Sorry about missing the garage sale Sunday; I was wiped. And yesterday and today I was actually able to go out and do yardwork in the wake of the recent storms, so I did. Now it's almost possible to drag the fallen branches all the way to the brush pile at the property line! Yay! But I am tired. Oh, well.
Anyway, this morning, an article titled: Alternate Theory of Inhabitation of North America Disproved appeared on my tumblr dash. So I made a skeptical sound and said: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I suspected it was about the Solutrean Hypothesis, and it was - or rather, about one element of it, the freezing of the North Atlantic down to appropriate latitudes for humans to utilize the ice fields for hunting, as historical and modern hunters have utilized the Arctic ice. The lead paragraph contains the claim: "Now, researchers at the University of Missouri, working with colleagues the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and elsewhere, have definitively disproved the ice bridge theory."
Well, maybe they have; but if so, you can't tell from the rest of the posted article, which consists entirely of a muddled account of nitpicks concerning the provenance of a point associated with mastodon bones, both dredged out of Cheaspeake Bay in the 70s. I wouldn't have to know anything about the Solutrean Hypothesis to know that you can't prove or disprove anything with the data presented, as presented. I can't tell whether the University of Missouri archeological team write lousy press releases and make grandiose claims, or if they tried to explain the background to a University employee in charge of writing it, who got bored halfway through, lost the thread, took crappy notes, and then gave it to somebody else to write the headline in which the grandiose claim is made. Either way, lousy journalism has been committed here, and both the Solutrean Hypothesis and the arguments against it have been oversimplified into absurdity.
(And may I just say, if I never see the term "bridge" brought up in a discussion of the peopling of the Americas again, it'll be too soon? Nobody needed a land bridge, or an ice bridge, or any kind of bridge to get to America. The most conservative archeologists I've ever met conceded that the first Americans not only may have had, but probably did have, boats, and will emphasize that Beringia (and the ice sheet) were not passageways from one continent to another, but distinctive geographical regions with resources to be utilized in a number of different ways. Nobody refers to or thinks of the polar ice caps or Central America as "bridges." If the Isthmus of Panama is flooded, people will wind up on side or another of the resulting strait, but it would be absurd to think that they were in transit the whole time they were living on the Isthmus of Panama. Get a grip, geez!)
Which is why primary research is so important. When you're writing something inspired by science, or history, or whatever, you'll inevitably encounter a lot of accounts and explanations that fall easily into the shapes of common conceptions. They report in broad strokes that create familiar patterns, as conflict between two opposing forces (because a story is character + conflict, right?), in terms of proof or disproof, stodgy conservatism or reckless iconoclasm, arguments that stand or fall on a single piece of evidence - and it simply does not work that way. You read the journals and talk to the scientists, though - really read them, for information, chewing your way diligently through all the background details that seem tedious at first - the moment will come when you have your epiphany and see them as the millions of tiny pixels making up a much more complicated, much grander, a thousand times more ambiguous, but far more interesting story than the broad strokes that first intrigued you led you to believe.
When you write your own story, you'll have to leave out a lot of those details, too. You'll have to create your own broad strokes version - and you'll probably have to draw, or at least sketch out, a conclusion that the scientists will hedge around with disclaimers. But that's all right, that's the nature of narrative.
As long as it's the narrative that paints the picture you built up for yourself out of all those pixelly details; not the same old familiar lazy pattern that everybody already knows.
Because why write the same old story over and over and over, when the world is infinite? All your readers will see on the beaten path is packed dirt. Lead them into the long grass, into the trees, and across the pristine ice fields of the mind!
They might be confused. But they won't be bored. The better a story reflects this infinite, chaotic, beautiful, reality we live in, the less dull it will be.
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