How to Research When All You Have is Bones and Dirt

Thank you for inviting me to your blog today, Alex, to talk about how I research. I love researching a new book almost as much as writing it, but this is the first time I’ve explained how I do that. Let me know in comments if I miss anything.

Most authors flesh out stories by reading other books or visiting digital and physical sites, but my stories occur in a time before the written word or oral stories, up to 1.8 million years ago. Events from those ancient time frames are mostly rough guesses based on whatever artifacts survived the ravages of time. Nothing preserves about the characters’ dreams, passions, inspirations, or emotions, how they handled illness, worried about threats from vicious predators, or solved problems. For a fiction story, I need to know about family, community, culture, but bones, dirt, and rocks tell little about those. As a result, the story I first wrote was more textbook than life.

It took me a long time and much outside-the-box thinking to answer the questions that would breathe life into my characters. Here’s how I did it:

• I explored the great names in my topic.
I read everything written by topical experts like the Leakey’s, Donald Johanson, Desmond Morris, Ian Tattersall, and Christopher Wills. Each time I came to a question they couldn't answer, I dug deeper, found new experts. For example, (see below), answers about counting from experts didn’t satisfy me so I read the amazing Lev Vygotsky as he explained how different societies did or didn't use numbers and counting.

• I explored academic resources like JSTOR, Google Scholar, university libraries.
At first, the words and phraseology of papers from places like the Library of Congress and the University of Notre Dame sounded foreign, but eventually, I demystified the language. Once learned, it didn’t change.

• I visited museum websites (like the Smithsonian) for early man collections
Not just one—as many as I could access. Each has its own take on evolution with varied shading and nuances. After exploring a dozen (or more), I distilled a personal understanding that breathed life into my story.

• I read raw data from archaeological digs.
It’s easy to rely on a researcher’s opinions in his published work, but I wanted the raw data so I could peek behind the curtain, draw my own conclusions. In my case, this was archeological digs like East Africa's Olduvai Gorge, South Africa's Rising Star cave system, China's Dragon Bones, and many more. 1.8 million year old remains were primarily skeletons, tools, scat, and the animal bones around them, but these told me a lot about my characters’ health and diet, communities, and more. An example is these remains never included pottery which meant berries and water must have been collected in gourds, skulls, or the intestinal sacks of large animals.

• I didn’t just seek answers to questions. I sought understanding.
For example, I wanted to know the food Neanderthals ate. Scientists provided clues from what they found in teeth and bones, what was indigenous to the land, how climatic changes drove early man one direction or another, animal routes based on land bridges that came and went. I kept at it until a picture formed in my mind of the characters' lives, what inspired their movements, what shaped their decisions. Was it herds? Water? Or maybe a search for salt?

credit – Deposit Photos

• I became them.
When writing about our oldest human species, Homo habilis, though they are extinct, their evolutionary predecessors (chimpanzees and Great Apes) remain much unchanged today. I postulated that understanding these creatures would bring sense to earliest man. So I read everything about them from the authorities like Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas, and Dian Fossey.
Additionally, my early man characters were primarily hunter-gathers, so I explored living tribes who still practice that way of life. I read everything possible about the San, Pirahã, Pygmies, the American Indians (OK--no longer hunter gatherers, but much is written about their early lifestyle). I spent hours--days--watching videos, walking in their footsteps, hunting for food and digging up roots with them, finding water where there seemed to be none.

• I made myself aware of their surroundings.
For example, necklaces and wall paintings didn't exist in man's evolution until Neanderthals arrived. Then, something in their brains made it important to string teeth and feathers around their necks and paint symbols on the walls of their caves. It was intriguing that they'd evolved as a genus to consider those important (for reasons we don't yet know).
“The content presented in this blog are the result of creative imagination and not intended for use, reproduction, or incorporation into any artificial intelligence training or machine learning systems without prior written consent from the author.”

• Google Earth has a time slider that will take you back 100 years into the past so you can see what the land looks like. This didn’t work for me, but if you're writing about that era, it is a boon.

Overall, researching what will primarily be raw data is both exhausting and exciting, challenging and gratifying. I would always choose to find my own connections over using someone else's.

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular prehistoric fiction saga, Man vs. Nature which explores seminal events in man’s evolution one trilogy at a time. She is also author of the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers and Building a Midshipman , the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. Her non-fiction includes 100+ books on tech into education, reviews as an Amazon Vine Voice and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics.
Find Jacqui - Amazon, blog, Pinterest X, and website

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