This site explores Stone Age life through archaeology and restrained storytelling, with particular attention to women, ecology, and survival in deep time. By restrained storytelling, I mean brief imagined moments grounded in archaeological evidence, used only to illuminate what the material record suggests rather than to invent the past.
I find myself returning again and again to the Stone Age—not because it is remote, but because it is unfinished. The people who lived then faced lives stripped of many things we take for granted, yet filled with concerns that feel immediately familiar: uncertainty, care for others, attention to seasons, the hope that what sustained them last year would return again. Their world was shaped by flora and fauna, by weather and landscape, by bodies that healed slowly and tools that had to last. In that simplicity, there is depth we are still learning how to read.
What draws my curiosity is not how different their lives were, but how complete they were within their own terms. Daily life unfolded through gathering, making, waiting, repairing, and remembering. Aspirations were not abstract. They were practical: enough food to last, bodies kept alive through injury or illness, children growing strong, knowledge passed on intact. Prosperity meant surplus at the right moment. Poverty meant absence—an animal that did not arrive, fat that ran out too soon, a season that failed to turn as expected.
The Stone Age was not a constant struggle, nor was it a static harmony. It was a world of rhythms and interruptions, of brief abundance and long preparation. What counted as success was often quiet: a tool that held its edge, a wound that healed, a plant that returned on time. What counted as loss was not always death, but erosion—of strength, of predictability, of margin. These measures of life are harder to see archaeologically, yet they shaped how people understood risk, security, and continuity.
This site grows from that fascination: with how people lived inside uncertainty, how they valued what endured, and how daily choices—often invisible—held human life together long before certainty, surplus, or control became possible.
Timeline of human history from pre-Neanderthals and Neanderthals through the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and modern period.
> 700,000 – 400,000 years ago
Pre-Neanderthals (early Homo species in Europe)> 400,000 – 40,000 years ago
Neanderthals
(Middle Paleolithic)> 300,000 years ago – present
Homo sapiens> 45,000 – 12,000 years ago
Upper Paleolithic
(Stone Age hunter-gatherers)> 12,000 – 6,000 years ago
Mesolithic
(Post-Ice Age foragers)> 6,000 – 3,000 years ago
Neolithic
(Early farming societies)> 3,000 – 1,200 BCE
Bronze Age> 1,200 BCE – present
Iron Age → Historical periods → Modern world
What draws me most, as I move through this deep timeline, is the role women likely played in holding everyday life together across these immense spans of time. Much of what archaeology preserves—tools, bones, shelters—points indirectly to work that was continuous rather than dramatic: preparing materials, maintaining tools, tending injuries, gathering plants, preserving knowledge about seasons, bodies, and places. These forms of labor rarely leave clear signatures, yet without them survival would have been fragile at best. My curiosity lies in this gap between visibility and importance: how much of human continuity may have depended on knowledge passed quietly, through repetition and care, rather than through moments that appear heroic or exceptional in the archaeological record.
My posts in this site imagine women who lived before agriculture, before writing, and before certainty—women whose lives unfolded within Ice Age landscapes shaped by seasonal risk and ecological change. Each piece pairs restrained storytelling with archaeological evidence, not to invent the past, but to stay close to what material traces allow us to infer. What appears here is not prehistoric fantasy, but reflection grounded in anthropology, material culture, and the quiet, durable realities of survival.
This site explores women-centered historical fiction grounded in archaeology, anthropology, and deep-time ecology, with a focus on Stone Age life before agriculture, writing, and modern social structures. Its essays draw on material culture, prehistoric flora and fauna, ancient tools, care and healing, and survival strategies to reflect how early humans lived, adapted, and made meaning across deep history.