Folsom Projectile Blues

IDW Publishing makes Star Trek comics of various vintages, from Original Series, to Next Generation. Issue 3 of Star Trek of their current series involves the new movie continuity.

While on the way to drop of medical supplies, the Enterprise investigates an odd planetary phenomenon. Spock and his away team crash land on the planet (of course) and are attacked by what appear to be giants offscreen. Examining a left-behind spear, Spock makes this observation:



Folsom is a real place in New Mexico, and Folsom points are a real thing. This type of stone spearhead is very important to archaeology because the discovery of one of these points embedded within an extinct bison’s skeleton was the first definitive proof that humans were in North America during the Pleistocene Period, over ten thousand years ago. It was nice for the writer of the comic to include this piece of real archaeology in the comic. The problem is that Folsom points actually look like this:

Also, they are this big (or, more apt, this small):

From the Royal Alberta Museum. Scale is in centimeters!

Since it’s unlikely that the Spock, the Enterprise’s science officer, would not be so wrong in his assertion, my only conclusion is that Folsom points really are giant (even for giants) and shaped like trowels in the rebooted Star Trek universe.

2 thoughts on “Folsom Projectile Blues

  1. Dave says:

    It’s a real crying shame when a writer goes to the trouble to research something and then the artist doesn’t think it’s important enough to Google.

    The fact that the discussion takes up at least a full page of plot from the issue would’ve been enough to flag it as an important detail to me.

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