Marco Werman: You’ve just paddled across into Pacific Standard Time, is that correct?

Paul Salopek:Yeah, that’s right. For the last six to seven weeks, I’ve been paddling down the Inside Passage of Alaska and just crossed the international border into Canadian waters. So yeah, the time zone changed … first time I’m in the continental US time zone in a long time.

And that little vessel you’re paddling around in … you told me earlier that you fold it down and put it on your back. Your walking partner, or shall we say fishing partner, his name is also Paul. Tell us about him.

Yeah, so I spent a little time in an Indigenous community, a Tlingit community on the outer coast of Alaska called Yakutat. And Paul was a young guy who was out at the height of the silver salmon season, laying gillnets across local rivers. I went out with him to watch him work and learn about his job. That’s when I found out that archaeologists say that his work might be the kind of work that the first explorers did when they were moving down that coast maybe 14,000 years ago. You know, it’s really still not known.

So, silver salmon … that’s one variety of salmon. I mean, what kind of work are we talking about?

You get up — basically, your days and nights are guided, determined by the tides and the currents. So, you’re very much tied to nature. You’re in an open skiff, an aluminum skiff. Paul was working with a colleague, Dylan, another teenager; you get up early, go out, put the boat into the nearby river and then start moving up and down the river looking for the fish. These two young fishermen knew where to look because this knowledge had been passed down from their fathers and grandfathers. And then they would lay a net out and then let it sit for an hour or so and go back and collect it and pluck the salmon off of it, basically harvesting protein the old-fashioned way.

Wow. And according to the Fishing Link hypothesis, Paul Pavlik’s ancestors arrived in these waters 10,000 to 14,000 years ago, he said? I mean, that’s how they were doing it back then?

Well, they probably were not using gillnets, right? The prehistoric equivalent would be like a weir, where you build something on the side of a river to channel fish into a basket. And it does make sense when you think about it, that there’s so much salmon, especially back then, right? Catches have declined tremendously these days, but back then there were historic descriptions of so many salmon they would clog the [entrances] of rivers. That would be a huge draw onward from one river to the next, right? Kind of a ladder of rivers descending down into the continental latitudes.

So, Paul, how does the “fishing link” hypothesis contrast with other hypotheses about how the Americas were populated?

The classic old hypothesis of the peopling of the Americas, as you might remember from our high school days, is that people were hunting on land, and they walked over during the land bridge, when there was a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska called Beringia, kind of a cold steppe, cold grassy highlands. And there were big animals, land animals. … Imagine a kind of a cold Serengeti; and that protein source drew people on into this new horizon. Then they got bottlenecked, right? Because there was this big ice sheet for thousands of years until it melted. And then they came down an ice-free corridor. Then that’s when you start seeing archaeological sites in Canada and North America, South America, etc. But recent discoveries, Marco, in far South America, in places like Chile, are 14,500 years old. That’s before that ice plug, that cap, melted. So, it’s confusing. So, this new theory basically posits that they were able to reach in small craft and bypass this big ice obstacle.

I’m curious: What did you learn about Paul Pavlik’s understanding of these early routes in Alaska? Does he know about these competing hypotheses? Does he believe one more than any other?

You know, we talked a little bit about it, but really, I’ll be honest, it wasn’t that big of an interest with him. He’s a member of the Tlingit people, First Nations. They have their own migration stories. They have oral histories about coming from the north and coming down to the coast. It even sort of matches the archaeological record. It’s amazing that there might be this kind of limbic memory still humming in the bones.

That’s fascinating. Years before the Out of Eden Walk, Paul, you worked for some time as a fisherman. Tell me about that.

Yeah, that’s my Paleolithic, Marco. I started working on boats when I was 19, in the Indian Ocean, on shrimp boats in Australia, and then I was last on deck on a scalloper out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, when I was in my early 30s, off and on. So yeah, I did work at sea, deep-water fishing, but you know, I got out of it simply, and this is something that is kind of tragic and poignant, you know, fishing catches around the world, as you well know, are declining a lot — over more than a million metric tons a year for decades now. And the number of fisherpeople — men and women — engaged in oceanic fishing is declining by 20% to 30% over the last 20 years. So, it’s sad to note that if this theory does prove out that the lure of the sea was a factor in pulling us on these ancient migrations, that there are fewer and fewer people who today engage in that activity, which is the last hunting activity left, right? You’re after wild game, wild fish.

Has climate change come up in your conversations with local fisherpeople who depend on salmon for their livelihoods?

So, there’s climate change, there’s overfishing. I gotta know, though, Paul, how salmon in Alaska taste these days? The stuff they get to keep for themselves.

Oh, it’s transporting. There is nothing, nothing in the best restaurants in Paris or New York that matches a silver pulled straight out of the water and just cooked atop a fire with a pinch of salt and a pinch of pepper. That’s it. It’s heaven.