Strangers From the South follows a weary elf who rescues a human boy from a massacred village and is drawn into an ancient conflict that will force him to choose between his people and humans. Was there a particular archaeological discovery, myth, or image that inspired this story?

I relied heavily on Proto-Indo-European mythology and linguistics, but that was really only the starting point. I tried to rewind the clock further, to imagine an older origin myth, perhaps something carried out of Africa and transformed through successive waves of migration. What I kept finding were variations on broadly the same structure and many of the same players: two brothers, sacrifice, the living and the dead, the priest and the king, and a third figure or principle through which the dead body becomes the substance of the world. I wanted to ask what that story might have looked like before thousands of years of cultural change turned it into the mythologies we recognize today.

Mammoths, glaciers, grasslands, forests, and changing climates are integral to the setting. How much research did you do into Pleistocene ecology?

I’m a fossil nerd, so thinking about vanished ecosystems and what the food web actually looked like was immensely helpful. I didn’t want to write theme parks; I wanted fully operating, largely indifferent habitats, which was a hell of a lot of fun. Habitats functioned then much as they do now, with many of the same ecological niches, even when very different animals occupied them. Once I settled on a date, I looked at the climate and weather patterns and built the food webs outward from there. I wanted the world to feel real, actually, physically real.

What does the novel suggest we lose when we dismiss ancient stories simply because they aren’t literal histories?

Numerous examples exist where local mythology has turned out to be true. Locals in the Congo described to outsiders a ‘man of the forest’ who walked upright and howled at the moon. Outsiders dismissed them until someone decided to take them at their word and investigated. And Karl Ammann discovered the bili ape, fitting the description.  Plenty of cases exist where local stories preserve observations that outsiders initially dismiss because they don’t fit the outsider’s conceptual framework. People interpret the world through culture and language. A community may be describing something perfectly real using categories that sound nonsensical to someone who doesn’t share them. That interested me enormously. Could stories about elves, Gandharva, Ribhus, Aen Sidhe, Almasty and similar beings contain distorted memories of actual peoples or lost hominins? In the novel, the Alma grow out of traditions surrounding the Almasty, which have often been described in ways that invite comparison with archaic humans such as Neanderthals. Maybe our ancestors were describing something real. If so, what happens when you strip away thousands of years of mythology and try to reconstruct what they might actually have seen?