Explore an Era:
Holocene
11,000 BC - Today
Climate warms and glaciers melt |
Seas spread over the land |
Abundant deer, rabbits, bear, waterfowl |
Native Americans |
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The Delaware Bay | 11000 BC-3000 BC
8500 BC
Because of the wide variety of stone used to make their tools, the Native American no longer needed to settle near a certain Quarry. The north people used rocky outcrops as shelter. The people further down the peninsula gathered near wooded swamps in "macroband base camps", that contained as many as twenty to thirty families. Deer, rabbits, bear and waterfowl were abundant. The stone points of this Archaic period were lighter than those made by the Paleo-Indians. They killed the animals with a stone point lashed into a wooden shaft. They also devoloped a spear throwing lever that enhanced its speed, allowing them to hunt faster game.
7000 BC
Delaware Bay was formed as a result of transgression, a geologic term, meaning the sea spreading over the land. The transgression was the result of a combination of regional crustal subsidence and eutasy (change in sea level caused by melting of glaciers and tectonic movement.
6500 BC
Estuaries could not develop because of the continued rise of the sea about 1 inch per decade. Drill cores taken dating to this period from the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays do not contain shellfish; however, there is evidence that shad and herring were already swimming up the rivers every spring to spawn.