When I was young, and just becoming interested in science, it was my love for animals that drove my interest. A cat on my pillow, a dog in the yard, a monkey in a tree; those were my best friends. Just as in later years I have come to appreciate the gift of perspective that growing up overseas gave me, the perspective I gained by communicating with animals is also one that I feel has made me a more empathetic human being. Granted, the communication is nonverbal and requires making assumptions often dismissed as anthropomorphic, but it is communication nonetheless.

 

    As my education progressed, I was naturally drawn towards the field of animal behavior, that of primates in particular. After meeting Jane Goodall and hearing her speak when I was in high school, I saw my path ahead of me, or so I thought. Along the way, life had other ideas for me and devoting my life to “living in the jungle with the apes” would have meant giving up my wandering ways. I chose to follow other paths, and have never regretted it, although I have tried to keep up with recent research and am gratified to see Jane Goodall having a positive influence on the wider world today, through her work with Roots and Shoots. Another field of interest in school for me was anthropology and archaeology, especially the study of early man and our hominin cousins, and I continue to be fascinated by the constant new discoveries in that field, now known as paleoanthropology.

 

    Outside of school, my best education came from the books I read. An avid reader since preschool, I devoured books as quickly as I could. As a child in Africa, quality children’s books were in short supply, so my mother would ask friends to bring books from the States or England as often as she could. When I stayed home sick from school, she would pull a book or two out of the secret stash to keep me in bed, and I would happily oblige. Black Beauty, The Jungle Book, The Wind in the Willows, My Friend Flicka, the Narnia series, all taught me more about animals and communication. In my teenage years, science fiction and fantasy opened up whole new worlds, and I credit Robert Heinlein for introducing me to different ways of thinking about relationships between the sexes, Stranger in a Strange Land being particularly mind-blowing in that respect and others. Dune, with its intricate historical background, posited a possible future for our species that sparked my imagination. Most of all, The Lord of the Rings, captivated me in its creation of a world with several different types of beings interacting with each other; elves, men, dwarves, etc. When I read it, at fifteen, I cried when I finished the last page because I would never again experience reading it for the first time. That hasn’t stopped me from reading it over and over (fourteen times at last count) but that first time was magical.

 

    All of these influences have led me to where I am now, and to Riverheart, the book that I am writing. My love for animals and the desire to communicate with them, my interest in paleoanthropology, my history of reading about alien species and other worlds; all share a common thread. I have come to believe that as a species, we humans suffer from a great loneliness. Not having another intelligent species that we can communicate with on an equal footing, I feel that we are missing the perspective that would allow us to step out of our shoes and see our world through a different lens. My upbringing as a TCK (third culture kid), gave me a very different perspective than my friends who grew up in the United States, and I value that because I think it gave me the ability to see a bigger picture. In this same way, if humans could speak with other species, we would see a bigger picture as it relates to our place in the universe. Think of what we could learn! In studying and using foreign languages, I found that learning another language is not just about learning different words for the same things. All languages have a different structure and perspective - learning another language is really learning another way of looking at the world. Imagine what you could learn if the language was of another species.

 

    Have you ever thought about having a time machine? Where and when would you go? I had always been sure of my answer to that question. I would go to East Africa, a couple of million years ago, when there were several different species of hominins roaming the savannah. Granted, the reality of the situation would not be conducive to communication, most likely, but who knows? My answer, however, has been revised. Recent discoveries of other hominins (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores “Hobbits”) that were around much more recently, say in the last fifty thousand years, have changed that picture. It now seems we were sharing the planet with other species with which we could have easily communicated with, and clearly did, quite intimately, judging from the traces of their genetic material in modern human DNA. We have not always been alone.

 

    I began researching my family geneaology several years ago, and quickly became obsessed with tracing the lines back as far as I could, which isn’t really that far when you look at the whole arc of human existence. What happened during all those tens of thousands of years before recorded history? We were essentially the same then as we are now, humans have not genetically evolved that much since we left Africa some seventy five thousand years ago. I believe that we have been navigating rivers and sailing the oceans for much of that time, with explorers, visionaries and poets leading the way. Theirs are the stories I am looking for, the lost stories of our ancestors. How did we come to be who we are, and what were the paths that led us here? Using my own family genetics, I am creating characters based on possible ancestors of mine and imagining their lives by finding bits of historical or archaeological evidence to build upon.

 

    Aside from my own creation story, another thread is woven into Riverheart, one that was inspired by a discovery made on an island in Indonesia. In 2004, fossils of a three foot tall hominin were found in a cave on Flores Island. Given the scientific name of Homo floresiensis, they were quickly dubbed “hobbits”, since The Lord of the Rings movies had recently been released. My imagination was immediately sparked, and I took the idea of the little people and ran with it. Didn’t nearly every culture have legends of small people? What if that’s who the “hobbits” were? What if they still existed?

 

    In Riverheart, I will tell the story of what the world might have been like if we had another species to communicate with and help widen our perspective. Would we have followed a different path, or not?