It's appropriate, on a long journey, to stop for a moment and think about where you are. As any fan of Lewis and Clark would tell you, checking at least a mental map is the best way to keep from getting lost - especially when your trip is over time. So far on this journey your map has been more like following guideposts on a trek through the past, with mile markers laid out in millennium. And unless you happen to be a very insightful historian versed in this particular part of the world, at this moment you have every reason to be a bit confused. Not confused about where you are as much as when.

And you have every right to be asking yourself some rather introspective, almost philosophical sounding questions. Such as, "When you've been on the road for 8,000 years, how is anyone supposed to remember when one picky little event happened in relationship to everything else?^1* So, before, out of frustration, you start wishing for a GPS, which at the moment has not been conceived of much less invented, here's another approach - benchmarking with more familiar human passages in time as to what's going on around the rest of the known world.

After the Ice Age had ended 12,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, after the wooly mammoth had seen better days, long before anyone had ever wondered about the lure of islands or the value of beach-front property; the stage had been set for the first "hunters and gatherers" to begin arriving.

The first evidence of their presence, however, did not occur here for another three to five thousand years. While Europe was in the last stages of the Stone Age, when agriculture had developed but stone was still the main material for tools and weapons, the island where you find yourself, had no stones to speak of, which is why they began building a cottage industry around shell tools and utensils. And because of the abundance of fish, they didn't have to rely on growing broccoli or beets; the reverse of the corollary suggesting necessity to be the mother of invention - which applies to making shell hammers, but at this point in history, has not yet been said. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

1* Imagine how archeologists must feel sifting through a 12' square area of dirt for months or longer.