Kathleen O'Neal Gear & W Michael Gear

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Tag Archives: prehistoric

SUN BORN just came out!

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 12:01
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people-of-the-songtrail-mass sun-born

Hi All,

We are happy to announce that SUN BORN, the second book in the PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR trilogy, just hit the shelves. We really love the new cover concept that our great publisher has used for SUN BORN, and the paperback of recently released, PEOPLE OF THE SONGTRAIL. Both designs use real prehistoric artwork, which just delights us!  

Winter is settling over Wyoming as we write.  We rose to 36 degrees this morning, with a light dusting of snow on the ground.  It’s always so beautiful to look out across the meadow and see the buffalo frosted white, their warm breaths rising like clouds into the air above them.  Winter is a quiet, serene time in northern Wyoming.  The songbirds are gone, leaving mostly hawks, chickadees, and dark-eyed juncos to fill the trees during the day.  At night, owls call from the red cliffs, their voices mixing with those of coyotes and the occasional howl of wolves.  

We hope you are all having a lingering and colorful autumn.

Best Regards,

 

Mike and Kathy

 

Young Adult novel set 20,000 years ago…

Sunday, 08 November 2015 15:12
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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

Sunday, 20 September 2015 10:43
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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…

Saturday, 12 September 2015 15:24
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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

Roman ships were big…

Tuesday, 01 September 2015 20:49
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Rome- ships

This is an example of one of Roman Emperor Caligula’s Nemi ships, built on Lake Nemi, Italy.  Caligula had grand ideas–most of them completely insane.  

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