village or one group, one society to the other, and intermarriage and so on. So it was quite common. That's the one thing, the kind of society migration, and the other thing is the exploring and then the trade. And trades have been all over the place. The people who left, maybe they had a memory of where they came from and sent things that they discovered back home. It took maybe years until these elements or these things uh reached home. But this contact between the different cultures that stayed on. We see that also in the traces that uh we found in the during the Bronze Age in Europe, where we thought that well, we lived here in forests and there was not much civilization, and then we discovered in the graveyards of the ruling emperors or whatever chiefs, we found uh beautiful artifacts from Greece or from Turkey. And we said, How come these things traveled through over the Alps and then buried in some tomb in northern uh Germany? So can you imagine? No roads, no things. So these things, and why did they take that? And the other thing that was uh it's even older the trade with uh with the flint stones. There are areas in France where you find the perfect flint stones to make these points for the flashes, and uh these things have been traveled throughout Europe in the Stone Age. So it's uh it's really common that uh these exchanges, not everyone migrated. There were always the ones who made the the go-between. The migrants were kind of respected people, so to speak, who linked with other societies who brought news um from the world or who brought new inventions and uh progress, progress without migration is not possible.

SPEAKER_00 20:38 Yeah, and actually we learned when we were discussing the origins of music with Steve Pritti that even um ancient instruments like cont shells were found in places far from the sea, which means they had been seen as valuable enough to be transported. So it's really fascinating. Like you say, we we don't learn we wouldn't learn about all of these different things if we never migrated, if we lived inland, we would never know about the ocean and vice versa. But what it sounds like is even by the time we see these substantial communities and civilizations emerging, still, you know, with agriculture, we still see migration as essential. It's it's almost encouraged, it's an encouraged way of life because we understand the importance of how it brings us on. Is that is that fair to say that it's actually only in fairly recent times where we've had this almost polarized, toxic relationship with migration?

SPEAKER_01 22:30 Yeah, of course, it was always a little bit of a um a conflict between those who stayed and those who kind of wandered around between the the agriculture, even starting with the agriculture, where all of a sudden they occupied a certain area and stayed there. Whereas the the hunters, or those who lived from that or followed their their cattles and so on, um, there is always uh this kind of Sometimes it's a struggle, but uh different interests. Conflicts were always there, and uh but also solutions of how to when to travel, where to travel, um, pay something if you travel, and so on. So different um measures have been taken to kind of balance these different interests that we have in society.

SPEAKER_00 23:22 Now I've spoken about the story of Ibn Battuta, the great traveler, uh, previously on the podcast, and it was a whole episode about what we did before cars, how travel uh you know what that was like. Because, like I said earlier, we sort of trivialized travel, haven't we, in the modern day. But Ibn Battuta was this medieval traveller who set off from Morocco and visited much of the ancient Islamic world. He was just going on pilgrimage to Mecca, I believe, but he ended up traveling for 29 years, covering an estimated 120,000 kilometers, which is just astounding. And obviously, his story is so special because it is unique, but it does it does show that migration did have a different meaning back then, right? In the medieval world, there was this sense that you could do something like that. But I I imagine, I don't know, how common was long distance movement like that, or was it quite rare and specific to Ibn Battuta?

SPEAKER_01 24:19 I mean, long um uh distance traveling was linked with a couple of challenges. Uh, you had to organize your your journey, you have to find guides, you have to find uh it's sometimes it's expensive, you need sometimes protection, so it's uh it's not easy. So it was certainly not everyone who was traveling, but those who were traveling had uh uh a good renomme and because they they could tell stories from other parts of the world. And this was this made them kind of amazing personalities, and they brought new things, new customs or or things and new languages and so on. Translators, you needed translators to uh or learn another language, and uh being able to understand the others, and this implies the will that you want to understand those who look a little bit different, clothe a little bit different, and uh eat a little bit different. Uh why they so you enter into a dialogue, and this dialogue was is also very human. It started with the exchange between kind of tribes, but it it continues this exchange until these days. It's uh I think the invention of states and then belonging to a different state and the establishment of borders, that was kind of the end of it, so to speak. Because uh you needed kind of other things in order to be able to travel to enter another country, because in ancient times, also in until recently, or until today, societies are also have their customs. If a if a foreigner enters their territory, it's it's the law of the guests who is who is there. You have to accept him, give him some food and water. And what is also uh interesting is these rules often imply, of course, to welcoming him, wash his feet, give him food and water, and uh a place to rest. And after a couple of days um exploring, okay, you are here for a couple of days. Now it's maybe time to help in the household or to help with the herds or help with whatever, and uh a couple of days or weeks longer, is the definite decision or question was will you stay or will you go home again? So this kind of being nice to the guests, to foreigners, but also being able to uh accommodate them if they wanted to stay, if they wanted to adapt to the society, but also bringing new things, a new language, new techniques, or whatever. This was a kind of a regular exchange, which is also the motor of migration, is a motor of development of kind of satisfy the curiosity, but also slowly change every society because no society is being able to just uh being on their own only. That doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 27:30 But nowadays, Marcus's work at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation has focused on the political side of migration. He says that while there have always been humans throughout history who haven't moved, who haven't migrated, technology has really made that more common, reshaping the way we view travel in the modern age.

SPEAKER_01 27:51 What changed also that we can we can travel through videos, through kind of whatever we read in books and so on. So, this kind of element of curiosity, we can satisfy this with new techniques, and not necessarily with going there. That's something that is maybe blocking a little bit our own migratory genes, and is also uh blocking the understanding of those who actually migrate, even if we see the misery where they come from, even if we see the wars, we can kind of we should have pity to those people. And unfortunately, we established kind of patterns or rules to how to welcome them. And these rules are these are new rules, not the ones that I mentioned before, where you welcome a guest and then after a certain time you ask again, and uh sooner or later he has to decide whether he's here and establish and work and contribute to the society or he leaves. Actually, we just don't allow him to be here and uh establish rules that force them to invent a story that fits with our kind of criteria of who belongs, who can stay here. And that's weird. That is simply weird. We we should develop other uh rules and uh uh I think we we have some uh kind of models how these things could be organized, because we are lacking uh war uh workforces in our societies, in our older older uh societies, and we the young people that are coming, uh they claim asylum, which is the wrong thing they do, because um we would need that we would uh need them, but not as my not as asylum seekers, but as kind of workers. And the UN uh established um a compact, uh the Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Safe Migration. If you if we follow what is written in that compact, then we would organize migration the other way around, of saying uh okay, we invest in young people in foreign countries that are willing and able to come here and to contribute, and uh not to have this kind of unsafe traveling through the Mediterranean on small boats, uh, which is extremely dangerous. So it's not human what we do with these uh with these migrants uh that have to come that way to lie and have a dangerous journey in order to stay to come to our our countries.

SPEAKER_00 30:38 And and what do you think we lose as a species from viewing migration in this modern way?

SPEAKER_01 30:46 I think we we we use this kind of uh social um aspect that migration always had because migration needs the willingness to accept a stranger, to talk to a stranger, and to accept also that he's the same valued value that he um speaks maybe as a different language, but in basically we are both humans, and this capability of accepting all people around this globe as kind of equal and share maybe with difficulties, with language difficulties, with cultural difficulties, but you can overcome these things if you have the right the right setup of your mind. Then it's possible. It's possible.

SPEAKER_00 31:36 So, over thousands of years, humans spread across every continent through waves of migration, war, trade, and exploration. Migration led to the world we see today, to our species' global dominance. For most of our history, humans moved freely across the world. Today we've built a system that restricts that movement. And yet the instinct to move is still there, and it always has been. A massive thank you to Marcus and thank you for listening to what we did before. I'm Ollie. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode.