Written by: Dylan Casa Lobos
Submitted By: Steven Sampson
Fifty Thousand Years ago, the ice was a mile high over two thirds of North America and Europe. Russia and Northern China were entombed beneath the same ice fields. Many of the earths 10,000 people had been living in the lush tropical valleys of North Africa, but the ice is thirsty for more and more of the earth's water and much of the earth is in a perpetual drought. The lush green valleys of North Africa are turning into a desert. The people are faced with migration or starvation. Most of the people of the world were on the move, following the herds or existing as hunter gatherers.
The ice fields have acquired so much of the earth's water, the oceans are 140 meters more shallow than today, the Mediterranean is a series of lakes, and you can walk from France to Ireland. However the weight of the ice on the earth's crust forces warm water out of the earth and there are warm lakes and rivers south of the ice fields. The Mammoth Biome stretches for several hundred kilometers south of the ice, from Spain to Siberia, and it is a hunter's paradise with mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, caribou, rhinoceros, and many other animals of all sizes. The rumors of a land of plenty near the ice, spread to North Africa and a small tribe with a few great flint tool makers decides to migrate.
The tool makers are women with a strain of mitochondrial DNA that gives them an uncommon ability to create the perfect flint scrapers, knives, and spear points. Mitochondrial DNA is unique, because it doesn't recombine at conception. It remains the same for ten of thousands of years. Every man carries his mother's mitochondria, but he can't pass it on; mitochondrial DNA is only passed on from mother to daughter. When the dangerous and unpredictable big game hunters, who are virtual giants because of their protein-rich diets, kill a 20,000 pound mammoth and all they have to butcher the animal are stone knives, they want the best stone knives. The women of this family can produce the stone tools the mammoth hunters need and they often keep their tribe from starving by trading meat for tools.
In time, the family splits up and these artisans and their DNA are spread around the world. They adapt their tool making skills to many different areas, even creating some of the masterpieces of Lascaux. They continue to survive and thrive through the dawn of civilization and into the modern ages. Eventually descendants or distant cousins of this family converge on the Oregon Trail in 1860 from different cultures and different parts of the world. From there the story continues into the present and one of the family members begins to unravel the mysteries of her prehistoric relatives with the help of modern day DNA science and a philosophical cowboy, for a surprising and thought provoking conclusion.
The hunting scenes and stories of survival are authentic, since the author is a former big game hunting guide, and has worked in Northern British Columbia for many years.
