How old is old?

On a school visit not long ago a boy told me that fifty four is, like, ancient.

 Oh dear. I do hope it was nothing personal...

 Surveys have decided that the beginning of old age is anything from about sixty five and eighty years of age.

 My Neanderthal band in SONG HUNTER has an old lady amongst them. She’s called Pearl, and she’s the grandmother of my heroine Mica. Pearl is nearly blind and her joints are stiff. She’s too old to hunt, though she’s full of life and nobody’s fool.

 How old is Pearl?

 Well, Neanderthals seem to have grown up a little faster than Homo sapiens in Western Europe does nowadays. Neanderthals were more or less full grown by the time they were fifteen.

 That meant that I could have a guess at the age of my old old lady.

 After doing all the arithmetic, it turned out that the ancient Pearl was forty three years old.

 

Who do you think you are?

In SONG HUNTER my heroine Mica is forced to reject almost all her people's beliefs. 

 She loves and respects her parents, but her world is changing so profoundly that she must either  rebel or die.

 But it’s cold out there. And full of danger. How can she work out how to become the person she needs to be in order to survive?

Well...

How did you do it?

How many people make up the ideal band?

Well, you need a drummer and a bassist and a lead guitarist who can all sing...

No, okay, what I'm really thinking about is the best size for a band of Neanderthal hunters.

Mica lives with seven other people in SONG HUNTER. One of them is too old to hunt, and one is too young. Two of the band are adolescents, which means they’re not yet at full size or strength.

 That leaves four full-strength adults: two women, two men.

Of course there’s more to living than hunting, even for a Neanderthal. There’s the gathering of fuel for the fire, and the preparing of food, and the processing of skins for clothing and bedclothes.

In fact, even though half the band aren’t fully efficient hunters, the one problem my Neanderthal people don’t have is finding enough things to do.

I wonder if the ideal ratio of workers to non-workers in modern humans societies is any different?

 

How to make your blood strong.

An Inuit hunter will drink the blood of a slaughtered seal to make his own blood strong. It is said that as he drinks you can see the veins on his wrists becoming darker and thicker.

 How can that be true?

 Well, the Inuit say it's true, and surely they must know.

 I can’t claim to understand what’s going on in the minds, and perhaps the veins, of the Inuit on these occasions.

 But it makes me wonder if the fact that SONG HUNTER is about Neanderthals makes much difference to our chance of understanding them.

How FOXy were Neanderthals?

We can’t be sure how much Neanderthals could do or how bright they were. They had the FOXP2 gene, which is necessary for speaking – but then song birds and mice have the FOXP2 gene, too, so that doesn’t prove that Neanderthals could speak.

 Neanderthals existed for half a million years, which is a lot longer than we Homo sapiens have been around: but then horseshoe crabs have existed for 450 million years and they’re just, well, crabs.

 On the other hand, look at this:

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8985122/Amazing-photos-of-Kanzi-the-bonobo-lighting-a-fire-and-cooking-a-meal.html?image=5

 Now tell me: how bright were Neanderthals?

 Impressively bright, I think we have to say.

Why didn’t Neanderthals eat fish?

There are a million things science can tell us, and a million things it can’t.

There are at least two million things that people with letters after their names pretend science can tell us. But that’s a subject for a different post.

 When it comes to the history of Britain 40,000 years ago, science can tell us some extraordinary things. Science can tell us what the weather was like season by season (whereas I quite often have trouble remembering what the weather was like last week). There’s a branch of science which looks at pollen grains and can tell us exactly which plants were growing where, when.

 Even more extraordinarily, to me, scientists can analyse Neanderthal remains and tell us what they ate by looking at chemical traces in the bones.

 Like humans nowadays, Neanderthals had different diets depending upon where they lived. Those in Gibraltar enjoyed shell-fish, but those in Northern Europe don’t seem to have eaten fish at all.

 That’s amazing, you know. No fish.

Think about it. I'm sure that I’d have trouble hunting any sort of animal - even something fairly small like a reindeer - but I think I could probably manage to catch myself a fish.

 Why didn’t Neanderthals eat fish?

 Well, that’s one of the things science can’t tell us. So in SONG HUNTER I had to try to work it out.

How do you cook a mammoth?

 

There aren't any recipes for mammoth on Google that I could find, but there are some for elephant.

 Apparently the trunk is the very tastiest bit, followed by the legs.

 Several of the recipes involve cooking the meat in a pit for several hours, but that’s no good to Song Hunter’s Neanderthal people because for them fuel is very scarce: Mica’s band eat their meat raw most of the time.

 For me, the idea of eating elephant is sad, and rather revolting, but there was one recipe that tickled me.

 It said cut the elephant into bite-sized pieces and cook until done.