'I didn't believe in evolution'
She was an anti-science Creationist but Ella Al-Shamahi now champions palaeoanthropology and is making some startling discoveries about our ancestors
BBC
- Terry Payne
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If it wasn’t a true story, you might think the philosophical transformation undergone by scientist-cum-comedian Ella Al-Shamahi was a tall tale from one of her stand-up routines. A Brummie of Yemeni/Syrian descent, Al-Shamahi was once an emboldened Creationist who toured the country trying to dismantle theories about evolution. This week she’s presenting a major new BBC2 series on, you’ve guessed it, human evolution.
It’s the latest chapter in an eventful life story that started with a deeply conservative Muslim upbringing, her faith-over-science activism, an arranged marriage that ended in divorce, a breakdown and then, in her late 20s, embracing a secular lifestyle and latterly the job of palaeoanthropologist. “Yeah, it’s been a very complicated journey,” the presenter of documentaries like Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors (2018) admits with a smile that frequently bursts like a firecracker into uncontrolled laughter. Not an exclusively human trait, but one that disarmingly punctuates our conversation.
In Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors with Andy Serkis in 2018. BBC
To understand this latest stopping point on her remarkable journey – the five-part BBC2 documentary Human – we have to start with the teenage Al-Shamahi. So persuaded was she of the “lies” being spoken by scientists about evolution that she travelled the country with like-minded friends giving pro-faith, anti-science Creationist talks.
Was she ever one of those door-to-door nuisances? “No, I never did door to door,” she howls hysterically. But what she did do, almost unbelievably, was sign up to a degree course in genetics and evolution just so she could, as she says, “destroy it from the inside”. It was, she admits now, the “arrogance” of youth. “I thought we were effectively being lied to and I could overturn the theory.”
Where did such certainty come from? “I grew up in a Creationist community so the reason why I didn’t believe in evolution was because my community didn’t believe in evolution. I became a missionary and we were very devout and wished for other people to become more religious, much like missionaries in other religious groups.”
It wasn’t until she was 28 that the doubts she’d been increasingly wrestling with finally transitioned into acceptance of the science she now champions. “There wasn’t one trigger. It was years of me looking at it and examining it. I realised it was a really solid theory and the data couldn’t be explained in any other way.” But she insists faith and evolutionary science can still happily co-exist. “Part of the reason I do this is that I don’t want people to feel like it’s either ideology or it’s science. There has to be a space for everybody.”
I was a missionary wanting others to be more religious
Embracing the science she had been so defiantly dismissive of naturally put her at odds with those she had grown up with. “It did come at great personal cost to me,” she says. “It meant that I made the difficult decision to leave the missionary community I had belonged to.”
Other changes were happening in her life too. She was starting to embrace a more western, liberal lifestyle, which meant learning a whole new set of social skills, as she told her friend Dan Schreiber on his podcast We Can Be Weirdos (well worth an hour of your time). Dating was a particular challenge.
“Up until my 20s [in her book The Handshake she says it was 26] I wasn’t even shaking hands with men. I had no idea how to behave [on a date]. It was just terror. A friend of mine sort of took me on as a project. One of the things I was really stressed about was this kiss that’s supposed to happen at the end. When am I supposed to kiss him? I came from a world of rules, so I wanted rules. He literally had to give me a formula because it was the only thing I could understand. I am so glad that is over because that was too much.”
If it was too much for her, it would unquestionably have been too much for her devout father. Already an emerging stand-up comedian, she adopted the stage name of Ella Murray because, as she told Schrieber, “I have really dodgy jokes and I didn’t want my dad to come across any of them.”
Ironically, protecting him from the other excesses he would have observed in her new life was what persuaded her to find a parallel pathway between the science she was now immersed in and TV. That way, she thought, “when my parents watch my TV shows they’ll go, ‘Oh, she may be wearing a crop top, but at least she is talking about science.’ ”
And talking about science – specifically the ascendancy of us Homo sapiens – is what she’ll be doing over the next five weeks on BBC2. The story starts 300,000 years ago with up to seven species of human, including us, Neanderthals and so-called Hobbits thought to be roaming the planet, though Al-Shamahi adds: “It’s worth saying that some of us really do think that’s the tip of the iceberg. That there’s more we will find.”
I did a degree to destroy evolution from the inside
The reasons why the Magnificent Seven became the Solitary One is what underpins the series and if your reaction to some of the anthropological inference is “how can they possibly know that?”, Al-Shamahi understands your scepticism. “I think it’s really important people ask that question. We are very careful in this series to never say for certain ‘this is definitely this’. None of us were there, sadly. Science is just a set of data points and this is our best interpretation at the moment.”
That said, the scripts have been overseen by 20 different specialist consultants and the 3D representations of the human species we see on screen are said to be the most accurate to exist.
Al-Shamahi is particularly intrigued by the fraternising now known to have occurred between Homo sapiens, who were migrating from what is now Africa and into Europe, and the Neanderthals who were already established there. Would they have known they were different, but related? “I think they must have seen themselves as different,” she says. “When you look at the fossil records, what you see is even if Neanderthal and Homo sapiens are in the same area they don’t mix, except that every so often they are interbreeding [most of us in the UK today have two per cent Neanderthal DNA]. And without getting too dark, what was that interbreeding about? Was it a survival thing or was it a thing with the bad boy next door? Would the mother have been like, ‘Oh my God, I hope that child doesn’t look too much like a Neanderthal.’ Would the child themselves have felt included or confused?”
We now know that Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago, giving Homo sapiens a clear run at domination. But what caused them to become extinct? A bombshell awaits — a new-found ability to weave could have been one of the contributing factors!
“The argument is that if you can weave, you not just have better fishing nets, but you can give your babies warmer clothes. Even a one per cent difference in survival rates back then, with such small populations, can equal a lot.”
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Al-Shamahi, who’s now 41 and in her spare time observes archaeological digs in politically hostile places, hopes the series will fire a new fascination with the story of humankind. “If there’s one thing, it’s just how absolutely epic and incredible our story is.” Not dissimilar to her own then.
Authors
Terry Payne
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