Ella Al-Shamahi:
If you are looking for scientific discoveries, you go to places where barely anyone’s looking.
Somebody described it to me once as the most alien-looking place on earth, so it has these incredible canyons, and then it has these beaches that have sand dunes on them. So many of the plants there, the animals there, are endemic, so they exist there and only there.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I am Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast about the human drama of saving animals.
This season, we’re talking to all kinds of nature advocates, from a paleoanthropologist who hunts fossils in conflict zones to someone who helped save an endangered species while in prison. We’re going to hear from real-life heroes with widely different expertise and life experiences about what led them to be champions for the natural world. What transformation did they go through to create change within themselves, their community, and the world? Together, we’ll find out how these ordinary people fell in love with nature and became their most extraordinary selves.
This is Going Wild. In this episode, I’m talking to my longtime friend, Ella Al-Shamahi. Ella is a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist who specializes in studying Neanderthals. She’s also a television host for nature and historical documentaries. As a paleoanthropologist, Ella explores caves in unstable and hostile territories, in search of fossils to uncover the overlooked stories of human evolution. Her work has taken her to places like Iraq, Somaliland, and her ancestral home of Yemen.
Hi, friend.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Hello. How’s it going?
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh, my gosh. Listen, you’re a hero of mine for so many reasons.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
What? That’s ridiculous. She shuffles in her seat and is wondering if Rae’s sound of mind. I don’t know.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Oh, my gosh, I love this. In our conversation today, we’ll dive into the transformation that Ella had to go through to become the scientist that she is today and how the shifting of perspective has been the through line of her life and career, whether it’s her adopting a new way to look at the world or using her work to inspire a shift in the world’s perspective on people and places that are often dismissed or misunderstood.
Born in The United Kingdom to Yemeni parents, Ella grew up in a Muslim community in Birmingham. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ella adopted the creationist beliefs of her community, believing that life on earth was created by a divine being, like a god, rather than gradually changing over time through natural processes like evolution.
Okay, okay, so let’s jump in. Can you talk about your journey and your upbringing as a creationist, believing in creationism? And then how did you transform into someone who doesn’t just believe in evolution but is an expert in it?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
The truth is, most people have the beliefs and opinions that they do just because that’s the community they were raised in. It’s just really that simple. It just happens to be their tribe because of an accident of genetics, basically. For me, I really didn’t believe in evolution, and I was going to university to destroy it. I’m just apparently that arrogant.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
As a curious teenager who loved history, philosophy, and pondering life’s big questions, Ella was very intrigued by the theory of evolution. Even though at the time, she believed the theory to be wrong, she still had so many questions about it.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I was kind of already going through the texts across many religions, actually, that were critiquing of evolution. And certainly, by the age of 17, I had said, “Okay, some of this is just, they really don’t know their stuff,” and part of the reason for me going to university was so that I could really understand it. Ironically, my dad, he’s an immigrant, so he put a lot of pressure on me to actually go into the sciences, and I would be lying if I said that he didn’t influence me in that.
But I found my little in because I was really into philosophy and the humanities and blah, blah, blah. Of course, it made sense that if I was going to go into the sciences, it would be to try and take apart this theory that’s been causing us so many headaches. It was fascinating to go study this subject that you don’t believe in. It was like, “Oh, okay, this is the strength of this subject. Okay, might this be a weakness? Okay, let’s look at this a little bit,” and it was that kind of thing.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Do you remember the first time that it hit you, the class or the professor or the textbook where you were kind of like, “Huh?”
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I think one of the first realizations, which came quite early on, I realized that my professors weren’t lying to me. If evolution is incorrect, as I believed it was, it’s not because there’s some kind of a conspiracy. They might conceivably just have the data wrong, and they might be quite arrogant about it, but these guys clearly believe in this. And then eventually, I realized it was just too solid a theory. Obviously, became an evolutionary biologist and now travel the world doing human evolution, so that was quite a full circle, I guess.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Ella came from a Muslim heritage, and even though she changed her mind about the theory of evolution, and now she’s a scientist who studies evolution, it’s clear that for Ella, those two things are not at odds with each other. To her, science and religion, whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, are not mutually exclusive.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I would say that Islam is very similar to Christianity in the sense that there are so many different schools of thought. So the community that I came from, certainly, when I was younger, didn’t believe in evolution. If you go and speak to that same community now, I think as they’ve been exposed to more science, many people have changed their opinions or are much more open to stuff. There is a lot of diversity of opinion about the science, and I think that’s probably really, really good, because the best people to convince their own communities about the validity of, for example, evolution or climate change or vaccines, are actually people that are within those communities.
We do really, really need to not exclude people just because they come from communities which we associate with being against the science, because actually, those are the communities we need to really focus on.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
This commitment to ensuring that certain groups of people are not excluded from science is something that becomes a central theme throughout Ella’s career as a scientist. So you’re the first paleoanthropologist we’ve ever had on the podcast. Can you just explain: What in the world does that mean?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
So paleo is obviously from the paleolithic. Old stuff, basically, but I’m not a paleontologist. So those are people who are into all kinds of things that are, let’s say, very, very old and fossilized, including dinosaurs. As a paleoanthropologist, I’m like a subset of that, and the anthropology is the giveaway. I’m interested in humans, so I’m interested in our story, the story of human evolution, why we do the things that we do, from an evolutionary perspective. And for me, personally, it’s Neanderthals that are what I’m most interested in.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
All primates, like humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, share a common ancestor, meaning we all evolved from a species that lived millions of years ago. And paleoanthropologists examine fossil records, artifacts like tools or weapons, and genetic data to understand how early humans like the Neanderthals Ella specializes in, evolved from our shared ancestors and eventually led to the emergence of modern humans.
Why should people care about prehistoric discoveries? For things that happened so long ago, how does it really help us, or is it just knowledge?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
We are the byproduct of evolution, and most of that evolution did not happen in the modern era. The blueprint of our physiology, of our anatomy, of the way that we think, even, of so many things about us, are a byproduct of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years before that. We didn’t evolve for the here-and-now. At best, we evolved for a time when you would hang out in a cave.
So many things that we find absolutely frustrating about us today. For example, you can think about our negativity bias. So many studies have been done on this, where they basically show that you are always more likely to remember the negative than the positive. So if you lose $50, you are more likely to have a strong reaction to that than if you find $50. A lot of that blueprint made sense in the Paleolithic. It just doesn’t make sense in the world of agriculture, which has only been around for 10,000 years, and it certainly doesn’t make sense in the age of technology.
We are not designed for this world that we have ironically created, and so I think it’s really, really important for us to know about our background, because just like you go to a physician and they take a history, this is what the field is.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
As someone who studies ancient humans that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, Ella often has to explain or even defend the relevancy of the science she’s doing. But she points out that it’s actually impossible to predict which branch of science will turn out to be truly relevant in the future.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Twenty years ago, when I started, I remember one of my random community members was just like, “What’s the use of this? This seems like pointless knowledge.” It’s worth saying that some of the biggest discoveries, when you actually look at them, come from areas of science that nobody would have predicted. I would never, in a million years, go like, “Oh, this doesn’t seem relevant to us, and I just want to fund cancer stuff.”
If anything, we as the public and we as a scientific community, should be saying, “Look, you don’t know where the next big discovery is going to come from, so we need to fund all aspects of science.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And this uncertainty about where the next big scientific discovery will come from becomes a driving force behind Ella’s paleoanthropological research.
One of the things that you are known for is not just paleoanthropology but the geographies in which you focus on your paleoanthropology. You dig fossils in parts of the world that have experienced political conflict and sometimes war. Can you talk to us about: How did that take shape?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Okay, so it wasn’t initially intentional.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
It all started when Ella was an undergraduate, studying human evolution. At the time, the accepted theory was that humans evolved as a species in Africa, and eventually, we left Africa and migrated to other continents by way of the most obvious migration route.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yeah, so basically, they kept pointing to the Sinai of Egypt, which for those who aren’t familiar, is the bit of land that basically, you can just walk it to get from Africa to Asia and the rest of the world.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The Sinai Peninsula, which is situated to the northeast of Egypt, serves as a land bridge between the African and Asian continents. But Ella noticed something else that wasn’t taught in the curriculum at the time. Because her family is from Yemen, and she was really familiar with the geography of that country, her attention was drawn to another potential migration route out of Africa: through the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, located on the southern coast of Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula. Even though the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb is not a land bridge like the Sinai of Egypt, Ella believed that it was still a pretty compelling route for early humans to pursue.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
It’s a small bit of water, and it’s just so close to East Africa. Water was much lower back then, so I just kept looking at the map, and I was like, “I don’t think that humans didn’t attempt this particular crossing.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So you were studying the migration of humans out of Africa, and all of the text was pointing towards Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula. But you were looking at these maps, and you were like, “I understand Yemen quite well. This country and this passage might play a huge role.” And then there’s a but. “But can we do paleo work there?”
Ella Al-Shamahi:
A hundred percent, and so I just thought, “Oh, it’s really worth doing some out in Yemen.” I was quite inexperienced, shall we say? They don’t really teach the practical side of paleoanthropology at university. That’s the kind of stuff you do on-the-job training, and so I just started reaching out to just different paleo digs. But I especially focused on paleo digs that were in places that were complicated to work in, places that I would call hostile, disputed, or outright unstable, because it’s not like the science is any different. It’s a different level of understanding how to make the system work and et cetera, et cetera.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
To gain more experience working in unstable places that were difficult to navigate, Ella joined different research teams on their archeological digs. She participated in projects in Iraq and other disputed territories, and before she knew it, working in conflict zones became her thing.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
But none of this was intentional. It’s not like I woke up and was like, “I want to specialize in hostile territories.” It was more like, “If I’m really interested in communicating the importance of a place like Yemen.” Then you’re like, “Hold on a second. There’s loads of places like this.”
In fact, this is a huge portion of the map, places that are unstable, hostile, disputed. And are we just going to not work there? Are we just going to ignore these places, scientifically? That doesn’t make sense. And so actually, then it becomes like, “All right, I guess that’s actually what I specialize in.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So why are these places so important, scientifically speaking?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
It’s what you call low-hanging fruit. If you are looking for scientific discoveries, you go to places where barely anyone’s looking. And it’s also worth for me pointing out that we don’t know where the next person who goes into the back of a cave and discovers a very particular microbe that I don’t know, digests plastic. We don’t know if that person is going to come from Wales or from Wisconsin or if they’re actually going to come from Iraq or from the Congo, for example. There are probably other Einsteins out there who have just never been given the opportunity to be a Einstein.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And it’s not simply that most people are more nervous about working in conflict zones. The barrier to the possibility of scientific discovery in these under-researched places is also institutional.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
What a lot of people don’t actually realize is that it is very, very difficult to get grants to work in these places, and by that I mean that a lot of the grant-giving bodies in a lot of the universities just don’t allow it. People are like, “Oh, but it’s logical, and it’s because you might get kidnapped.” And I’m like, “Look, I’m not saying everybody should do this.” I want people to really think about it, to be trained. Just take it on a case-by-case basis. Say like, “Look, the bar might be higher, but it’s not a blanket no. You just got to prove to us that you know what you’re doing.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And when it comes to working in conflict zones, Ella definitely has a knack for it. As someone with family ties to Yemen and close connections to people whose lives have been shaped by revolutions, political imprisonments, and secret police, going to places experiencing political instability doesn’t really faze her.
And after spending years training to do science in different conflict zones, she was more than ready to pull off her own research project in her ancestral home, because Ella had big questions she really wanted to answer.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
So I had three questions. One was: Did humans use the route via Yemen to leave Africa? The second question was: Did Neanderthals, who are primarily a European-Asian species, did they ever make it as far south as Yemen? And the third thing is, and people might not realize this, but we keep discovering new species of human. They just keep popping up, which is just insane.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So what Ella’s talking about here is that even though all primates share a common ancestor, at some point, they evolved from this common ancestor into different species. For example, Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Western Asia, while Homo Sapiens, which are modern humans, evolved in Africa. But many other human species also existed across the globe.
And Ella’s right: Researchers keep finding new human species we didn’t even know existed. For example, in 2003, a hobbit-like species was discovered in Indonesia, and in 2015, researchers in South Africa uncovered a small-brained species of human. The point is, human evolution is not linear. Multiple species of humans didn’t just coexist; sometimes they also interbred. And we’ll likely continue to discover ancient species of humans.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
And so I was like, “Well, is there a new species of human that is yet to be discovered that I could find in Yemen?”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Ella assembled a multidisciplinary team to help her answer these big questions, but there was also an urgency to her mission, because in 2014, the political unrest in Yemen that had been brewing for years began to boil over.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
As the war started, that feeling of like, “Oh, this should be something I focus on” just became more and more prevalent in my mind.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
In September 2014, the Houthi rebels captured Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a and declared themselves the new ruling power.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Things were not good, but I was still like, “Oh, I can still work there, because the airport’s still functional, and the full-out war is not happening in the bit that I’m going to.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So while keeping a close watch on the situation on the ground, Ella continued planning the logistics for her research project, and in 2015, Ella and her team were finally ready to head off to the part of Yemen that was still accessible at the time. But things didn’t go as expected.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yemen really started taking a turn for the worst. I think part of being trained is knowing when a place is just too unsafe, and there were definitely places which I possibly could have entertained at the time. But the problem is I couldn’t entertain them with my team.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
With the civil war escalating on the mainland, we’ll find out how Ella and her team eventually managed to make their way to Yemen through a very unlikely route.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I was really devastated of what was happening to my family and just the country as a whole. And I’d hear a story about this bit of the country being okay, and then I’d look into it, and I was like, “Maybe if I could do that.” And I was just like, “Right, how do I make this work?”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
More on that after the break.
I’ve been talking to my friend Ella al-Shamahi, a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist who focuses on working in unstable territories around the world. Ella was about to embark on a research project in her ancestral home of Yemen, but that opportunity was derailed by an intensifying civil war. In a very short amount of time, the fighting had spread to a considerable part of the country, and by March 2015, many airports in Yemen were either shut down or damaged due to the war.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
And so I was like, “It’s just too risky,” and just feeling incredible guilt, in the sense that it’s a weird sense of guilt and gratitude, if that makes sense. You’re just like, “Oh, my God, that could have been me. My parents could have decided to have me be born in Yemen, and I would currently be trying to be a refugee. It’s mind-boggling.”
And because it was happening at the same time as Syria, I mean, the general public was so depressed by the stories coming out of Syria that nobody had any headspace for stories about Yemen. So Yemen was being ignored, ignored, and it was devastating, because at the time, the UN was saying it was the worst man-made humanitarian disaster on the planet. And it was just like, “Wow, nobody’s talking about this.”
And so in my mind, I was like, “If I can do an expedition there.” I wasn’t just seeing it as research. I was seeing it as PR, and I was just like, “Right, how do I make this work?” And I just sat there for two years, just looking at a map.
The thing that I kept hearing was that the island of Socotra was safe once you got there. And the island of Socotra is actually a few islands that are between Yemen and Somalia, so they’re not exactly the safest and the easiest to get insurance for, let’s say. And I was like, “Okay, it’s once you get there, it’s safe. The problem is getting there.”
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Even though at the time, Socotra was still unaffected by the war on the mainland, getting to the island was a huge logistical problem.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
One route was via a flight. You would get a flight. I think it was from Egypt to this really small city in Yemen, and then you took the flight from that city to Socotra. The problem is, that city is an al-Qaeda stronghold, so we were hearing quite a few reports that over the last year or two, regularly, the connecting flight would get canceled. So I was like, “I’m going to be stuck with a bunch of white people that I have to protect. They’re my responsibility, in the middle of this place where they could get kidnapped. No, that’s not a good idea.”
The other option was a cement cargo ship, which was insane.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Tell me all about it. I imagine you’ve never been on a cement cargo ship ever again?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
No, no, I don’t know if I ever will again. I’m not going to lie. So it was a cement cargo ship where it was not fit for purpose. It had no safety, anything on that ship. There was nothing. They didn’t have life vests, as far as I remember, on that. There were no beds or anything like that. I mean, that’s the least of our concerns. There was no toilet, really. I mean, there was a basket that was literally hooked onto the side of the ship, and when I say toilet, what I really mean, it’s like a basket with a hole in it. So you walk up to it and you squat, and because I’m really tall, there was no way I was going to do this without everybody being able to see it, so I was like, “Oh, my God, this is going to be horrific.”
And we were having to look at pirate reportings and all this stuff. It was quite intense, but I was like, “Look, this is the only way we can get there, and the risk is localized to these few days while we’re on the water.” But what I love about this is I have fear of things that don’t necessarily make sense. So for example, I am incredibly chill around guns, but I don’t like heights. But obviously, I’ve picked to work in caves and mountains, so I just have to deal with it, basically.
But the other thing that I didn’t know I had a fear of was cockroaches. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all right with one or two cockroaches, but that kind of an infestation where you’re sleeping and you’re flipping them off you. I describe it as at one point, below deck, the floor was black, and it would just be moving. And it was because it wasn’t actually black; it was just that there was so many cockroaches down there.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
No.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
And I was like, “Oh, no.” There was a moment where I was like, “Should I send the rest of the team via the ship, and I just go via the terrorist stronghold?” I didn’t even know I had a fear of a swarm of cockroaches.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Okay, so the hell that was this ship. I’m imagining there’s this beautiful moment where you’re approaching the island. Do you remember the moment that you first saw the island and stepped onto it?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yeah, it was really emotional because I hadn’t been to Yemen at that point. So it was incredibly emotional, and I was getting some really sad messages from some of my cousins that were in Yemen, about how awful what they were going through was. So I was just not in a good place, shall we say? I was just like, “Oh, I can’t believe I’ve got to go to Yemen.” It’s not the mainland. It’s not the city that my dad comes from, it’s not the city my mom comes from, but it’s still Yemen.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And not only was Socotra one of the few places in Yemen at the time that wasn’t engulfed in the war unfolding on the mainland, this island, which is slightly smaller than the State of Rhode Island, is home to an incredibly unique ecosystem.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Somebody described it to me once as the most alien-looking place on earth. So it has these incredible canyons, and then it has these beaches that have sand dunes on them, which is remarkable. And then so many of the plants there, the animals there, are endemic, so they exist there and only there. And so you get these trees called the dragon’s blood tree. Now, the dragon’s blood tree is a very ancient tree, and very few of the species of that tree remain in the world.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
The dragon’s blood tree of Socotra, with its spiky, umbrella-shaped canopy and striking red sap, looks like something straight out of a fantasy world, just like the rest of the island. And because Socotra is a biodiversity hotspot with a unique ecosystem, it’s no wonder that it’s been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I mean, it’s gorgeous. It’s really, really beautiful. It was definitely worth it.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Gosh.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yeah, in fact, if you correct the size, it has more endemic species than even the Galapagos, so yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Goodness gracious.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
It’s quite incredible.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I mean, it seems like the journey was like …
Ella Al-Shamahi:
The journey was enough.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Then you had to execute a plan once you got there. You had to do your scouting trip.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yeah.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
What was your plan?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
So the plan was to look at some of the caves and get a sense of if any of them might be Paleolithic caves. And it was particularly interesting in Socotra because historically, Rae, people have lived in caves in Socotra. And it was interesting because I turned up, and everyone was like, “Oh, no, no, nobody still lives in caves.” And I was like, “I’ve heard that they still do.” And we asked around enough, and one guy went, “Actually, there is this one area.” And we traveled for quite a while to get there, and these people basically lived in front of their historical caves.
So it’s best to describe it as a tiny, tiny village, more like a hamlet, in the middle of the mountain, and mostly, these people were either born or one member of the family was born in that cave. They were raised in the cave. They had these huts in front of the cave, and then when the weather gets rough, which is quite frequent in Yemen, because they get hit by monsoons, they then went back into the caves that they were born in, because actually the cave is much better protection from the elements than the hut is.
And for me, as a paleoanthropologist, those caves are particularly interesting because if I want to identify a cave where people lived back in the Paleolithic, if it’s of interest to people today or was of interest to people 50 years or 100 years ago, there must have been something about that cave that made it habitable.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And this was a scouting expedition, so you weren’t properly engaged in the research, but did you find any fossils?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
No, so every so often, there is one academic who finds a fossil on a scout, and we all hate them. Most of us are not that lucky.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
No, you’re looking at the potential of this place.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Exactly right. No, so we didn’t find any fossils. What we did find, though, was a bunch of caves, and I think based on that, it became very clear where prospecting should happen.
The other side of it was we wanted to have not just to be doing science, but we also wanted to put out some positive stories about Yemen that would get Yemen some attention. So we wanted to get some amazing photography out of it, and we did well out of that expedition. It certainly was more fruitful than any other scouting expedition I’ve ever done, for sure. And we put out a bunch of incredible pictures in so many publications, and I think it’s a very easy sell to media outlets because we basically just produced the most incredible imagery of the most incredible place on earth, which barely anyone had heard of or seen of. And it happened to be a conflict zone.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
So you did this scouting. It was tremendous. You faced your biggest inner fears, even, to get there. You were able to get these articles out that showed the world a bit of Yemen. Have you been able to go back for the proper expedition?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
So no, we haven’t gone back. A number of issues happened, including COVID, which really didn’t help.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
That’s a huge bump in the road.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yeah, massive bump. A lot of our political contacts had also left the island because of the war, so that was hard, and so basically, that is on hold right now. We’ll go back to Socotra when we can get it right.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
I bring that up because it can be hard. I mean, even without the public eye, it’s hard to have setbacks or difficulties or bumps in the road. I’m curious: How have you dealt with it?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I mean, that one was tough. Parts of that were part of the game. Do you know what I mean? I know what it’s like working in unstable territories, and you got to let it calm down, and then you come back to it, and you have a lot of just long-term projects.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Since the Socotra project is currently on hold indefinitely, Ella decided to turn her focus to other projects. In recent years, she’s been busy conducting research in other under-researched places, like Somaliland. She’s also launched a second career as a television host.
From a show that investigates the lifestyle of Neanderthals to a series that explores the discovery of female Viking warriors, Ella, both as a television host and a scientist, is always eager to explore subjects from a fresh perspective.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
And I think the television shows I do, I’m especially excited about topics where we get to overturn the perception. So whether it’s about Vikings or about the Amazon, where we went in and tried to overturn a stereotype, and those are the ones that are often the most exciting.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
You bring so much of yourself to the public, in the spirit of science and adventure and exploration. And I also very much see and appreciate that the bigger picture of your work, whether it’s the research you do or the show that you present, you’re working to eliminate this blind spot of Western science, which is so important. And you’re also shedding light on subjects and peoples and places in the world that are misunderstood or sometimes just dismissed and invisible. And I’m curious: Would you agree that a big picture in your work is to offer people a shift in perspective?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Yeah, a hundred percent. That’s a huge, huge part of it. I think for me, I could have very easily just continued being a creationist, if I hadn’t have gone and looked at it and thought about it. And I think for me, it’s like, “Well, I want to be able to present knowledge and just bring people in.”
Science belongs to all of us, all of us. When I say that, I am definitely talking about gender and ethnicity, but I’m actually also talking about political belief and religious beliefs, because I’m like, “I don’t have to agree with you. I might not like your political beliefs. I might not like this, that and the other about you, but we’ve got to be able to agree on some of the foundational science.” At the end of the day, I want us to not see science as political, to not see science as an agnostic or atheist endeavor.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
And as much as Ella wants science to be accessible to everyone, regardless of their identity, politics, or religion, she also envisions a world where conflict zones aren’t just seen as war-torn landscapes but as places where life continues and discoveries are possible.
You do this work in parts of the world that have experienced political conflict, and there are many that the media are attentive to right now. We have Gaza, we have Sudan, we have Ukraine, we have Democratic Republic of Congo, and that’s just a few that the American media, at least, is giving attention to. But I’m curious: Do you have kind of a big picture articulation for what shift in perspective you’re hoping people can get from the work that you do about conflict zones or unstable regions in general?
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I think in terms of attitudes to conflict zones, I think what I would love is for it to just be absolutely culturally acceptable for people to work in hostile territory, places that are unstable, hostile, disputed, because I’ve never seen people quite so proud as when it’s a place that’s completely forgotten. Everybody only hears negative stories about that place, and then they have a write-up in a magazine, and sometimes it’s just a YouTuber turns up, and it’s just like, “Wow, you have this incredible bit of biodiversity or these incredible this or that.” And they’re so proud because the only stories that they hear about themselves and about their country, they’re always negative.
So I will say, and I will always say, that it’s a tragedy for science if we’re not working in these places. And it’s a tragedy for the people that come from these places if they don’t know that they could be doing incredible research, because we’ve basically excluded those places, scientifically, in the international community.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
God, you are such a good communicator.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
Bless you. I might have given these answers before. Thank you so much, Rae. I really, really appreciate this.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Thank you. I love you, so you’re welcome.
Ella Al-Shamahi:
I love you too, babe.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant:
Ella’s new series with BBC and PBS is called Human. It’s a five-part series that explores our journey as a species, and it’ll be out in the US on PBS in fall 2025.
