[Revised] Earth's history in the ChoM uni/multiverse

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Somes J
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[Revised] Earth's history in the ChoM uni/multiverse

Post by Somes J »

I think I've finally got the timeline to something that works well for the history I envision. This should be more-or-less the final form of Earth's history in the ChoM uni/multiverse. Everything past the Age of the Masters doesn't really touch directly on the setting at all, but it's something that may come up in tangenital materials.

Rather than post yet another revision in the original thread, I thought I'd just make a new thread for clarity.

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THE AGE OF EMERGENCE

2 MYA – Homo Erectus evolves.

1.3-1.2 MYA – Homo Heidelberginis/Antecessor evolves, begins to move out of Africa. The European branch will eventually become Neanderthals, while the African branch will become Homo Sapiens. A small population will also eventually penetrate East Asia and evolve into a third species, Homo Asiaticus, lost to the fossil record until the twenty-first century. This last species will eventually become the Masters.

400-200 KYA: Neanderthalis/Asiaticus/Sapiens divergence.

130-105 KYA: Eemian Interglacial. Last period of sustained warm, wet conditions on Earth before the Age of Man.

130-120 KYA: Eemian Warm Maximum period.


THE AGE OF THE MASTERS

130-125 KYA: Homo Asiaticus civilization begins to develop in the area that is now coastal China.

125 KYA: Masters’ (Homo Asiaticus) civilization begins to develop technology. Industrialization in the East/South China Sea region.

The Golden Age of the Masters. Master technological civilization thrives, though it is rather insular and never colonizes much beyond the coast of China. The Masters enslave other hominids and modify them using genetic engineering, creating a rather brutal caste society.

Masters discover the Gateway. It is a device, built by unknown hands, that allows travel between universes.

Masters’ civilization is destroyed in a massive war. Most of the Homo Asiaticus species is wiped out, along with most of their slaves. A small faction of them use the Gateway to flee to a parallel universe Earth. Unfortunately for them, the handful of slaves they take with them rebel, kill most of them, trash their equipment, and fleet into the wilderness.


THE LONG WINTER

125-90 KYA: The last of Homo Asiaticus gradually dies out, along with their various modified slave races. The future does not belong to them, but to the runty, skinny hominids that will one day call themselves Homo Sapiens. On the alternate world (ChoM World) the descendants of the Masters’ slaves experience an evolutionary radiation instead. The Masters there meet a similar fate.

105 KYA: Eemian Interglacial ends. The last Ice Age begins.

105-75 KYA: Fluctuating Climate Scheme. Fluctuating climate generally cooler and drier than present. Homo Sapiens begins moving out of Africa.

75-58 KYA: First Glacial Maximum of the Wurm. Sustained dry, cold conditions on Earth.

58-22 KYA: Fluctuating Climate Scheme. Fluctuating climate generally cooler and drier than present.

50-30 KYA: Homo Erectus dies out.

22-14 KYA: Last Glacial Maximum. Sustained dry, cold conditions on Earth.

20-15 KYA: The Neanderthals die out. The last serious competitor to Homo Sapiens has disappeared.


THE AGE OF MAN

14 KYA: End of Last Glacial Maximum. Warm, wet conditions prevail. Homo Sapiens begins to develop agriculture.

10.8 KYA: The Younger Dryas Cold Snap. Dry, cold conditions briefly return.

10 KYA: The Younger Dryas ends. Beginning of present warm period.

Homo Florensis dies out. Homo Sapiens is now the only hominid on Earth.

On Earth, the timeline is the same as real life history from this point on. On ChoM World, humans and Cave People begin to develop agriculture several thousand years before present.

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NOTES:

For the sake of brevity, dates are given in MegaYears and KiloYears.

Estimate for movement of Homo Heidelberginis/Antecessor out of Africa is based on the presence of Homo Antecessor remains in Atapuerca, Spain, 1.2 MYA. As far as I know there is no evidence that they ever got as far as Asia, but Homo Erectus managed it, so the idea of Homo Asiaticus doesn’t seem wildly implausible. The fossil record is, after all, very sketchy by nature and could easily exclude entire species, especially relatively rare ones. Indeed, it’s probably a good rule of thumb that the fossil record will give you an underestimate of a species’ lifespan, and I fudge the disappearances of the various hominids accordingly.

I realize that having the Gateway be built by “unknown hands” seems like a horrible cliché but really, anybody who could build something like that should not need slaves. Of course, arguably the same can be said for anybody who can do sophisticated genetic engineering, but that’s not quite as horribly schizophrenic as a slavocratic regime run by people who can play with spacetime. I haven't decided who built the Gateway yet, but I'm thinking maybe another Heidelberginis-descended species in yet another parallel universe, who developed an advanced civilization hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Dates for ice age climate events are based on this excellent site: http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html

Date for extinction of Homo Erectus based on the discovery of Homo Erectus fossils in Java dating back to around 50,000 years ago.

The estimate for the first human movements out of Africa is taken from William James Burroughs’s Climate Change In Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, which is available on Google Books.
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Re: [Revised] Earth's history in the ChoM uni/multiverse

Post by Somes J »

A final revision. I've decided to move the Age of the Masters to the late Eemian Warm Maximum - 125,000 years ago. The Eemian Warm Maximum is one of my favorite periods of the Pleistocene, and I've always wanted to have something interesting happening there.

There is actually a reason for all this ridiculous amount of revisioning. A while ago, before I concieved of Children of Man, I read some interesting materials on Boskops Man, a fossil hominid from South Africa that was believed to display "super-modern" features (the same features that distinguish Homo Sapiens from other hominids - only more extreme than found in Homo Sapiens). Some people had suggested that Boskops Man was a hominid that was actually more advanced and smarter than modern humans. Here's some interesting reading material on it (note: it was written in the 1950s so it sounds kind of weird). Now I believe it's now thought that Boskops was just a normal Homo Sapiens, but it got me thinking, what if we actually found something like that? A creature that would fit right into those elementary school "ascent of man" pictures, but would logically go ahead of us on it. Evolution's a pretty random process, so it doesn't strike me as at all unlikely that a cognitively superior hominid might have existed in the past, but gotten wiped out for some reason, leaving us to inherit the Earth. I love the idea of exploring the social ramifications of such a discovery on modern humanity - we do so like to think of ourselves as the smartest creatures to ever exist on the planet, it would be interesting to see how people would react to finding out this wasn't so.

Anyway, the idea seemed real interesting to me, and since Children of Man has sort of a paleontological bent I figured it would be a good idea to integrate it into the setting. Unfortunately, I could never really find a space on the timeline that worked well for my hypothetical Pleistocene superiors (I like to call them Homo Sapientor - "Wiser Man"), and eventually I just had to conceed they didn't fit very well in ChoM-verse. At which point I decided to stop trying to make room for them between the arrival of anatomically modern humans (which they would have evolved from) and the rise of the Masters, and just put the heyday of the Masters where I originally wanted it, in the Eemian Warm Maximum.

Pity, as I really like the idea. I'll have to integrate it into some other universe.
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Re: [Revised] Earth's history in the ChoM uni/multiverse

Post by Magister Militum »

I have to say that I really like the concept behind the Masters and Homo Asiaticus. The real question is who or what precisely built the gateways?
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