My most research-intensive series is the People of the Wind
mystery series. Those are the books featuring a Neanderthal tribe and set
30,000 years ago. I took the artistic license of putting the tribe in North
America. Aside from that, I try to make everything about them and the
surroundings as true to life as possible. We don’t know everything about them,
of course, but we’re learning more all the time.
I had to research every single step of the way, beginning
with the climate and the appearance of the land at that time. I learned that
much of the present day Midwest was an open spruce parkland with balsam poplar
and quaking aspen, also mires, lakes, and ponds. The landscape looked much as
Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Michigan and parts of Canada look today. The
trees growing then are those that grow now in the Rocky Mountains. The summers were cooler then and the winters
a bit colder. I was astounded to learn that the Mississippi River didn’t exist
yet! This was the time before the advance of the last glacier to cover much of
the Midwest. The Mississippi was created on its retreat. (1)
The animals that were around were very different. What are
called mega-fauna, very large animals, mostly became extinct on this continent
at around 10,000 years ago. Some of these were giant sloths, mammoths,
mastodons, muskox (which are not extinct), stag-moose, dire wolves, short-faced
bears, giant beavers, peccaries, sabertooth and scimitar cats, American cave
lion, tapirs, and camelops (ancestor to modern camels), eve an giant version of
bison, just to name a few. There were also very tiny horses that migrated to
Asia and disappeared here until modern horses were brought here by the
Spaniards. (2)
Then there was the task of creating the characters. I had to
know what they might have looked like, what they ate, what they wore. I learned
that they largely ate meat and only ate other things when it was unavailable.
They would have had to have foot coverings and more than an animal skin draped
across a shoulder to survive the climates they lived through. (They existed
from 250,000 years ago to about 28,000 years ago—a long, long time.) It is likely
they dried meat from one hunt until they got more. It takes more than a bit of
ingenuity to bring down a mammoth when you’re about 5 1/2 feet tall.
(3)
I researched if they could speak or not and, from there,
what their language might have sounded like. That involved studying how babies
learn to speak, how people with impediments speak, what early languages were
like, and great stuff like that.
That’s not the extent of my research, just a bit of it, to
give you an idea. Hope you enjoyed the post!
(1) http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/gen/nerc.html
(2) Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big,
the Hairy, and the Bizarre Ian M. Lange
(3) Journal of Archeological Science 6/3/2009 “Energy Use by
Eem Neanderthals” by Bent Sørensen.
