Here’s more interesting stuff I learned as I tried to make The Point of the Spear at least respectable, archaeologically.

The vast and beautiful Chesapeake Bay that dominates the region where I live is nowhere near as old as I always assumed. It only began to form about 10,000 years ago, and came into something like its current character as recently as 3,000 years ago.

What’s more, just 15,000 years ago, everything out to about 75 miles offshore from today’s east coast was dry land. The ocean level was about 300 feet lower than today. As a scientist in The Point of the Spear says, any number of cultures could have arisen, thrived for a while, died out and been drowned under the rising ocean. We’ll never know.

Everything was different then. The landscape, the climate, the animals that we ate and that ate us.

Dates, also, can be perplexing. Archaeologists have long since discarded BC  and AD, but the seemingly convenient “Years Before Present”  is also a little twitchy, since when this system was adopted, “present” was taken to mean 1950. So we’re already 68 years off. Maybe not much in the scheme of things, but think of those poor archaeologists of 500 years from now.

As the main characters in The Point of the Spear might agree, think long and hard before you dig up the past.

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