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Young Adult novel set 20,000 years ago…

We have had the best time writing our first Young Adult novel, set 20,000 years ago, at the height of the Pleistocene Ice Age.  What fun to writer about American lions, sabertooth cats, dire wolves, giant bison, mammoths and giant beavers.  Had Mike on tenterhooks (your word for the day) when young Lynx fell into the crevasse.  It’s great inspiration to be able to watch bison out the window while writing about their ancestors who roamed the continent twenty centuries ago.2014-06-22 15.46.29

Doggerland 8,000 years ago

7,000 years ago skeleton This is one of the “Ladies of Teviec.”  She was found in a Mesolithic cemetery off the coast of Brittany, France.  Her remains date to around 8,500 years ago. She was approximately 25 years old.  She died when someone clubbed her in the head five times, cracking her skull, and she was shot between the eyes with an arrow.  Her loved ones must have found her body, because she was buried with care in a pit roofed with red deer antlers.

We all like to believe that some time in the distant past there was a Golden Age of peace and prosperity where people lived in harmony, but the truth is, while there were harmonious episodes in human prehistory, they were relatively short and punctuated by extreme violence.  In the case of the Ladies of Teviec, the climate was changing, shifting from the Pleistocene Ice Age and into this warm period we enjoy now, the Holocene.  Sea level was rising.  The “ladies”” homeland, which archaeologists call Doggerland, was being swallowed by the ocean.  Apparently, war erupted as people scrambled for disappearing land.  Eventually there would be no dry land left in Doggerland for anyone.  

 

 

Stonehenge shadows…

One of the interesting things about this reconstruction of Stonehenge is the shadows cast by the standing stones.  In the past thirty years of doing archaeoastronomy, archaeologists have learned that shadows, and the way they move on important days, like the solstices and equinoxes, can be as important as shafts of light.  

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge/Stonehenge reconstruction

The Yupik villagers in the Alaskan village of Newtok don’t have to be told the globe is warming up.  They see it every day.

 

Newtokhttp://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/alaska-village-climate-change/402604/

Argentina to return 4,000 stolen artifacts…

Thank you for doing the right thing, Argentina.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-34031740Machu Picchu

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