"It's curious how much cover there is on the chalk downs," Household observes casually at one point, "prehistoric pits and trenches, tree-grown tumps, gorse and the upper edge of coverts, lonely barns and thickets of thorn".
In the back of a nearby closet, past a rack of antique rifles, is a walk-in vault in which Fenn safeguards his most prized possessions: gold artifacts and tribal jewelry, several Clovis points (prehistoric tools), an old revolver and a peace pipe that belonged to Sitting Bull, chief of the Lakota Sioux.
Signs by the road pointed to prehistoric caves and Neolithic paintings.
Another notable addition is the prehistoric earthworks of Poverty Point in Louisiana, USA.
The fine stone blades were excavated from a prehistoric site called Pinnacle Point on the southern coast of South Africa and are between 6,000 and 11,000 years older than the previous oldest known samples of spear and arrow blades, scientists said.
The truth of the matter, however, is that fossil hunters have truly only scratched the surface of prehistoric dinosaur diversity, a point driven home by this week's announcement of a new carnivorous enigma from South America.
Evidence of their technological sophistication and dominant presence litters the prehistoric landscape: some 10,000 Clovis points have been discovered in locations as far flung as Florida and Washington state.
Archaeological and paleogeographic evidence suggests that Northeast Asia (Western Beringia) was a starting point from which prehistoric man began to explore the Western Hemisphere via the Bering Land Bridge.
Rather than saying that the Celtics had a fine run in that prehistoric era, and rather than pointing out that Magic Johnson soon destroyed the Celtics' aura of invulnerability, and rather than noting that Andrew Bynum was injured in 2008, the Celtics fans and watchers revel in gloating about how Celtics teams are superior in character.
As a vast collection of artifacts grew — almost half a million items have been cataloged — Dr. Luckenbach hypothesized that Pig Point was a sort of regional rest area, a feasting spot for prehistoric travelers.
