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“From Spain they passed into France...drifting northwards…through oak forests…till they reached the English Channel….they crossed it with their cattle… and here they settled in small villages to cultivate the soil… And how long, one wonders, as they sat in their damp huts looking out on the driving rain, did the remembrance among them persist that their fathers had travelled here from a land of perpetual sunshine? Did they ever dream of returning again?”
Gerald Brenan: South From Granada.




Less than a century after Gerald Brenan wrote of man’s epic migration, the average north European is heading south again in search of cloudless skies. And as he leaves his ‘damp hut’ for his sea-view villa, he packs his golf clubs instead of cattle as he pushes south. History moves in circles, it often repeats itself and if you look really close, you will even see it retracing its footsteps.
The retracing of our footsteps has always been a very personal journey – a journey without maps – to find the answers to ancient unanswered questions: Where do we come from? How did we get here? Where are we going?
If your answer to these three questions is the following:
1. North Europe
2. Ryan Air
3. To Mercadona for some chocolate biscuits.
The perhaps it is time to look a little deeper.
Human migration has taken place in all times and the greatest variety of circumstances. It has been tribal, national, class-based and individual; its been climatic, political, economic, religious, or mere love of adventure. The present emigrational shift from North to South Europe is really no different from previous population movements, but there appears to be a popular misconception as to the reasons behind it. Many subscribe to the theory that the availability of cheap travel and the diet of media shows depicting ‘the better life’ abroad have been the real reason behind this widespread movement, but new research shows that It has more to do with our internal genetic clocks than internet-generated airfares.

I first was introduced to this subject in England last summer. After ten years in Spain, you can sometimes forget what it is like to “sit in your damp hut looking out into the driving rain”. So I decided to remind myself. Although I didn’t expect a Mediterranean warmth, a tad more sun and a little less rain would have been appreciated. In July I travelled up to Newcastle – a charismatic and energetic place - but it rained incessantly. I then went south in August, heading for a popular folk festival in Kent. Although it rained less frequently, rain it certainly did. And when it didn’t, it grew cloudy and got cold. To be fair, it was warm at times and there were even people resolutely sunbathing on the wonderful sandy beaches and swimming in the less wonderful, murky green sea. But it didn’t feel like summer to me. I wore long trousers and carried long-sleeve tops and shivered whilst others stubbornly donned their dusty beachwear. My relatives and friends sniggered at my ‘foreign’ habits. I had simply fallen out of rhythm with north Europe. I suppose I had changed; acclimatised to another place, adopted another pace and acquired a new south European perspective. Or was it new? Perhaps it had always been there, dormant until awoken by an episode of ’Place in the Sun’, a little voice in my ear whispering quietly, but persistently: ‘Come home, come home now’.
Torn between seeking advice from a Psychiatrist or a Social Anthropologist, I eventually settled on calling up an old friend who now worked for a multi-national company as a DNA researcher. We met up in a British Home Stores café over a warming cup of Bovril. In his mind it was all very clear: ‘We are,’ he suggested, ‘simply responding to the demands of our Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA). This is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions specifying the biological development of all cellular forms of life. It has been from the study of DNA that we have been able to renew our study of human history and pin point our genetic place of birth: Africa. And it is towards this country that we all gravitate.’


I sipped my Bovril and feigned agreement. I wasn’t convinced. He wore peculiar clothes and a haircut that made me question his ability to understand my world. But what did I know, perhaps all Geneticists dressed like this. Besides he had paid for the Bovril.
‘From such new studies,’ he continued, ‘we know that all living human beings today descend from one woman that lived in Africa approximately 150.000 years ago. All our mothers are linked to this ‘Eve’ through a direct lineage and thus are we all part of the same family. We know that modern man originated in Africa about 200.000 years ago, the oldest fossils being found in Ethiopia. About 130 – 150.000 years after this, a particularly restless group left the African continent and headed east, and in so doing began the slow but methodical population of the planet, replacing their Neanderthal cousins as they went. Debate rages amongst us about why this particular group left the African continent in search of other pastures. Some argue that it was because they had developed the power of speech and that they could communicate the concept of travel and therefore embark on the search for more fertile land. Others argue that this group had developed more modern and useful tools that enabled them to move and resettle with greater ease. Whatever the true reasons, our ancestors set off on a trek that would take many hundreds of thousands of years.’
All these figures were beginning to confuse me. To help me concentrate and to take away the lingering taste of yeast I called over the waiter and ordered us some food.

‘During this journey’, he continued as two packets of cheese and onion crisps appeared next to the ashtray, ‘these people would gradually become the parents to the rest of the planet. Then, about 50.000 years ago one part of this group arrived in Australia where uniquely, a genetic link with Africa has been maintained. Another part, between 40 and 30.000 years ago, moved though Asia before heading up into Europe. We believe that modern Europeans are descendants from this group.
So essentially, north European emigrants have been away for a very long time and are now on their way home. In fact,’ he added,’ we are all compelled – programmed by our DNA - to return to that great continent from which all life once sprang.’
He began to dunk his crisps in his Bovril.


I waited a minute or two, thinking that this was a display of some molecular interplay. But the history class was clearly over and so I withdrew leaving behind my crisps and many unanswered questions. Was Africa really our final destination? Is Spain just a roadside tavern – a posada – a place to rest before continuing our trek further south? And if so, why were we not there now where land and property is even cheaper? I dug into my rucksack and pulled out Graham Greene’s A journey Without Maps. I remembered what he said when he had just disembarked at Dakar:
‘‘…one could believe that this was the life one was born to live, breaking through life as one had been made to live it, breaking though anxiety and irritation and financial depression and a lust which had gone on far too long…’’
Was this the real message? Is Africa the real destination we are all unconsciously edging towards? The only place where we can truly be ourselves?

Back in Spain I scoured through some of the adverts for coastal property sales and was shocked to see the beginnings of a new trend in Mediterranean investment: Mountain houses in small white towns such as Chaouen, front-line apartments with communal pools in Tetouan, and the inevitable ‘Luxury villas’ alongside golf-courses in Tanger. My Bovril buddy had been right, the mother of all continents was calling out to us and we were responding on mass.

The pull of our ancestry is pretty heavy stuff to ponder over, whether on holiday for a couple of weeks or just settling into a life on the coast.
And maybe the DNA specialists are wrong and that we are simply in search of a year round tan and an affordable golf course under our bedroom window, irrespective of country or continent.
Maybe the Great British Stampede South is genuinely about Ryan Airs cheap flights and the incessant diet of property investment TV. Or maybe, just maybe, the dreariness of North European suburbia has prompted us all to finally pluck up the courage to leave our ‘damp huts’, change our lives and to begin the long journey home.

© Paul Read