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dolariWhen I began formulating Han'a's origin for A Wish for Wings, I only had the roughest sketches. She was 14,000 years old, the first of the angels chosen from humans, and lived as a huntress in a hunter gatherer tribe.
It wasn't until I read a widely discredited theory about the possible origin of the Basques that a story attatched itself to her tribe. The theory postulated that the Basque Language pointed to them actually being from western Asia and somehow migrating to the Basque country in Spain and France.
It was this idea that caused the "explosion" of story ideas, characters, and the timelines of the Tribe of Ehrem, Hanna's (now Han'a's) tribe. 14,000 years ago, Han'a's tribe takes a 100 to 200 year journey (we're still working that out) across the continent. While I never say it in the story, they're traveling from the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Biscay, and (again, never explicitly said), they are the origins of the Basque people.
It was a widely discredited theory but one that made for an interesting tale.
Then I read this:
While the Ehrem tribe would be coming from the Astrakhan region around 14,000 years ago, they did have a huge bottleneck experience in Central Europe which decimated the tribe down to a core group that spread out through Western Europe (the main grouping of that core ending up at the Bay of Biscay). They wouldn't be the first migration, but the second from Central Europe is feasable, although confusingly, the paper says the original migrations are east to west, then later, west to east.
Sometimes, I wonder about where these stories come from. And I hope I never ever find out, because I want it to stay magical to me.
It wasn't until I read a widely discredited theory about the possible origin of the Basques that a story attatched itself to her tribe. The theory postulated that the Basque Language pointed to them actually being from western Asia and somehow migrating to the Basque country in Spain and France.
It was this idea that caused the "explosion" of story ideas, characters, and the timelines of the Tribe of Ehrem, Hanna's (now Han'a's) tribe. 14,000 years ago, Han'a's tribe takes a 100 to 200 year journey (we're still working that out) across the continent. While I never say it in the story, they're traveling from the Caspian Sea to the Bay of Biscay, and (again, never explicitly said), they are the origins of the Basque people.
It was a widely discredited theory but one that made for an interesting tale.
Then I read this:
We show that Basques have the most ancestral phylogeny in Europe for the rare mitochondrial subhaplogroup U8a. Divergence times situate the Basque origin of this lineage in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most probably, their primitive founders came from West Asia. The lack of U8a lineages in Africa points to an European and not a North African route of entrance. Phylogeographic analysis suggest that U8a had two expansion periods in Europe, the first, from a south-western area including the Iberian peninsula and Mediterranean France before 30,000 years ago, and the second, from Central Europe around 15,000-10,000 years ago.
[...]
Its most ancestral node is represented by Bq1820 and the only Anatolian lineage assignable to haplogroup U8a, both carrying the CRS motif in HVSI, and transitions 73, 282 in HVSII. This ancient connection might trace the hypothetic route followed by the U8a ancestor from West Asia to the Basque country. The absence of U8a in North-Africa and its extremely rare presence in the eastern Mediterranean area further reinforces this continental route of entrance against a southern alternative.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523212/?tool=pmcentrez.
While the Ehrem tribe would be coming from the Astrakhan region around 14,000 years ago, they did have a huge bottleneck experience in Central Europe which decimated the tribe down to a core group that spread out through Western Europe (the main grouping of that core ending up at the Bay of Biscay). They wouldn't be the first migration, but the second from Central Europe is feasable, although confusingly, the paper says the original migrations are east to west, then later, west to east.
Sometimes, I wonder about where these stories come from. And I hope I never ever find out, because I want it to stay magical to me.
