Even authors of fiction find a need to research for their work. As I have been writing for nearly two years, I have found many things I don’t know. I thought it would be easy to write about ancient times, imagining what life may have been like in those earliest years of our planet. So little is written about those days, most of it must be imagined, or so I thought.
Then I began to write and found I needed help. I had no idea how they used fire, or made unleavened bread, or tanned hides, or other things. I went to the web, searching. I found the answers to these and other questions. It’s wonderful to have the Internet to do research.
Did you ever have to use the card catalog or the magazine indexes? I did. Research only happened in libraries, with books and magazines. Never as easily as now, with computers and the Internet.
I found some amazing things, and some even went into my book.
Fire was used for heat and cooking, as you would expect. It hardened wooden tools and kept wild animals away. They say early people used fire to drive animals in the hunt, drive bees from the hive, and grasshoppers into cooking pits. Fires were used to clear away growth to find bulbs for food and brush to ease travel, and promote seed growth. Heat from the fire straightened or bent weapons as well as breaking stones for weapons.
What do you use fire for? Is there something you want to know more about? Leave me a message. I’ll share.