El Origen 90%

The question is not philosophical. It is practical. To forget El Origen — the place where your spirit first recognized itself — is to become untethered. The Earth becomes just rock and soil. The river becomes just water. The corn becomes just food.

By A. Reyes

The lead author, Dr. Elena Quispe (Aymara heritage, Harvard-trained), caused a stir when she refused to call the finding “the origin.” El Origen

Sofía Márquez, the artist, eventually took her hidden canvas to a gallery. She titled it No me he ido del todo — “I haven’t entirely left.”

“I painted El Origen as a wound,” says Sofía Márquez, a 34-year-old Chilean-born visual artist now living in Barcelona. Her latest series, Rostros del Principio , depicts faceless figures emerging from cracked earth. “I left Chile when I was nine, during the dictatorship. My parents never spoke of ‘before.’ So I had to invent an origin. Not the traumatic one — the one before the trauma.” The question is not philosophical

Her paintings sell for thousands. But she keeps one small canvas in her studio, hidden. On it, a single hand reaches up from a sea of blue. “That’s my abuela’s hand,” she says. “She taught me that the sea has memory. El Origen is the first time you believed you belonged somewhere.” Science has its own version of El Origen . In 2024, a team of paleogeneticists published a landmark study tracing the first human footprints in the Americas to a single migration event roughly 23,000 years ago — a small band of hunters crossing a now-vanished land bridge from Siberia into Alaska.

In the high, thin air of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, the Arhuaco people do not ask where you are from. They ask: “Do you remember your Origin?” The Earth becomes just rock and soil

“They ask for your origin at the checkpoint,” he says quietly. “But they want a country. They don’t want the smell of rain on dry dirt. They don’t want the name of the dog that followed me to school.”