RESEARCH

Before writing A River through Stone, I spent a year researching Neandertals, Denisovans, and modern humans. I studied early Upper Paleolithic French cave art and the forty or so geometric symbols found alongside many of the images. I read more than a dozen textbooks and fifty-plus research papers, then took a Special Topics course on Neandertals at U.C. Berkeley.
I enrolled in primitive skills classes, where I learned to make string from reeds, soup from acorns, and fire from moss and sticks. I launched spears and swung slingshots and boomerangs. Then I hung out with a delightful group of stone tool knappers and watched them carve arrowheads and spear blades, soaking in their words about the beauty of jasper, agate, and obsidian, and how the wavefront of a strike rolls through them.
Last, I interviewed anthropologists, including a world-renowned specialist in stone-tool knapping. I pressed them for every detail I could think of—from the notorious shouting matches between anthropologists who champion opposite hypotheses to the distinguishing characteristics of Chatelperrion spear points, from the knuckle scrapes sustained in working a dig square to the thrill of unearthing a major find.
But now I needed a language for my Neandertals to speak, so I dove head-first into a whole new world—the invention of constructed languages.
To learn more, click ‘Neandertal Language.’