Ramona Koval is a writer, journalist, broadcaster and editor. She is also an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. Her previous books are Bloodhound: Searching for my Father (2015) and By the Book: A reader’s guide to life (2012). Her latest book is A Letter to Layla: Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future, a kaleidoscopic portrait of humanity that looks into the past in order to try and discern its future.
Today, Ramona Koval is on the blog to give us a glimpse at the future she’s hoping for her granddaughter, Layla. Read on …
Ramona Koval
Five years ago, thinking about my next book, I only knew that I wouldn’t write about my family. My last one, Bloodhound: Searching for My Father, was about secrets and lies, and even though most of the people involved were dead, over the years of historical research and tracking I had to negotiate the thorny path between saying what I wanted to say and offending people I wanted to keep close. In the end, I didn’t compromise on the important things and I let go of those that would not change my story. It was a tense and complex task.
So I turned away from my microscopic interest in the people I was related to (and some who I was not as closely related to as I had thought) and hopped onto another instrument, this time the telescope.
A Letter to Layla: Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future is a grand, sweeping, telescopic account of not just my family, but yours too – our human family, no less.
Because we now face some pretty tricky problems: global warming and the first of a series of pandemics, to name just two. Have you looked around lately at your fellow human beings and wondered what exactly makes them tick? I certainly have. Why aren’t they wearing masks? Why are they standing so close to me? Are they ready and able to work together to change the course of human history?
In trying to understand what kind of a creature we are, I closely examined our nearest living relatives (the great apes) and our nearest extinct relatives (Neanderthals and Homo erectus), looking for clues about how we came to be as we are. I travelled the world to interview all kind of experts, exploring deep, dark caves for paintings in Spain and France, driving to archaeological digs in the Republic of Georgia, and visiting a power couple of paleoanthropologists in North Carolina.
Then I turned my eyes to the future, meeting domestic robots in Berlin and a scientist of ancient DNA a bit further south. I travelled to California to talk with a range of people keen to evolve into the next iteration of human beings, trying to greatly increase our future lifespan. I talked with science-fiction writers with a very long range view of the years ahead. And in each setting, with each person I interviewed, they taught me something I had not expected beyond their expertise about humans.
When you take on such a range of scientific subjects, you let yourself in for a different kind of problem to that of my previous book. You don’t need to worry as much about causing offence (although writing about living people is always tricky), but you have keep up to date on all these topics right up to the moment your book is being printed. Finally, you can’t make any more changes and so can stop worrying about getting every fact right.
And despite my initial urge never to write about family again, I didn’t leave that subject completely behind. Layla, my youngest granddaughter – whose name is in the title of the book – was my companion while I babysat her. Over the five years that it took to do all this travelling and research and interviewing and writing, I watched her grow from a few-weeks-old tiny baby, and I realised I had in her my own little human laboratory subject, and I took many notes.
In the beginning I didn’t have to ask her permission, because she couldn’t talk, and all she wanted was for me to give her milk and then chicken soup and stewed apples. And later, when she did begin to talk, her ideas and opinions chimed with the things I was writing about. And after all, this is the world that she and her generation will take over.
And what did all this traveling and researching and writing add up to? What I discovered gave me hope for the future, for my granddaughter Layla and for our big family of human beings.
I know that humans are courageous and clever, curious and adaptable. We can also behave with such competitive selfishness that we endanger ourselves and the rest of the planet. But we can overcome our ape-like approach of aggression and fear, which is only a part of our make-up.
Our human ancestors developed sympathy and co-operation, as I have seen for myself in a 1.8 million year old Homo erectus skull of an old man with all but one of his teeth missing. He had been fed and cared for by others in the dawn of our humanity.
My optimism springs from looking at what miracles of thought and action we have already achieved, which have depended on co-operation and international effort. If only we can summon our enthusiasm and curiosity, we can ensure our shared future.
—A Letter to Layla: Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future by Ramona Koval (Text Publishing) is out now.
A Letter to Layla
Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future
How might the origins of our species inform the way we think about our planet? At a point of unparalleled crisis, can human ingenuity save us from ourselves?
Much-loved writer and broadcaster Ramona Koval travels the globe in a quest to answer these difficult questions and more. She speaks with an eminent paleo-archeologist in the Republic of Georgia, meets the next generation of robots in Berlin, attends a transhumanist conference in California, and explores a cave in southern France before talking with the world's leading authority on cave art...
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