Accidents Happen

There was this question in Stackoverflow today about a leading caret (^) in the SHA of a commit. This is easily reecreatable as follows:

As the answer to the question explains, this is how boundary commits are represented in Git. A boundary commit is a commit that does not fall into the time-frame on which a command is executed. For example, if you use a parameter like –since=3.weeks, the commits before three weeks are considered as boundary commits. In the above scenario, it’s the root commit. According to the git-blame man page, you can use the –root option to not treat root commits as boundaries.