“We were told to write our own history if we want it told well,” Bobbie Conner explained. She sat in a conference room of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, the center she directs on the Umatilla Reservation, home to the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes. “And this story is as old as time: conquest.”

The history of exploration is often told in the binary. Explorer and high mountain. Explorer and remote island. Explorer and uncontacted tribe. The conqueror and the conquered. Today the definition of exploration is more expansive. We explore our bodies, our ancestry, the capacity of our brains, the idea of home. We explore history and who gets to tell it. The explorer has been an adventurer, a showman, a scientist, and now there’s a new archetype: the reconciler—someone to help us understand how we got here. These pioneers are interrogating our history books, rewriting them, and hoping to prevent the past from repeating.

Since Alexander Graham Bell, an early president of National Geographic, tested his flying contraptions on the hills of Nova Scotia (upper left), aviation has captivated us. As space became a scientific frontier, we helped collect samples from the stratosphere (center) and supplied astronaut Neil Armstrong with a small National Geographic Society flag to carry on Apollo 11, the first crewed mission to the moon (bottom left).

SOURCE PHOTOS FOR ILLUSTRATION: JAMES P. BLAIR (STARGAZER BALLOON, UPPER RIGHT); DAVIDE MONTELEONE (PLANE); OTIS IMBODEN (ROCKET LAUNCHES); RICHARD HEWITT STEWART (STRATOSPHERE EXPEDITION BALLOON); BELL COLLECTION (BELL AND COLLEAGUE WITH EXPERIMENTAL KITE)

By the time I sat with Conner in that conference room, I’d spent six months in Oregon, my home state, waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic. For years I’d written dispatches for this magazine from places like the remote marshes of South Sudan, the desert border of the United States and Mexico, and the mountains of eastern Congo. Now, stretched in front of me was the banality of a home I’d never had much interest in. With nowhere to go, I sought to understand my new confines; before long, I ended up on the edge of the state, questioning my idea of exploration itself.

But first, let’s rewind some 60,000 years to when “a small colony in Africa went into the world and lost contact.” This is according to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a historian and professor at the University of Notre Dame, who’s spent nearly six decades studying how the world has been transformed by a process he calls route finding—in which different cultures collide, interact, and adapt to each other in journeys fueled by greed, imperialism, religion, and science. “The history of exploration,” he says, “is putting the routes between different peoples back.” It’s as if, for thousands of years, we’ve been attempting to undo the distance our earliest ancestors put between us, for better or worse.

It was this goal that united scientists, scholars, and military men to found the National Geographic Society in 1888. For the past 135 years we’ve plumbed the sea, sky, land, and space “for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.” The exploration we funded and documented seemed at times less about making contact and more about being first. And there was no shortage of those milestones: from summiting Mount Everest with the American team to mapping the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Grueling walks, climbs, and sea crossings have charted new pathways around the globe, mapped natural phenomena, and connected cultures. Continuing a tradition of past explorers here is writer Paul Salopek (front), who, for the past 10 years, has been walking a 24,000-mile route that migrating humans took out of Africa, populating the world.

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SOURCE PHOTOS FOR ILLUSTRATION: NEIL M. JUDD (CHACO CANYON SURVEYOR); LEAKEY FAMILY COLLECTION (LOUIS LEAKEY, CENTER, AND COLLEAGUES WITH PREHISTORIC ELEPHANT BONES); FROM HARRIET CHALMERS ADAMS (ADAMS WITH CAMEL); RICK SMOLAN (ROBYN DAVIDSON WITH CAMEL ON 1,700-MILE AUSTRALIA TREK); JOHN STANMEYER (SALOPEK AND ETHIOPIAN GUIDE AHMED ELEMA); CORY RICHARDS (EVEREST); STEPHEN ALVAREZ (PETRA)

Firsts then morphed into discoveries: Science, space, and the natural world were wrung for their secrets. The Leakeys unearthed our fossilized ancestors, Jane Goodall lived among the chimpanzees, and conservationist Mike Fay charted a 2,000-mile trek across Central African rainforests. Today explorers may not be human at all: Does a camera explore when it’s dropped to the bottom of the ocean to photograph at depths humans haven’t yet reached? Or a microscopic robot, when it’s threaded through our bodies to perform surgery?

Stories have fueled exploration for hundreds of years. During what’s known as the European age of exploration, from the 15th to 17th centuries, popular fiction told of heroes on daring journeys, and these so-called romances of chivalry may have inspired Columbus and Magellan to set sail. Storytelling has repopulated the world with new generations of explorers many times over. Perhaps the photography and maps National Geographic magazine published moved you to go out and see the world. But stories have also served to propel a Western myth of the explorer that isn’t entirely true.

“There’s a failure of the literature to discuss explorers from other countries, so for the last 500 years this was a story dominated by dead white males,” says Fernández-Armesto. “That’s created the impression that it’s a white male activity—it isn’t, by any means.”

One of the earliest world maps was painted on a cave wall in India some 8,000 years ago, and the first explorer we know by name is Harkhuf, who led an expedition from pharaonic Egypt into tropical Africa around 2290 B.C. Then there was the Bantu migration from West Africa across the sub-Saharan continent, starting a thousand years earlier. In the Pacific Ocean, sailors in dugouts and catamarans followed the stars and sea swells to map and colonize islands from New Guinea to Hawaii, starting around 1500 B.C. In the seventh century, a Chinese monk named Xuanzang crossed China, India, and Nepal on a quest for original Buddhist scriptures. That same century, Arab armies marched from the Arabian Peninsula to Central Asia and North Africa, fueled by the drive of holy conquest.