Get up and leave
The first thing homo erectus did when he got properly up on his two legs was to leave. Leave home, leave the savannah, leave Africa, which had been the home of the hominids for over 5 million years.
Get up and leave. The rest is human history.
Since then, humans have got up and left, mythically and historically. The Homeric Greeks got up and left to fight a war hundreds of miles away from home.
Roman colonists left Italy to found cities at the edges of an expanding empire, carrying with them law, language, and habit.
The Phoenicians pushed out across the Mediterranean, establishing fragile trading posts that became enduring cities like Carthage.
The landless sons of the medieval European nobility got up and left looking for their fortunes away from home. Some sewed crosses on their hauberks and went to the Holy Land.
Traditional societies don’t move, we’re told. People don’t just get up and leave. And yet, the human story has been one of movement, of opening the door and closing it behind us. The itch is deeply embedded. There’s something on the horizon pulling us to it. Though we might not know what it is, we keep walking.