[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Latif, how do I pronounce your name? Because I'm pronouncing it the Yemeni way.

LATIF NASSER: Pronounce it the Yemeni way. I'm, like, excited about you pronouncing it the Yemeni way.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Lateef. Lateef. Because it's used heavily by Yemenis. Lateef!

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. Or, "How's your day going?" "Latif."

LATIF: Oh, yeah. 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 the Yemeni way.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Oh my God. Unpronounceable. Aalaa.

LATIF: Aalaa?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Aalaa. It's like at the end, it's too much. Everyone kept calling me "Allah."

LATIF: Allah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And I was like, I know I'm great, but, you know, I think that's too far, guys.

LATIF: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. 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. 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The thing is about our story is kind of epic, man. Our story is epic.

LATIF: 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: We lived in a world that was a bit like Lord of the Rings. There was obviously the Neanderthals, who 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.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The Neanderthals of Asia.

LATIF: There was a species called Homo naledi, another one called Homo luzonensis.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: This was the world that, you know, we were born into.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: We were constantly not succeeding. And then we did. And we did so in the biggest way possible.

LATIF: 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Okay, so what you're referring to there is something which I guess 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." I was like, "Oh yeah."
LATIF: Wow. Why is, why was, why has this been so tender?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I—you come from a religious background.

LATIF: I do. I was very devout.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: No way!

LATIF: Yeah. And 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I did not know that!

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I never get to have this conversation with people who have any kind of religious background, let alone a Muslim background.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I—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.

LATIF: I don't want that either. And actually, I feel like hearing Ella'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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The community's incredibly tight, it was incredibly protective. It was absolutely overprotective as well.

LATIF: Yeah. Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: You know, like I ...

LATIF: As a woman, I'm sure. Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Oh my God, yeah. Like, I didn't wear trousers. I didn't wear makeup. It was—it was an ultraconservative community. And I decided ...

LATIF: Where were—where were you again? Where did you grow up?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Birmingham, England.

LATIF: Birmingham, yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: 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. It feels like you didn't have that—yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: No. Clearly, you know, your family isn't—clearly there were families and individuals who did explain things like that.

LATIF: Right, right, right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: But there was no space for evolution in my family. There was absolutely none in the missionary world.

LATIF: Yeah. And what did you believe? Like, what was the creation story that you believed?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah.

LATIF: How did you think people came to be?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So I personally believed that we were created in a week, basically.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: God created us in a week. As in the whole world, including Adam and Eve.

LATIF: 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 ...

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Very similar.

LATIF: Very similar.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: They're very, very similar. The one difference is that the Christians give God a day off.

LATIF: [laughs]

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Muslims are like, "God—God doesn't need a day off."

LATIF: [laughs]

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: [laughs]
LATIF: 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. I became a missionary at the age of 13 and, like, traveled the UK being a missionary.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Well, I was speaking to more lapsed Muslims.

LATIF: Okay, yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: But also to the wider public.

LATIF: That was a hard sell. What—what years were these, like?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Basically, you know, in the '90s I was basically—certainly in the 2000s.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Also, I was really young. 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 gonna just do it in the calm, chill that way that I should have done it like my siblings."

LATIF: Oh, so you were more, like, hard edge about it maybe than your siblings.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I think I was more hardcore.

LATIF: Hardcore. You were more hardcore than your siblings.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. I mean, you know, if you were to speak to them—and I don't want to put words in their mouth.

LATIF: No.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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?

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Which is really funny because they're not wrong. Like, I could have just—you know, they're just relaxed.

LATIF: Was it one of those things, like I remember for us, like, it was like—like, and 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 masjid there, but 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. It was like that kind of thing.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: No. We would have had thoughts about you. [laughs]

LATIF: No, no. I didn't do that. But my buddies did that, and I was the straight edge kid who was like, "No, no, no. I'm not drinking, I'm not smoking weed, I'm not doing anything."

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. So, I was so strict that those guys wouldn't have even been my friends.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Except that I might have taken them on as projects.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So okay, imagine you're a—a missionary, and you're that age, and you're good. Right?

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Your big thing that's hanging over you is what you're gonna do in university.

LATIF: Because that was a big deal in your family?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah, in our family, having a master's degree is the equivalent of a high school education.

LATIF: Wow! Okay, and so who are—what are all these people—what do they study?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: All kinds of things. Historians. Some legal but, like, theology kind of legal minds.

LATIF: Okay.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And my dad was very encouraging of us going into the sciences.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I was like, I'm gonna go study evolution because I'm gonna destroy Darwin's theory.

LATIF: Wow!

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah, to tackle the underlying assumptions of things.

LATIF: And then to expose them and then to persuade them, and then to, like—like ...

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: To—to basically proselytize my version of it, you know? "Okay, so you're saying it's like this. Well actually, have you considered it's actually like this?"

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: "Have you considered the data could actually fall into this interpretation instead?"

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Because I'm a missionary. My whole—my whole purpose is, like, to bring people to the message, to bring people to God.

LATIF: Right.

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

LATIF: So it's like—so it 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 ..."

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Oh my God, yeah.

LATIF: "You think we came from apes? We came from God."

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. That whole monkey story ain't gonna fly, kind of thing.

LATIF: So—so okay, so when you applied, like, what did you say, or what did they ...

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.'"

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: [laughs] None of that. I just was, like, "I really want to study genetics. I think it's amazing. I love all the evolution classes. Blah, blah, blah, blah."

LATIF: But you were lying? That was a lie?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I mean ...

LATIF: Was it?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I guess so. I'm not happy with the fact that you use that word, but I guess it was.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Because it was—it was a lie of omission.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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—oh, damn it! [laughs]

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: My—my—the other missionaries all knew about this.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So yeah. But it wasn't, you know—I was never turning around telling the, you know, other classmates who I was.

LATIF: So you were a double agent, basically?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I like the sound of that. [laughs] I mean, if you'd have known me at the age of 18, I was a dork. So ...

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: ... 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 ...

LATIF: Wow.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: ... people to kind of join up. And I went to the Darwin building, because Charles Darwin himself, he—he lived there. And that was my department.

LATIF: Wow!

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 dressed in a hijab, I was in full—so I wasn't just in the head covering, I was in the full jilbāb, which was like, a full cloak.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: They weren't kind of doing what I was kind of—what I was covertly up to.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I remember there was one girl who was also kind of vaguely associated with my world kind of thing.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 we 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."

LATIF: Like, she had a firewall up.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So there's, like, two things going on, right? So I'm just living my life, being a missionary.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I have an arranged marriage, like, via my imam, by the way. My—my dad wasn't even involved.

LATIF: That started in university or in grad school? Or ...?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It was my first semester at university.

LATIF: Really?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The imam suggested to me that yeah, he wanted me to marry one of his other students. And I was like, "Okay." And so that took a while.

LATIF: Were you excited about it? Were you flattered? Was that—did that feel good, or did that feel icky?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: You know what? Like, I—I didn't know him. I had three chaperoned meetings with him to decide if I was gonna agree to marry him. And then we basically never talked, ever. I can't explain it enough. I just didn't know him.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 and doing that. And at the same time it's like—it's just the 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. And I'm coming along being like, "Hold on."

LATIF: "Hold on. We can put these pieces together another way."

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. We can just ...

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: You haven't thought of something. Give me a minute. And by the way, some people do that to great success.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Some people have won Nobel Prizes on the back of this. I just picked the wrong puzzle.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: [laughs]

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The drosophila fruit fly experiment.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So basically because drosophila live for such a short amount of time you can basically, like, you know, 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.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And 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."

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. 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."

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Maybe it's being forced in the lab. Maybe in nature that wouldn't be happening.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Stratigraphy, which is the layers of earth and that kind of sequence of animals that you get in them. And they are broadly chronological.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And you do see an evolutionary process there.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: You just do. It's really, really hard to explain.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. You know, it is—forgive my language. You can't—you're like the BBC, right? You can't broadcast swearing.

LATIF: No, we can broadcast swearing. Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Oh, nice. [laughs] Sorry, I've been cleaning up my language.

LATIF: No, go for it.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah—like, you would—you would be looking at these stratigraphic sequences. And it was a—you know, forgive my language, but it was a motherfucker. Because you were just like, right, we haven't gone from complex to simple. By and large we go from simple to complex.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Or more complex. 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?

LATIF: Right. So you're like, okay, so you gave a little ground. You were like, "This makes sense. I can give—"

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. A lot of ground. All other species.

LATIF: All other species.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: All the other billions.

LATIF: That's right. But not us.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: The pattern of mutations within the retrotransposons that we have ...

LATIF: Yeah?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: ... align on a family tree with what you would expect from evolution if you then looked at those same retrotransposons within chimps.

LATIF: 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 of years. There's no other interpretation.

LATIF: Like, God would have had to copy–paste or something?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah, like, this is the thing, because one of the arguments that—for those of you who don't know—one of the arguments that creationists use to explain well, why is our DNA so similar, 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 are so many similar mechanisms" and blah, blah. And on the level, on one level, you're like, "Oh, okay. That is actually—like, there is some logic to that."

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Retrotransposons, they're not functional.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It's not like, oh, it's a bit of DNA that helps me process, for example, water, or helps me process carbohydrates.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It's a non-functional bit of DNA, and yet its mutation pattern fits almost perfectly with an evolutionary family tree.

LATIF: Hmm.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And it was just, like, ahhh! It's just—sorry, that's the noise that you make when your whole life is about to fall apart. [laughs] Like, that—that exact noise is the noise you make.

LATIF: Wow.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And I was just in hell. Like, I was in hell. There'd be times when I would just be looking out my window, just going, "Oh my God. Like, what is this? Like, what am I gonna do?"

LATIF: Were you living with this guy at that point? Or what—what were you ...

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: This guy. My ex-husband. Yeah.

LATIF: You're married?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. Our marriage wasn't doing great, 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 that 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 gonna have to leave my world.

LATIF: How 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.

LATIF: 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.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 gonna drive a massive wedge.

LATIF: And why did it feel—like, why did it feel so existential, like these things could not co-exist, there was no room for you to believe in evolution and still be a part of your community?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Because it's such an extreme thing in my world to say that you believe in evolution. And, you know, that's just—we just didn't do that. And by the way, all cases where that did happen, let me tell you, loads of those girls got cut off. Thank god my siblings came through in—in the way that they did.

LATIF: Wow. How did they come through?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: They decided to embrace me regardless. They decided that I was their sister regardless. Makes me want to cry.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I didn't tell people. I just disappeared.

LATIF: You just ghosted people?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. I literally just disappeared. And that's because I was a missionary and I knew the training. And the training is if somebody, you know, falls, you go collect them, basically.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I was, like, "No. You know what? You don't need to learn about evolution. You just stay where you are." [laughs]

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: "This is awful."

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It was a truly awful time. I had no idea how to exist in a secular world.

LATIF: Hmm.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 ...

LATIF: The Prophet would have done this in this situation.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. It's every single thing is prescribed. And suddenly it was like, good luck. I didn't make eye contact with men.

LATIF: Yeah.

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

LN : Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And it was the most anticlimactic.

LATIF: [laughs]

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: [laughs] And it's probably informed a huge part of my personality since. Because no man cared. But I had been told my whole life that, like, you know, my hair was, like, an—an ...

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: You've gotta cover up because it's a fitnah—it's, like—it's corruption. Like, it corrupts the Earth if you—it's a bad translation. But, like, you know, it's all those things that—these things you've got to do to not ...

LATIF: Because it's like raw—it's like raw sexuality. It's like that kind of thing? Is that the feeling?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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!

LATIF: Wow!

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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, you know, I'm a paleoanthropologist—you know, you kind of go and—and sit with these "exotic"—inverted commas—tribes and you kind of learn their ways.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And I was like, "My exotic tribe is just central London."

LATIF: Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 question—writing a book about the handshake comes when you are obsessively reading the behavior of every person around you.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Because in your culture you never shook hands with men.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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? I didn't want this. This isn't what I wanted."

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Certainly, like, now, 10. 13 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 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?

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: I will never, ever, 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, everybody offers you their place.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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 ...

LATIF: 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 ...

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: It hurts.

LATIF: ... it's sad. I—I yearn for that.

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

LATIF: 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 protohumans living together on the planet at the same time, but also very much separate from one another.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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, great, great grandparents having sex.

LATIF: Getting it on.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah. Having sex with a Neanderthal. So there's a scandal in the family, basically.

LATIF: [laughs]

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Now usually, right, the way this would be presented is, "Oh, this is 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—one of my and your ancestors ...

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: ... was half-half.

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And I'm—I'm not mixed race, but I'm mixed heritage. So I'm a British Arab, right?

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Let me tell you, that was confusing growing up, at times. Right?

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: At times I was like, "It's a bit weird." I'm like, "What would it be like to not just be mixed heritage, not be mixed race, but mixed species?"

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Like, what would that have been like? 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?

LATIF: Right.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Because, you know, she doesn't want them to get ostracized, she doesn't want them to get teased.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Seriously!

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah.

LATIF: Yeah?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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?

LATIF: No. Tell me.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So Tibetans live at obviously very high altitude, and the mechanisms, 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.

LATIF: Like, we drank their superpowers, kind of thing?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.

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

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: Yeah.

LATIF: 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 through.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: So are you.

LATIF: 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 now have superpowers from both worlds or something, what did you gain from that crossover?

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: 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. 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 ten I'm not trying to persuade them of one scientific point. I'm effectively taking apart their worldview.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI: And because I've gone through that, I approach that with empathy, by and large. It 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. 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 interest in bonding with them as a person, and showing them who I am and me seeing their humanity. That'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.

LATIF: Ella 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 protohumans. 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 Qari. It was fact-checked by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Hamza Syed and Misha Euceph. And you for listening. We will back soon with another episode. I just—I just have to kill this tiny elephant first.

[elephant trumpets]

LATIF: [laughs] Catch ya later.

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Monica, and I'm from Mexico City. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hey, Radiolab. Michael, Tacoma, Washington. 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.]

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