4 ideas
Hank Hannah, a Clovis-obsessed anthropologist, and his student excavate a spear point that unleashes a chain of events ending in a prehistoric prion-like plague. The dig, meant to recover the deep past, instead reenacts humanity's original role as the exterminating predator.
The novel argues that Homo sapiens' defining trait is over-consumption of every ecosystem it enters, from Clovis megafauna hunts to the modern present. The plague is less an accident than a mirror of a species that lives by depleting its hosts.
Clovis people are portrayed as the first to arrive and hunt North American megafauna to extinction roughly 13,000 years ago. Hannah's fixation on them becomes a way of reading present ecological collapse as a repeat of a very old pattern.
The narrator's academic detachment is exposed as its own kind of appetite: the drive to know and possess the past is continuous with the species' drive to consume. Curiosity is rendered as a hunger indistinguishable from the one that dooms them.