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The Fox and the Ptarmigan
Tweet Topic Started: Jun 7 2013, 05:39 PM (199 Views)
Zirojtan Jun 7 2013, 05:39 PM Post #1
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The scene is Doggerland, 176,000 years before present, on the banks of a rather larger river unknown to us today. It is high spring, and thousands of Atlantic Salmon are finally completing their 200 miles journey up river to spawn. The water is nearly freezing, having warmed little in its own 200 miles journey southwest from a massive glacial lake that is fed by rivers that we would know as the Rhine and Thames. This lake, in our own timeline, will one day become the North Sea, and the overspill that is this great river will one day carve the English Channel.
The annual event of the salmon run is an important one for animals in the area. As you might imagine, Earth 176,000 years ago was considerably colder than present. Much of Europe specifically, is in fact subarctic in climate. Animals here need as much insulation and energy as possible to survive in this harsh world, and the salmon run is a fine opportunity for a wide variety of animals gain vital nutrients and fat stores, as well as learn hunting skills. Therefore, as it does every year, it has brought a show of wildlife to the shores to participate in this grand spectacle, that would rival even the finest of National Geographic's nature documentaries. Bears, eagles, owls, seals have come to take their share, and all manner of scavengers have arrived on the scene. Even the occasional Homotherium can't help but get a little wet for a taste of spring's best.




About a mile from the shore of the river, a Mountain Hare is sleeping in his den. It is mid day, and as a nocturnal animal, he has no business being up at this time of day. It's too dangerous, as there are too many diurnal predators on the prowl. One such diurnal predator, a 9 month old, itinerant amber fox, has failed in an attempt to catch a ptarmigan some 300 metres away from the hare's den. He picks up the scent of the hare, and follows that scent to its den, where he finds our little hare sleeping peacefully. But there is a problem: this hare has dug his den in such away that the fox cannot easily fit his head inside to get at him. As he tries to reposition himself so as to get at the hare, with the terrified hare trapped in its own home, another predator takes notice of the scene. A loan male scimitar cat, in search of his own coalition to join, has taken notice. He is hungry, and without his own coalition with which to cooperatively hunt the large prey which his kind specializes in killing, he has to settle for smaller meals. The trouble is, he hasn't been able to catch anything bigger than a hare here and there for days.
It only takes a mere grunt for the fox to instantly pull its head out of the den, and notice the 400 lb cat with a look of hunger on his face. As quick as his head came out of the whole, the fox runs for his life, and subsequently, so does the hair. The Homotherium darts to its right... but that's not the way he had intended on going. His hunger has clouded his mind and his senses, and having meant to go for the fox, who has gone in the opposite direction, he has gone after the hare by accident. He chases the hair a good 400 metres until something infests his nose – the smell of dead salmon. The smell is so powerful and delicious that it stops him in his tracks. It's almost soothing. As he has stopped however, our little hare has gotten away, but not before taking this scimitar cat off of his historical course. Of course, the wind has confused him, as it has blown that scent a mile from its source in his direction, but until now, the scimitar cat had thought that he was actually too far from the river to be realistically concerning himself with the salmon run at the moment. Maybe after he had something else to eat, but not while his belly ached as it did. But that scrumptious smell seemed to have the power to sooth his stomach, and so he pressed on for the next few hours, determined to find the source, and take a bite of it. All the way, memories from last year's salmon run ran through his head. He had been alone for two years now, after the death of his brother due to injuries sustained challenging an older, and far more experienced alpha male for mating rights of his harem. He and his brother had always been able to cooperatively hunt to take down prey large enough to feed the two of them. Saiga, sheep, deer, even horses... those were the days, but no longer. The past two years, as he did not have his brother to cooperatively hunt to take down larger animals, the salmon run had been an important annual feast for him. If he couldn't catch a fish, then he would just scavenge someone else's kill. He was not quite the hunter that his brother was, but he had a very powerful roar, and that roar had even scared off a cave bear last year (who herself, was scavenging a brown bear's kill). Memories of last year bustled through his head as his feline mind tried to size up the possible challenge ahead. Although a cave bear had succumbed to him last year, such an event was a fluke, and that bear was surely a coward, and so the cat knew that attempting to scavenge the kills of larger animals wasn't a good plan. He planned to start out the same way he did every year: looking for the smaller animals. Owls and eagles who were stupid enough to eat their fish on the shore were no match for him, and were the most easily scared off.
But he was going to have to wait until he got there to actually formulate a plan. Once he did, he was a little disappointed, since there were few smaller animals at the section of the river that he arrived on. In fact, there was only one Golden Eagle perched in a pine tree on the river's shore. The only other thing nearby was a large brown bear and her cubs. After passing grimaces at the bear, the cat traveled up river to see if he might get lucky. An eagle, an owl, or even a loan wolf would be perfect... but his search was to no avail. As the day went on, he began to realize that if he wanted to eat, he may just have to get his paws wet, and catch his own fish – it's not like there weren't thousands of salmon swimming in the river as he searched for food to scavenge. Along the way, he saw seals and otters in the water, but he knew that as long as the two were in their element, that they were two quick for him, and so he didn't even bother.




Just as he is about to give up, and attempt on honest meal, something silvery catches his eye. Its color contrasts the black and brown colors of the river's shore, so it is easy to spot, but more importantly, it looks out of place. If it were a rock, one could expect it to be a similar color to the sediment, but as the cat got a little closer, he was able to make out distinctive dark spots all over the silvery surface of this object, and that's when it hit him – it wasn't a rock, it was a seal. Not just any seal is this, but it's a pregnant female Harbor Seal. She's become temporarily stranded from her group, as her pregnancy has left her in need of a little more rest than the rest seemed to interested in having. They left her there on the shore, but she doesn't really mind... there were no predators in the area when she left, and she should've been able to catch up with them very easily once she's gained some rest. This seal has gambled in allowing herself to be separated from her group, but the gamble seemed worth it as she is sure that she is closer to the water's edge than she actually is. As the cat has now spotted her, he has begun stalking. He is no longer moving carelessly, but instead, every step, and muscle moved is done with extreme caution – he is not going to wake her up and allow her the chance to scoot herself back into the water, where she'll surely get away.
God, just look at her... a clumsy, fat sack of meat that had no business on land! Oh how easy this could be if he could just keep quiet, and how worth the reward. As as soon as he could choke the life out of her with that gargantuan bite, she would fill his stomach for days! The very thought made him smack his lips.




Just four metres now... it was perfect. The seal snorted in her sleep and turned her head in the opposite direction. She was completely unaware. If he was ever going to have her, it was going to be now. So, finally close enough to make his move, the cat lunges at the seal at full speed, but just as he does, a sound coming from his left distracts him – like rocks being crushed under the feet of something large...




No, no, no, no, no, no! NO!




Just as our cat has started his pounce, a very large British Brown Bear has jumped out of the treeline, coming crashing down onto the river worn rocks below with enough noise to wake the seal, and coming nearly within reach of her seconds before the cat due to the longer reach of its legs. The cat continues at the seal, despite the fact that she's been woken, only to come crashing into a very surprised bear. The crash of these two great predators is a meeting of fate, as it knocks the bear off course, just as it is about to wrap its twelve in paws around her. As the bear regains its balance and turns to meet the scimitar cat with a powerful swipe of its massive claws, the seal utilizes the seconds that she has to escape, turning herself clumsily around and hopping into the river.




The seal is lost, and the world will never be the same because of it...
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Our Timeline


In our timeline, the aforementioned itinerant amber fox caught the ptarmigan in question, as it didn't see him in time to get away. Because the fox caught the ptarmigan, it was able to feast, and the hair was able to sleep away the remainder of the daylight in its den without any bother. Furthermore, as the fox was not awkwardly trying to fit its head into the hare's den at the moment that our scimitar cat came onto the scene, the cat took no notice of the den, and continued scanning the landscape until he caught site of a roe deer, which he followed another good mile away from the river and killed. When the cat followed the deer, he was not there to disrupt the bear when he came out of the treeline after the seal, and our seal, who we'll call Silkie, died there on the banks of the Fleuve Manche. Therefore, a chain of events that forever changed history died with her: Neanderthals remained specialized hunters in forested environments, and never left Eurasia, only to be out-competed by and absorbed into the societies of anatomically modern humans.


This Timeline


Our point of departure is something as simple as the turn of a head. The ptarmigan has looked to its right, and not to its left, and has seen the fox, and subsequently taken to flight in time to escape the fox. Because of this, the fox bothered the hare, and the scimitar cat stumbled upon the awkward scene, chased the hare instead of the fox, and caught scent of the salmon run in Europe's greatest river. As he was at precisely the right place at precisely the right time, Silkie got away.


Now, you may be wondering, how can a pregnant seal's escape from the grasp of a cat or a bear change the world? Well, location in this timeline is key. When the cat crashed into the bear as the two simultaneously tried to take the seal, it was within side of the intersection of the Fleuve Manche and the Seine, on what we would recognize as the French side of the river. When Silkie got back in the water, she swam right upriver and turned east, swimming as far away as she could from her death. This is significant because seals did not normally swim up the Seine at all, because the Seine was not the primary source of salmon, and they would only ever travel this far inland after salmon in first place, as their habitat is marine. She becomes disoriented in the Seine, and by the time she is ready to give birth in the summer, she is so deep into the Seine River Basin that reuniting with her rookery is no longer feasible, as they are hundreds of miles away at sea... where seals belong. Although Silkie is without the safety of her group, she finds that there are a number of rewards in her new riverine habitat, among them, she does not compete on as wide a scale for fish. See, as I'm sure anyone who knows anything about nature is aware, a seal is far from being the only predator at sea. Although harbor seals rarely, if ever venture more than 20 kilometres offshore, they still compete with dolphins, porpoise, narwhals, belugas, seabirds, and sharks. At sea, they are also predated by orca, sharks, and polar bears. But here, her only real competitors were otters, and her only predators on land. The river was ripe with fish, and lacking in competition, and although she was confused and alone, she was content. This was a much safer place for her young pup than the open ocean... or so she thought.


Her presence in the Seine River means everything because of the fact that it was not the average range of her kind, and so brought her into the territory of a very different kind of predator – Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Now, recent archeological discoveries have successfully demonstrated that neanderthals hunted marine mammals, especially in Iberia, but how they hunted them is still a mystery. It is supposed by many, given their primitive tool kit, that they waited until seals came ashore to birth their pups, and then perhaps stabbed or clubbed them to death where they were easily accessible, and outside of their natural element. But this is not how seals will be hunted from now on...


No. Silkie's presence this far south with her young pup presents an interesting problem when winter comes about, as her riverine habitat begins to freeze over. True, the fish are now moving slower, and are far easier to catch, but finding open spaces to breathe, as she herself was not a fish, started to become difficult, until finally the river was completely frozen over, and there were no holes to be found. She quickly learned how to search for thin areas in the ice however, where she and her pup could break through and catch some air. This behavior, which she had learned as a pup at sea from her own mother, caught the attention of an 8 year old neanderthal boy. And so begins the story of how neanderthals crossed the ice to the Americas.
Becoming a Man




Because the Neanderthals in this area at this point in time only used verbal speech for commands, and complex sign languages to communicate, we cannot give this boy a proper name, as his name was a very specific sign in the sign language of his 16-person band. This language is a dialect of a wider language that is spoken by about 30 bands within the area of central and northern France, totaling out at about 250-350 speakers. As these bands rarely come into contact with each other at all, their languages are highly divergent from one another, and given the short lifespans of the species speaking them, linguistic evolution happens at a much faster rate. The language from which the current one originated was spoken less than 1,000 years ago, but has become so different from its ancestor as to be completely unrecognizable. Because of the size of his band, the language can also afford to create a specific sign attributed to him without associating said sign with a noun, verb, or adjective.
But despite our inability to translate his proper name into writing, as it is wholly individual to he himself, this boy is the center piece of our timeline, as it is what goes on in his young head that makes all the difference in the end.




He is 8 years old, but a far cry in maturity from what we would recognize to be an 8 year old boy. As a neanderthal, he is maturing about 15% faster than modern human children, and has already hit puberty at a young age, even for neanderthals, as he was teased during the summer about his first pubic hair by his uncles and his father. If we were to see him, we would see a boy of 11, or even 12, and he certainly wouldn't be something that you look twice at. Although we would not consider his nose to be oversized, as we would with some of his close relatives, the mental protuberance of his chin is nearly nonexistent, and his brow is thick, and protruding. He is skinny, but built stocky, and very muscular for an 8 year old as his lifestyle is very demanding. He has thick, frazzled read hair, blue eyes, and worn, stubby, yellowish-brown teeth. However, despite what we would consider less than attractive features, his family thinks he is quite adorable, especially because he is currently the only child in the group.
Like many neanderthal children, he is very curious about the wider world in which he lives, but that curiosity with many of his kind dies out as they grow older, drowned in life's necessities. As mentioned previously, his kind mature quickly, and die young by our standards. Their lives are as brutal and harsh as we can imagine. They live in a wild world, where only the fittest will survive; therefore, there is no time for higher thinking, unless it has to do with improving your chances at survival. Prehistoric Europe is chuck full of predators that think neanderthals taste delicious, and nearly 200,000 years before the invention of the bow, taking down a prey animal is a difficult feat. The primary weapon at their disposal is a stone-tipped spear, which they can and do throw, but more often use in close combat with their prey, as they lack other methods of taking down their prey. If the spear is thrown and lost, then prey will not be caught, and the thrower will starve. Furthermore, if the spear is thrown and fails to deal critical damage to the prey animal, then the hunter is without a weapon. While it is not easy, it is cost effective to engage the prey head on, as neanderthals often do. But something is about to change...




Our boy and his band have come up on the frozen banks of the Yonne River. This area of France was not the temperate, broad-leaf forest habitat that it is today 176,000 years ago, however. No, the majority of France was a cool, treeless, semidesert, which was the perfect environment for the animal that has brought these neanderthals so far north – the saiga. The saiga are migrating south from the steppes of Doggerland for the winter into France's semideserts. Although the whole of France will see snow before the year is over, as this area already has, it is a far cry from the severe temperatures and bitter winds that have made their summer pastures uninhabitable. They are en route to the semidesert pastures that surround the southern Loire River, which does not normally freeze, and will subsequently provide them with the necessary moisture to get through the winter.
The band has migrated some 100 miles from their regular range to catch tired saiga on their annual trek south. They are far easier pickings here than they would be if they approached them in their winter pastures, where they will be well-rested and at the top of their game. This annual event is a very difficult one for the neanderthal bands in the area of Central France, and can actually cost many of them their lives, as it brings them out of their forested pockets and into the open country, where they too are vulnerable to predation. But the saiga hunt is a sort of coming of age trial. Of course one would think that as a race of stocky built brutes, neanderthals would better appreciate the slaying of an animal matching or exceeding their strength. So, why is hunting something the size of a large dog so meaningful? Because saiga antelope are extremely nimble, quick little creatures, and challenging them on their open range makes for the climactic show of hunting prowess. If you can be quiet enough to sneak up on one in broad day light, and kill it up close, you're ready to be a hunter, and a man. For the sake of realism however, these animals are hunted during their winter migration, when it is more plausible for young boys to catch them.
Our boy has begun the early stages of puberty, and the band elder has already examined him, concluding that he will reach sexual maturity in the next few years (probably by the time he is 10). As this is a very harsh world, where both he and the elder (who is his great uncle) may die before the onset of spring, his passage to manhood must be accomplished as soon as possible. There just isn't time to wait. So they have come north to make sure that their boy becomes a man before death takes him. For a neanderthal boy his age, he's in top physical shape, and has been training hard for the saiga hunt since his pubescent situation became a reality to the band earlier in the year (once it warmed up, and clothes were no longer necessary). Because this animal isn't as big as say, a deer, he will be going solo, and will have to bring back the entire carcass to present to his band. Once this is done, he will eat the animal's eyes, paint his own eyes in its blood, and the band will divide up the portions equally amongst each other, celebrating his manhood. The hunt will commence the following day, as the river has frozen thick enough for the saiga to cross.




“Do not try and take a bull... he will surely gore you, you'll bleed out on the snow.” His mother's hands tell him as her brother uses a sharpened deer antler to cut his dreading hair.
“A bull would be most glorious, woman. Let the boy choose his own kill. He alone knows his own strength, and if he thinks that he can match the bull on the open plains, then let him.”
“The glory of killing a bull is not worth the price of his death on our people...” His mother signed to her brother.
“Chuki!” He says to her, this time verbally. The word was a command used to tell others to stop talking, usually used in the context of shut up and get to work. The boy's mother was cutting up the skin of a mountain hare, killed just days ago. By the end of the day, it was supposed to make her son a hat that he could use to warm his ears, as his shoulder length hair was falling to the ground in clumps as they spoke. Her speaking had required her to put down what she was doing, and her brother was letting her know that there was too much conversation, and not enough work going on.
“I just don't want him hurt.” She signed. Her brother rolled his eyes.
“And if he kills a bull, then we can use the horns for spears. Or perhaps we can mash them, and use them next time you're with child? Stop fretting. You only have a few hours to be done with that hat, and I'm already done cutting his hair!” He said as the last dreaded lock fell to the ground. He ran his fingers through the short, dusty remainder of the boys scalp roughly to tease him, and he jerked his head away and smacked his uncles hands.
“Stop!” his hands told him sharply, “Don't play with my head as you would your dick!”
“You would know all about playing with your dick, wouldn't you, boy?” His uncle signed to him. His mother let out a scoff, but the sound amongst their kind was recognized as a form of laughter. Some jokes transcend millennia, and it was enough to make our young neanderthal blush.
“Of course. I have not had a woman...”
“And neither shall you until you bring a saiga to this camp!” His mother interrupted, signing furiously, “A woman will not have you unless you can provide for your offspring.”
“I can kill a deer...”
“Any brute can kill a deer.” His uncle told him, “it is easy to find cover in the woodlands and sneak up. Besides, a deer will only run so far before stopping to look back. Everyone knows this. A saiga does not look back. You must be quiet, you must be strong, and above all, you must be quick. It is the ability to combine silence, strength, and speed that will make the difference when the times are harsh. A woman knows this. But then, a woman also knows that undescended testicles will not make her children. So you're going to have to weight a year or so for that...”
“They work well enough for his hands, brother, and that's going to have to be sufficient for now. Perhaps if we find another band while he is away...” His mother said.
“Perhaps...”
“I am sick of the two of you talking about my body as if I were not here in it to listen!” The boy said, “My balls work, and so does my dick. Give me a woman now and I'll show you. I will give her the seed of the best hunter ever known!”
“Indeed...” signed his uncle, “Prove yourself today, and we'll see about that dick of yours afterward...”
“Do you want to see?” He reached for his loincloth.
“No!” His mother grabbed his hand and set it at his side. “Whether or not your dick works is irrelevant. A woman will not have you if you cannot hunt. My first husband was a fool of a hunter, and when the deer were scarce we ate hares and lemmings. I ran away and found your father.”
“And now father is dead...”
“Yes, but he died hunting the mammoth, providing for all of us. That mammoth bled out, and fed us all winter.”
“But a mammoth is a large animal!”
“Yes, but it is the speed and precision with which you will hunt the saiga that will kill a mammoth. A mammoth is a gargantuan creature, with skin as thick as bone. In order to kill one, you must be able to strike at precisely the right spot before the animal kills you.”
“So father was not fast enough...”
“Your father was a well-worn man.” Said his uncle, “He'd been alive at least 28 summers or so. He had killed 2 mammoths previously. A man of such a ripe old age can be excused for moving a little slower, and he died bravely providing for you. May you be the hunter that your father was.”
“He will be.” His mother told his uncle.
“I will kill a bull then...” The boy said.
“No need. A female saiga is every bit as quick and alert as a male. Killing a bull will only prove that you can avoid being gored, which you've proven hunting deer with me. No need for unnecessary risks.” His mother smiled at him.
Hunting, Slugs, Saiga, and Lions




“The saiga has an eye for movement, and as I said, they don't stop to look back like a deer. It is crucial that you move as slow as possible so as not to scare them. If you move slow enough, they will not suspect you, and you will be able to get within 4 times nine fingers of one. When you strike, you must be quick, like a cat, and strike with the utmost precision. Strike from behind, beneath the foreleg. This will disrupt the animal's breathing, and it will die quickly without spoiling the meat. Do not stab the animal in the belly. It will die slowly, and possibly get away, and it will spoil the meat. Remember, to become a man is to prove your capability to feed your family. There is more to hunting than just killing an animal.” The signs of his uncle replayed over and over in the boy's head as he lay huddled in the snow, inching ever closer to his target. There were literally thousands of saiga walking about, as far as the eye could see, even if it were during the daylight. They were prowling the snow for any shoots of grass that remained, as it was still autumn, and the early snow and ice had not yet driven all of the plants to hibernation. Still, their probosces seemed to help them dig into the snow well enough, allowing them to reach the hibernating grasses beneath it.
They were positioned about a 2 miles down river and across from his band's camp, and they had hardly moved all day long. Weren't they supposed to be on a migration? Don't migratory animal's constantly move? Why hadn't they crossed the river yet? It didn't matter. The animals' sedentary behavior, whatever was causing it, was to the boy's advantage. But patience was a virtue in this situation, and he had learned it many times when hunting deer in their home range 100 miles south. He knew how to move quietly, but he had always had cover before. The trunk of a tree, a fallen log, a shrub... now however, he was on the open plain. He was in plain sight, but had spent literally the entire day inching closer, and closer to his prey. He was within about 20 feet of a female, a distance he would recognize as 4 times 10 plus 5 fingers. The males all seemed to be densely packed within the interior of the herd for some reason, making the idea of killing one implausible. He knew that at the right sound, or the slightest wrong movement of his that set off suspicion, that the entire herd could mobilize in seconds and leave him in a cloud of dust and snow.




But there was something else that had caught the boy's eye several times during the day. As he had crossed the frozen river on foot, he had noticed that there was a deep hole in the ice. As he had never been this far north where the rivers freeze every winter, he had never seen anything like it. What had made the hole? He had certainly seen the small holes of otters in the thin layers of ice that ran over some ponds in his home country, but never anything this large. The ice was far too thick, and if it were an otter that had made this hole it would have to be at least twice the size of your standard otter. Whatever it was, he couldn't stop thinking about it, even as his eyes were locked on a specific saiga female who had been laying down for quite some time now. Her eyes opened and closed periodically every few minutes, and sometimes she would bring her head up to look around, each time she did sending a nervous shock through the boy's chest. It's not that she had heard anything, she was just doing this every so often to check for predators.
But as quick as the saiga could open her eyes, she all of the sudden jumped to her feet. A terrible rumbling sound started to erupt from the other side of the heard, and like a stream of dominoes falling over line by line, the herd was mobilizing. FUUUUUUUUCK! Right? Our boy jumped to his feet, tightly gripping his spear, his blood flowing so fast and hard that he felt as though it would burst from somewhere in his head. Several saiga literally jumped in surprise at his presence, which told him that he had still had the element of surprise, and that something else had set the herd off. Was it just time to move? Had he spent too much time trying to get close to them? Or was it something else? Another predator perhaps? Either way, it didn't matter. If he didn't attack now, he would quite possibly have to wait till the following year, and he had no intention of enduring that kind of embarrassment in his band, nor doing this again. He had never had to spend so much time trying to get close to an animal in his life, and to him, this was simply ridiculous. That in mind, and with his blood flow up, he lunged at his target with a thrust of his spear, but something caught his attention in that fatal moment out of the corner of his eye – something had come out of the whole in the river. Not only had something come out, but it was lying next to it... and there were two of them, not just the one. They looked like giant black slugs... but... wait! NO! As his attention was not on the kill, he missed the chance for a second stab. Yes he stabbed the saiga, but in the hip, and not deep enough to impede her movement. There was ONE critical second that he had to get again, this time under the foreleg, as instructed by his uncle, but he had missed the opportunity. She was now within six times ten fingers of him (about 20 feet), as was the rest of her herd. In the distance ahead, he could see something moving... lions. Not just one or two either. There appeared to be quite a few of them. Maybe... ten or more? Was this the effort of a single pride? Ten hunting lionesses could mean twice as many lions in the pride, which spelled trouble. Saiga antelope were a puny meal for lions, and one or two of them DEFINITELY was not going to feed a pride of that size. The lions were probably only hunting them out of desperation, and our boy knew he'd be looking pretty good if he didn't start moving himself.
The herd had started to cross the river, and theoretically, the lions wouldn't follow them for fear of the ice breaking under their weight. However, the weight of at least a thousand or more saiga didn't spell stability for the ice in question. But if he didn't get across the river, there was going to be nothing between a super pride of lions and our boy, so he ran began running as quickly as he could for its shore. The two black river slugs that had been lounging were long gone, then again, so to was the ice... or it was about to be. As the herd moved in panic across the snow covered ice, a terrible crackling noise began to infest the air, and water began to visibly spurt from cracks as the ice suddenly shifted in several places at once. Saiga stopped in their tracks as the freezing water shot up in their faces with the first cracks that allowed for its movement, and they began to snort, grunt, and cry out as the river started to move beneath their feet. Some slipped and fell into the water as the ice separated, frantically trying to keep their heads above the surface and kicking for dear life to get to the other side before their blood froze in its veins, and others hopped from ice chunk to ice chunk, successfully making the cross, while others still were crushed as the river literally broke apart, smashing the heads of many that were in the water, catching horns of bulls and dragging them helplessly to their deaths.
All of this happening within just a few seconds... the lions had trapped a significant portion of the herd against the river, and many had dispersed in the boy's direction, one of them running its throat directly into his spear. However he wasn't out of the woods in the least. Just as he had speared one bull by chance, another knocked him clean off his feet with a botched leap before he could appreciate his kill. The moment his bruised little head was able to rise from the snow, he noticed a very large lioness headed right for him. He wanted to get up and move, but there was no time at all. She was literally right there, in his face. But to his surprise and relief, she was jumping over him after the saiga bull that had just crashed into him. Her hind paws landed directly on his shoulders as she grasped the back of the animal with her powerful forepaws and jaws. He could here it crying out in a very deep, nasally cry as brought it to the ground, her hind claws sinking right through the animal skin's that made up the boy's clothing and into his skin for grip. He pounded on her legs with all his might until they moved, the lioness not noticing that there was something larger than what was already in her grasp just beneath her, just knowing that there was an annoyance that was distracting her from her kill.
The boy got up to all fours, desperately grasping for his spear somewhere in the bloody snow – it was lying next to the saiga bull on the ground next to him, that was coughing and choking on its own blood. But as soon as he could grab it, he noticed two other lionesses approaching him faces clean of anything by their light colored fur and snow. The lionesses had not yet tasted blood, and the boy could see very plainly by the way their eyes were focused on him that he was on the menu. He picked up his spear and got to his feet as quickly as possible, but the two lionesses didn't seem fazed by his puny little weapon. One of them roared at him, a sound that when combined with the stink of a thousand deaths on her breath was enough to make the boy shrink inside. His fear was plainly visible, and the animals were picking up on it. He jabbed his spear at her, which caused her to move evasively backward and sideways, but as he kept jabbing at the two of them, one of them swiped at his spear, knocking it aside. The boy hadn't lost grip, but the sheer power of the blow that the lioness had dealt... if she had thumbs, she could break him in half easily.
It didn't make much sense to fight... he was sure he was going to die... or was he? The river was still breaking up to his left, but there was ice enough to stand on. Perhaps he had a chance? But the ice could break, and he would either be carried down river on it, or in the freezing water, to certain death of course. But freezing to death in the river sounded a little more appealing than being pulled apart by lions, so our boy makes the jump. The lionesses try to follow him, but his impact is enough to break the ice, and with a lunge of his spear, she is deterred once again, one half on the ice as it begins to move, and the other on the shore. As the ice separates from the shore, she falls into the water, climbing back onto the banks of the Yonne wet and cold. Our boy has gotten away... but to what avail? On a piece of ice flowing slowly down the river? Sure, he's out of reach of any predators on land, but how's he going to eat? He can't jump in the water, because that would surely be suicidal. He's over a mile away from his band's camp, and would never reach them in time. No, he has to wait until his little ice raft runs ashore somewhere, and how long will that be?




Well, it wasn't more than an hour actually, but to him, it felt like days, even though it was obvious that a day had not passed because it was still plainly night time. He had the luck of landing on the other side of the river as well, the side that his band was on. But at the same time, he had not been so lucky. He had killed a saiga, yet because a very large pride of lions had ruined his hunt, he had only escaped with his life, and not with his prize. The saiga bull he had killed was food for the lions, and not for his band. What was everyone going to say? Would they even believe his story? Did the story even matter in the first place? He knew that other predators could sabotage hunts, but he had always hunted at least with mother, so this had never been a problem. This was his opportunity to prove himself, that he alone could hunt large prey successfully, and he had failed. As he came to the snowy river shore, feelings of guilt filled his mind, and he felt sick. Not knowing what else to do, he sat down, and began to cry. As the tears filled his eyes, he tried to hold them back: “Men don't cry...” He thought to himself. But then again, he wasn't a man, was he? So crying was actually perfectly reasonable. As neanderthal society was rather egalitarian, with both men and women hunting and gathering, it was not much of an insult for a man to be called a cunt, or anything else associated with the other gender. Instead, the worst insult, was to be told that you could not hunt, and so the boy repeated this over and over in his head: “You can't hunt, you can't hunt, you can't hunt...” He had failed totally, and in his mind, there was no going back to his band.
Learning To Live Alone In A Very Big World








As I'm sure you can imagine, our boy had over dramatized the situation rather drastically. Of course he could've gone back to his band, and they would've followed the Saiga that had crossed and sent him out in a couple of days, but that had slipped everyone's minds to explain to him. His entire life he had been built up for this pivotal moment in his life: when he would take a saiga and become a man. He had indeed taken a saiga, and a bull nonetheless, but taking one meant nothing if you could not bring it back to the band. The whole theory behind this test of a hunter's skill was to prove his ability to provide for his family. He knew that very well, and it was for this reason that he didn't want to go back and face them.
His 20 year old mother wept for many days over the loss of her son, and she would have many dreams for the rest of her life about finding her son. Each dream was different, but every one of them ended the same, with her cradling him in her arms, signing: “I thought I lost you.” Right before waking up to the reality that he was gone. Over the rest of her very short life (in our terms), it never once occurred to her that her son was alive. Surely, he was dead. She would go on to have two more children, and when uur boy eventually found his band a few years later at the age of 15, he saw that his mother had already had another child, and thinking that she had forgotten him, he didn't get close enough to them to be noticed.




But the next few days of his life are by far what is the most significant, as a meeting that was prevented in our timeline was made possible in this one.




First things first, he has to eat. So he goes about tracking hares for the next few days and eating those while he contemplates his rather childish decision never to return to his band. Hares are a very fine source of protein, but are so high in protein and low in carbohydrates that they have to be consumed with something else. He was also able to get a badger, and even a few stoats here and there, but he still needed some good plants. Plants were a smaller staple of the neanderthal diet than our own, but still an important one, and difficult to find in the present environment, especially in winter. For awhile he found himself digging in the snow for things like thistles, but he was able to find a spruce tree after the first day and a half, chewing the needles and what seeds were left. All the while, the night of his saiga hunt played over and over again in his head. He had accepted that it wasn't his fault how horribly wrong everything had gone, but the complexity of the situation was what in his mind was preventing him from going back to the band. He didn't know that his family would give him another chance in a few days, and he thought that the shame of his first saiga hunt would follow him for the rest of his life – as if it was even that big of a deal. Sure, he might get laughed at, and some of his uncles might not have believed his tale of how events had unfolded, specifically the part about having killed a saiga in all the chaos and not having been able to bring it back to camp. The presence of the lions was at least evident by the claw marks on his shoulders...




Oh well... right? As our boy's hunger became a growing issue however, realizing that subsisting on such petty prey was not going to be enough to keep him alive for long, one thing kept playing over in his head: the big black slug on the ice. What was that? It certainly didn't look like anything he had ever seen before, but then again, he hadn't gotten that good of a look at it. Was it some sort of gigantic river slug, or was it maybe something else? A fish that likes to spend time out of water, or perhaps some sort of overgrown and immensely obese otter? He had known otters to break holes in river or pond ice to escape the water, but he had never seen one so large. Maybe the distance had messed with his vision somehow... maybe this, maybe that... the saiga hunt was over, he was living on his own, and he might just die any day now, so why not go solve the mystery before he was dead?




When it was mentioned that our boy had floated a few hours down the river, let me clarify as to the fact that he had traveled no more than a mile down river. The River Yonne after all, is not, and was not particularly fast flowing at the time. Furthermore, the herd of saiga trampling across the ice at the speeds that they had only had the power to break up so much of the ice, and after a week or so, the ice had largely recovered. Remember that this was just before the Warthe Stage of the Saalian Glaciation; there were “permanent” glaciers within miles of the Thames River that swallowed up Ireland, Scandinavia, all but a shard of Britain, and much of the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. The ice was retracting, as it did all the way to the shores of Denmark during the Warthe Stage, but Northern France was still as Canada's Northwest Territories is to Nunavut today in many respects. So, refreezing the Yonne was no great feat for mother nature at the time. This meant that Silkie the seal was making use of breathing holes once again not long after our boy traveled back up river.




Of course, he saw her, and her pup lounging on the shore before the river froze again. He had never seen anything quite like her either. This time, he had gotten a better look, which only heightened his curiosity as to just what exactly she was. She vaguely resembled some sort of oversized otter. But otters didn't have flippers, nor did they lack tails, and they certainly had smaller eyes, and visible ears. That, and the coloration of their fur was distinctly different. Her obesity seemed to make her awkward on land, and yet, every time the boy came for her or the pup with his spear, both escaped into the river with ease... until the ice returned. At this point in time, the seals seemed to disappear. There were no proper holes in the river like the one that had caught his attention on the hunt neither at the river's center or on its shore. For several days, he could find no sign of the seals' existence, and so subsisted on lemmings and ptarmigans in the meantime, making a home for himself in the shade of the large spruce tree a mile down river that created a sort of bowl around it as the snow came in. But neither of the aforementioned small animals were enough to keep a growing boy alive in such a cruel environment, but there was something else...




Not two weeks after his failed saiga hunt, the ice had frozen such that it was safe enough to cross. He knew the ice fairly well, as he and his mother had made a habit out of hunting otters when he was younger, and he knew what to listen for as you walked, and what to watch for as you crossed. Even when it snowed, he knew the feel of ice that was too thin and ice that was thick enough to be safe. This knowledge got him safely across the river, but it also ensured his survival, as crossing was able to get him the remains of the frozen corpse of the saiga bull that he had killed. The lions had not left much... but it was enough for several days if he rationed it properly, and those few days would be crucial, as it was in them that he caught the first sight of Silkie since before the river froze.
She was in fact not far at all from his spruce tree, no more than a few metres or so. She was just as curious about this hairless creature as he was about her, but she had tread, or should I say swam with caution. She had a breathing hole not far north that was exposed to the surface and allowed her and her pup to escape for some lounge time on the ice, in the middle of the river, where predators were unlikely to bother them, but she also had one right in front of the spruce tree, but this one wasn't exposed to the surface. Our boy would not have noticed her if he had not lost a piece of chert in the snow as he was crossing, wiping the snow away to see her face looking up at him through inches of ice. Such a moment of excitement made the boy rather anxious, but having experience hunting otters, he knew that no animal that knew the first thing about surviving would be so stupid as to utilize a man made hole... or would it? Well, the question first had to be asked, how was he going to make such a hole? Well it didn't really matter, because as he pondered on it over the next couple of days, eating the last of the remains of his saiga, he found her breathing hole down river, but he saw that the water had gone murky. Having hunted otters, he knew that murky water meant an old hole, but with otters, it didn't necessarily mean the hole was out of use. Several hours of waiting, and no seal taught him this. Instead, after killing a few hares and storing them in the snow that surrounded his spruce tree, he found yet another hole not two days later. This one was closer to his tree, and actually in the opposite direction as well. It was not murky at all, and the water was black and fresh, but it was several hours before Silkie showed up and poked her head out. However, the boy was standing much too close to the hole, and as quickly as her head emerged from the water, it was back beneath it, and out of his reach.
Our boy was starting to get very depressed, and not only was he depressed, but he was also getting hungry. As aforementioned, rabbit meat is not enough to sustain the body, and neither are spruce needles, and the boy knew very well that if he did not find something else soon, something large enough to eat with enough carbohydrates in its meat (although the part about carbohydrates was not a part of his thought process), the winter would get the better of him. He was not getting the calorie intake that his body required, and he was getting skinny. But what could he do? Deer were scarce in these parts, especially during this time of year, and taking one alone, without the cooperative hunting efforts of his mother or his uncles would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Whatever this creature was, it was very fat, and well over enough to sustain him over the winter, or at least the worst part of it, anyways. But how was he supposed to kill it? Despite its apparent obesity, it was quick enough to escape, even when he was within two times ten fingers of her, she and her pup were able to to get back into their element, beneath the ice, where he could not reach them. But a break was coming soon, as Silkie's next breathing hole was formed directly in front of the spruce tree. This may seem unlikely, however, Silkie had taken into account the fact that our boy seemed to be most active during the day, and so, she was not afraid of him at night. Both of the attempts on her life had of course happened in broad daylight, and he seemed a rather clumsy predator in the first place. The cat that had tried to kill her months ago that spring was definitely quicker than the boy, and he would have had her had the bear not lunged from the trees at the exact same moment. Similarly, she had had to face off with a lion that winter to buy her pup enough time to get in the water, and the showdown had left her with a distinctive scar on her chest when the lion swiped at her. The boy was not much to be afraid of, given her experience in things to be afraid of, and just as well, while he could walk out on the much easier than most other predators, he was slower than they, and so she needn't worry... or so she thought.




Silkie's rather simplistic assessment of the threat would end up costing her her life, for as she punched through inches of ice with her head, the sound was enough to wake the boy in his spruce shelter, and when she emerged from the water, barking for her pup to follow, the boy emerged from his shelter... ever so slowly and carefully, and there she was. Unlike the previous two times, she seemed completely unaware. She was just sitting there, fat, and clumsy looking, grunting and barking, seemingly stupid and unaware, her pup just as silly as he emerged from the hole in the ice to lounge. “Wait, wait, not yet.” The boy could see his mother's signs in his head as the moment brought him back to his very first kill – a large badger. His spear clutched tightly in his hands, he began to feel his blood rushing throughout his body. Should he go for her, or the pup? Certainly the pup would be easier, as it was only a quarter her size, and probably didn't have the fight in it that he was sure that she did. However the pup wasn't as large, and didn't have the ability to sustain him for as long. Likewise, if he killed the pup, then he may never get another chance at its mother. Clearly, whatever she was, she had completely underestimated the threat at hand, and he was positive that she would not be making the same mistake twice, especially if her threat assessment were to cost the life of her offspring. He had never seen anything like her before, and he had not seen any others but her and her pup, and so this just might be a once in a life time opportunity.




But as he lunged at her, something rather unexpected happened. Before she had seemed skittish, but as his food came town on the ice with that distinctive scraping sound, Silkie whipped around with a rather unexpected and hideous sounding bark, and bit his spear before it lodged into her side, where the boy had perceived he would strike at her lungs. For a moment, this giant, as she was nearly twice his size, would not let go, and the boy pulled with all his strength to get his spear free of the unforeseen strength of her jaws. Once this was done, she charged him, roaring a low, gargling roar that was offensive to the boy's ears. So offensive in fact, that it made him back away, which gave Silkie the upper hand as she used the mass of her body to knock him off his feet. She was now fully aware that she had underestimated the situation at hand, and was trying to buy time for the escape of her pup. But as she saw him laying there, helpless, his spear fallen from his hands as he had come crashing down on the ice, it occurred to her that the only way to get out of this alive was to kill him. He had no claws, and no visibly sharp teeth like the many animals that had tried to take her life before, but she had felt the jab of his spear and the sharpness of its tip as she had caught it before it could be lodged deep inside of her, and she knew that such an object, whatever it was, had the power to take her life. She wasn't sure what the boy was, but she was sure that despite his small stature, he posed an enormous threat to both her's and the life of her pup – he had to die.
This in mind, she sank her sharp teeth into his leg, biting down with all her might and jerking her head towards the breathing hole to drag him beneath the water, where she knew he would surely drown, as a creature of the land. Our boy grasped about in desperation for his spear: he could felt his bod sliding as this strange, and apparently quite aggressive creature dragged him across the ice. All he could think was to get away. He didn't care if he killed her anymore, he didn't care if he died slowly, starving out in his spruce shelter. He just didn't want to die the meal of some unknown beast, drowning helplessly beneath the ice. As his hands grabbed frantically in the snow he caught hold of the wooden shaft of his spear, and as soon as it was in his hands he jabbed at the seal with all his might. He aimed at her neck, but her thick layer of fat seemed to be enough to keep the spear from going far. The jabs annoyed her enough that she let go of his leg, and with a turn of her head, the head of his spear pierced her directly through the eye, and lodged itself right in her brain.




Silkie, the seal who got away, was dead.
Living Alone Might Not Be So Feasible...




What exactly does one do with the carcass of a giant animal? Harbor seals can get as big as 6 feet in length, and weigh over 300 pounds. To a boy under 4 feet in height, this was a exceptionally large animal to hall even 25 feet back to his spruce shelter, and the amount of meat? Well, there was certainly plenty of meat for awhile, if it was just going to be him eating. But the thought of the sheer quantity made him think about his family, whom he was sure had left long ago, believing that the open country had claimed him. He was right to assume this, as they had indeed done so, but they had done it with heavier hearts than his little boy mind could ever have imagined. His mother would forever recall to other children that she was “partially dead”, as a part of her had died with her first son.
The meat he knew that he could store in the snow walls of his shelter, but what of the rest of the animal? It had an unthinkably thick layer of fat, which made him wonder just where this animal had come from to eat itself to such a size. Surely, it had not resided its entire life in the waters of the Yonne, because the subarctic rivers of Northern France just didn't have enough fish in them for an animal to live so large. But as he thought about it, he realized that maybe that's not what the animal ate... maybe, it was some sort of an aquatic ambush predator that hunted deer and saiga as they came to drink during the summer months, and had put on all of this fat for winter? He knew that bears put on a considerable amount of fat for winter, but he also knew that bears hibernated for winter, and this animal didn't appear to be hibernating when he killed it.




As he cut further into a very dead Silkie with his stone tools, which he, as all neanderthals of the time did, carried with him everywhere, he began to notice rather interesting features about her bone structure. She did have a tail, but it was just not as prominent as that of the other aquatic mammal with which he was a little more familiar, i.e. an otter's. She had abnormally long hind legs and abnormally short forelegs, which both seemed to be awkwardly positioned, allowing only for limited movement on land, as the legs themselves did not seem to extend too far from the core of the body itself, instead only leaving the exterior flippers. And her chest? It was very thick. But as he peeled back the skin and tissue of the head, taking great care not to create too many cuts in her pelt, as he intended to wear it, he noticed that he skull was not all that dissimilar from an otter, or even a badger's. Sure, the nose was bigger, and so were the eyes, but he could certainly sea this animal as some form of either of these two. All of the thoughts turned rather furiously in his head. The kill had not been all that difficult, although she had nearly taken his life, and he had saiga horns to use for the upcoming cold brought on by the infection that he would be sustaining from the fight. But as the kill had simply been a matter of lodging his spear in her face... I mean... what if there were more of these creatures? Where would one even begin to look? Perhaps his family would know?
If he had brought the remains of the seal back to his family had they stayed along the shores of the river, they would've feasted, without any real idea of what Silkie was, and the remains that were of no use to them, such as her bones, would have been discarded. They had no idea what she was, nor would they have cared. Some creature caught in the wild open regions of the north... not really their concern, as there would've been more pressing matters once her flesh had been consumed, like when the band would eat next. But our boy had just produced for himself a rather substantial surplus in food, and had a little bit of time to go about speculating about the beyond, so to speak. However the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he was not going to get the answer that he wanted sitting around under a spruce. If he could ration his food properly, a boy of his stature could almost definitely survive the winter on this kill alone, and once the winter was done, he was going to find a someone who knew what this animal of such abundant meat yet unusual appearance was.
Edited by Zirojtan, Jun 7 2013, 05:48 PM.
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Zirojtan Jun 7 2013, 05:49 PM Post #2
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Searching For Answers




So as winter comes to a close, as in the arctic it only does for a few select months or so, our boy has grown just a little bit. He has, after all, spent all winter making himself a fine coat out of Silkie's fur, eating and rationing her blubber, and making a necklace out of her bones.
Wait, what was that last part? Artistic expression, in a neanderthal? There are a lot of contradicting theories on this subject today, but remember that our boy was able to create a very substantial surplus of food for himself and literally had nothing to do but fend off predators from his meat storage and make himself a coat for the ENTIRETY of a subarctic winter. He got bored, and miraculously, he didn't get sick from Silkie's bite either, and so his saiga horns make the center piece of his necklace. Neanderthals did after all, live a very, very, very, very long time ago, and given that the estimation of their total population at its peak is a scant 70,000 people, who lived over a vast geographic area, it is really unfair to say that we know definitely that they did not have an artistic mind about them. So our boy has made himself a necklace out of Silkie's bones, the saiga horns, and will also be carrying around her skull with the melting snow as he searches for another band from the area that might know what the hell she was, and where he can find more animals like her.




The trouble is, according to his own band, and the bands that come to the area for the saiga hunt, nobody lived here. Well, that was actually a big fat lie. In fact, there were 2 different bands that lived not far away at all. One lived at the intersection of the Seine and the Yonne, and the other lived up on the intersection of the Seine and the Fleuve Manche, in what we would know today as the English Channel. Now, the latter was a little over 100 miles away, but the former was just over 20, so it wasn't a big deal. The trouble was, it was a well understood custom amongst neanderthals, especially in the area of modern day France, that one could not approach the encampment of another without offering a gift, and he had nothing to give... or so he thought at first. Items of value normally were items of use, such as pelts that could be used for clothing, leather, a fine set of Mousterian Tools, shells, or some ochre pigment. He was not about to give away the prizes of his kill, which included his new coat and his necklace, but he did still have a number of rabbit and lemming skulls that could used for making pitch, the glue-like substance which the bands of his homeland used to cement the tips of their spears and the leather wrappings to the shaft. The saiga's skull was also good for this, and of no value to him in this regard, as his spear had done him well over the winter, and had only been made the last summer, and had a long way to go. The trouble with the idea of giving the skulls away was that the tree of preference for this was birch, and not only had he not seen any birch trees, but he had seen very few trees besides his spruce at all.
But the snow was melting, and he didn't have a proper shelter, nor was there any material or any other spot good for one in the immediate vicinity, so he knew that if he didn't get moving, he was going to become food for wolves, lions, scimitar cats, or hyenas. Moving was his best bet, and finding another band to ask about Silkie's skull was also his best bet at finding out what she was, and where he could find more animals like her. So, gathering up the skulls in a pouch of leather that he and his mother had made years ago, he set out in search.




But the neanderthals in this region had different customs than those of his homeland, so, when he entered their territory, things went a little differently. He had been to another band's encampment once when he was very young with his uncles. In the area, it was expected that one strike a “hunter's pose” at the border of the camp. Striking the pose signified two things to your host: A) you clearly had not come to kill anyone, else you would not be standing in plain sight, and B) you were strong, proud, and unafraid. Your gifts were presented after the males of the hosting band had examined you while you stood there in your hunter's pose, and then you were allowed to enter. That is not how things were run up north. Bands this far north were much more fiercely territorial, as the resources were fewer and therefore had to be guarded much closer. Anyone coming into another band's territory had to walk with his head down and eyes on the ground as he approached the encampment, and drop to the ground while the hosting males examined him a little more roughly than they would in the south, making sure that he had not “stolen” anything from their lands. Visitors could be killed over slivers of grass if the hosting males decided to say that they had picked it in their territory (as if they would know anyways). Luckily for the boy, the band that he was about to visit did not claim the southern portions of the Yonne River as part of their territory, but instead looked north. They had fought with the Seine-Fleuve Manche band in the past over hunting rights on the Seine, and had a bitter hatred of them, even to this day, which was a bit of bad fortune for the boy. Why? Because the Seine-Fleuve Manche band hunted seals. Not the way our boy had done on the ice... no. The Fleuve Manche seldom froze, and if it ever did, they moved south, where they came into conflict with the aforementioned Seine-Yonne band. They did not know how to hunt on the ice the way the boy had done hunting otters in the south, since they had lived at their present location for so long, such knowledge had been lost. They instead hunted seals primarily during the salmon run and the summer, during the birthing months, and wore seal-skin coats like the one that the boy was wearing.
So, needless to say, when he was found by the Seine-Yonne band, he was treated a little rough. He struck his pose, but the band elder just hit him in the face with the shaft of his spear, and the others proceeded to take his belongings and tear his clothes off. When he was naked on the frost, one of them picked him up by his balls and the rest of the band laughed, but the elder signed to him that that was enough, and so the boy was dropped, and left to writhe in the cold in excruciating pain. The band took their time dumping out the contents of his bag and looking at his necklace, his coat, and Silkie's skull. The boy watched them sign to each other, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. Their signs seemed to be of a completely different stock, complete with very different facial expressions signifying the tone of voice. He couldn't tell if they were angry with each other, if they were happy, if they wanted his belongings... the only thing that was vaguely recognizable was the laughter, and even that... they actually inhaled when they laughed. Who inhales when they laugh? One of the women came over to him and grabbed him by the hair, dragging him to his feet. Once he was standing up, she reached for his genitals, but his hands were still grasping them in pain, so she punched him in the throat and then grabbed his penis once his hands had gone to his throat and dragged him over to his dumped out belongings. What the hell was their obsession with touching his junk? God... whatever it was, it fucking hurt, because she was squeezing with all her might, digging her nails in as she did. Once he was standing above them, she hit the underside of his legs with a club, forcing him to fall on his knees, and then rubbed his face in the bones and skulls that he had intended to present as gifts. Once she was done, and his face was still on the ground and his hind quarters exposed to the open air, she kicked him in the balls from behind, and emitted that strange sound that seemed to be their version of laughing. One of the males kicked him in the side, rolling him over, and then put a sharpened stone to his neck, and signed at him with his left hand. The boy signed back with both hands...



That meant everything. The man had signed: “What are you doing in our camp?”
The boy had signed: “I don't understand you.”
The Seine-Yonne and the Seine-Fleuve Manche bands spoke two different varieties of the same sign language, and the answer to his question, as well as a phrase such as that that the boy had signed him, would have been signed with one hand in both varieties, not two. He immediately recognized that the boy's signs were not the Seine-Fleuve Manche signs, and so he stood up. When one of his comrades stomped on the boy's stomach, he grabbed him and told him to stop.
“What's the matter?” The penis-grabbing woman asked.
“He's not one of them.”
“Of course he is! He wears their clothes! Only they hunt seals. He has to be one of them!”
“Then why did he approach the camp from the southeast and not the northwest?” The man asked her.
“Maybe he slipped past us somehow...” One of the other men said.
“But his signs are not theirs.”
“How do you know?”
“Sign to him, and see!”
The other man signed to the boy, asking the same one-handed question, and the boy signed again with two hands. But this time, he didn't stop at I don't understand you, but he went on to try and explain that he had brought the skulls as gifts, and that he had come to ask about an animal that he had killed further down river, all the while signing away in his strange little signs that they couldn't understand a word of. They all just looked at him, puzzled.




See, the Fleuve Manche had in fact frozen over that winter, and the seal hunting was rather scarce anyways for varying reasons. The Seine-Fleuve Manche band, which numbered 54 individuals, had moved south and defeated the Seine-Yonne fighting for a substantial portion of their regular hunting grounds. The Seine-Yonne at the start of the winter numbered around 66, but their numbers had decreased to 32, with 22 casualties in the battle, and another 4 dying from wounds sustained during, a further 6 in failed hunts of their regular prey (mammoths), 1 infant because of malnutrition. The last casualty was a little girl that the Seine-Fleuve Manche had stolen as a match for one of their sons when she reached maturity. So, the Seine-Yonne really hated the Seine-Fleuve Manche, especially after this winter, but the boy had indeed approached their camp from the complete opposite direction, and was signing some sort of funny signs that just couldn't belong to them. As he got up, and gathered the skulls in his pouch and tried to hand them to them, they began to realize their mistake.
“Is he trying to offer us gifts?” The one male who had objected to the alternative origin signed to the elder.
“I think so...” The elder said.
“Well, maybe he isn't one of them.” The woman said.
“Maybe not, but where is he from, and what does he want?” Said the man who had held the sharp stone to his throat.
“Perhaps we should let him have his clothes back, so he doesn't freeze. The hair around his dick looks new, and he certainly doesn't have much anywhere else.” The elder said.




As soon as the boy was able to get dressed again and clean himself up a bit, the band accepted his gifts and sat down with him to try and ascertain what he was doing in their territory. The trouble was, that none among them could understand his signs. Still, his body language was rather clear, as he imitated Silkie the Seal's behavior rather well for them, and his expressions of confusion seemed pretty obvious. It took awhile for them to understand the full meaning of what he was trying to tell them, however. It seemed pretty obvious that he knew what a seal was, because he could show them how one acted, but interpretations of his intentions varied for several hours. Was he looking for the Seine-Fleuve Manche? Did he not know where to find seals? Or was he trying to say that he was from a place where there were no seals at all, because that would've been fairly insignificant, since seals never swam up the Yonne, with the exception of Silkie. But several hours in, they finally got his meaning: he was from a place where there were no such animals, he didn't know what the animal was when he killed it, or where they came from, and was trying to ask where he could find more.
“Yoy!” One of the men said aloud. Yoy was their aha! "He's from the South Lands!"
“Don't people from the South Lands have two heads?” The woman said.
“Were your born that stupid, or is it just from having fallen on your head so many times?” The elder said.
“That's what my mother told me...” The woman shrugged.
“Your mother also fucked a horse.” The elder snapped.
“How did she manage that, by the way?” One of the men chuckled. Grabbed her spear and stood up.
“Oh, come on. All in good fun. Let's not start killing each other. The Others have killed enough of us as is.” The Elder signed to her; the Others was their name for the Seine-Fleuve Manche band.
“His being from the South Lands actually makes a lot of sense...” Said one man who had been adopted into the band 6 years earlier.
“What do you mean?” The woman asked.
“Well, you all remember when I came here from the West, when I had 18 summers...” he began, “When I had only 12, I was married to a girl from the South Lands who had run away from her band. She told me that her people come north when a member of the band is reaching maturity to ritually hunt saiga as a sort of passage to adulthood. We all saw the boy's dick. He's the right age, so, perhaps he got lost hunting saiga last winter?”
“Wait, what?” Another man interjected, “Why would you want to hunt saiga when you can hunt reindeer? That's ridiculous...”
“She said that it has to do with how quick saiga are.” The adopted man explained, “Only the quickest and most nimble hunters survive... some crazy shit like that.”
“So they come all the way up north, to prove that they're nimble and quick?” The woman seemed a little perplexed.
“According to my first wife, yes...” The man nodded.
“What a fantastic waste of time.” The elder said.
“Indeed.” Said the adopted man: “But if he's from the South Lands, there are no seals there.”
“There are no seals here either!” The elder scoffed, “He had to have been north...”
“Why don't we ask him where he killed it?”




The adopted man signed to the boy, asking him in which river he killed the seal. The sign in his language for “river” involved the right hand making a sideways flowing motion, and then he simply pointed in the direction of the Fleuve Manche. The boy made his two-handed sign that apparently meant “no”, and then proceeded to sign “river” making a forward flowing motion with the side of his right hand and then pointed in the direction that he had come. Everyone lifted an eyebrow. He was claiming that he had killed a seal, a creature that this band knew to live exclusively in the Fleuve Manche and the Atlantic Ocean (knowledge brought by their adopted member, who had come from a coastal band) in the southeast, in the Yonne river.
“If there were seals in this river, don't you think we'd know about it?” The woman scoffed. “Maybe it was just the one...” Said the elder.
“Really? How fascinating. A lone seal, swam all the way down here... for what?” Said another man.
“I couldn't tell you. Maybe it would be something like the great white bear that I'm wearing right now...” The elder retorted. He was wearing a polar bear skin blanket, which had come from an animal wandered hundreds of miles out of its regular range when he had killed it at the age of 20.
“Fair enough.” The other man said.
“How did he kill the seal?” The woman asked.




The adopted man signed to the boy, but the boy didn't understand until the woman got on the ground and acted like a seal while the man proceeded to pretend to stab her and then appear confused. It took the boy a moment, but he understood relatively quickly. He explained that he had killed her on the ice, imitating his actions and making scraping sounds to signify the sound a foot makes as it slides across the ice. He then dug a small hole with the shaft of his spear and showed the rest with his fingers. The band caught on a little quicker this time. He was saying that he had killed the seal on the frozen river, when the seal had come out of a hole in the ice. How odd... right? But if a boy of this one's youth could manage it, then it could certainly be done by them, and if they could learn how to hunt seals on ice, well... the Seine-Fleuve Manche came south when the Fleuve Manche froze, because their primary food source, seals, were perceived as unavailable when this happened. If seals could be hunted after the river had frozen, then this could mean one of two things:


1. The Seine-Yonne could outcompete the Seine-Fleuve Manche in their own territory, if they could just defeat them in battle.
2. The boy could be given to the Seine-Fleuve Manche as a gift of peace, teach them how to hunt seals when the river froze, and then they wouldn't come south to bother them... as often.



Well, obviously what to do was a little bit of a debate. The Seine-Fleuve Manche had wounded the Seine-Yonne... badly. The size of their band had decreased by over half, having once been one of the largest bands ever to roam that area of Europe. Manpower was a problem, and so was morale, as their fighting spirit had been broken with this last defeat. But they knew their hunting grounds a little better than the Seine-Fleuve Manche, who virtually never ventured south to hunt reindeer unless the river had frozen. So, if they could somehow lure them south again, they'd have the home country advantage, but that was about it. Plus, they couldn't really think of any reason that the Seine-Fleuve Manche would take the bait at this time of year. The river had thawed, spring was beginning, and the salmon run was about to start. They had positively everything they wanted in their own territory, so why go bother the Seine-Yonne?






These things considered, giving him to the Seine-Yonne was an enticing option. Still, the elder pointed out the problem with such a temporary solution to the problem. What if the seal population was down one year? What then? Hunting seals on the ice is not as beneficial when there aren't any seals to be hunted. They would of course come south again under these circumstances. But the other option, fighting the Seine-Fleuve Manche, carried graver consequences should it go wrong, as the Seine-Yonne knew that it would surely mean the end of their band. So giving the boy away was the best solution, but it was going to have to wait. Why? Well, first of all, because, as previously mentioned, the Seine-Fleuve Manche weren't even in the area. Second of all, and more importantly however, it would be more advantageous to present a solution when they came, as opposed to giving to them long before they needed it. So, the boy was going to stay with the Seine-Yonne... until the Fleuve Manche froze again.
I Thought We Were Friends?




So the Seine-Yonne band has decided to keep the boy in their company until the Seine-Fleuve Manche show up demanding their hunting grounds. He is accepted on the important condition that his saiga skull is not accepted by the band as one of his gifts, as a gift that large would warrant membership of the group. The boy at first doesn't understand the diplomatic complexity therein, but they accepted his rabbit skulls, and have allowed him to stay with them, and that's all that matters to him for now. He learns their language and their culture, the latter of which is ever so slightly more complex than his own. See, his people weren't really spiritual... at all. The world around them was the world around them, and they lived in it, and that was all they knew, and all they cared about. In that band, the very simple answer to the question what happens when we die was animals eat your remains and what's left of your bones gets buried by sediment. The philosophical question of what happens to their human conscience was irrelevant. Even if anything did happen, what did it matter? You can't interact with the dead, so, why bother speculating about what their consciences are doing? Who fucking cares?
Not so with this bunch. These people had a very vibrant totemistic tradition, in which people were assigned specific spirit totems. These totems were their names, and were objects or animals from the world around them. There was a man named Round Stone, and a woman named Weasel, and another man named Mussel. Everyone received their totems as children, when the oldest man in the band (the present one was a whopping 44 years old) assigned it to them after going off into the wilderness alone to meditate. Every totem came with its own perceived qualities and skills. Round Stone was good with stone tools, Weasel was a good climber, and a nimble hunter, and Mussel knew where to find the best mussels in the river. Our boy, not surprisingly, was gained the name Seal during his stay, which associated him with the animals of the river and a particular skill in hunting them. Indeed, he taught the band how to hunt otters, which made good practice for the younger hunters in it at ambushing larger animals.
During this time, he developed a particularly close relationship with the other adopted member of the band, the man from the west, whose was the aforementioned man named Mussel. Mussel and him after all had some things in common: neither of them were part of the original kin group, both of them had come from very far away (especially in neanderthal terms), and both had some knowledge of the South Lands. Mussel spent a lot of time reminiscing about his first wife with Seal, comparing and contrasting their different mannerisms and behaviors that he associated with people from the south. In turn, Seal was rather interested in the homeland of Mussel by the sea. The way he described it just sounded magnificent, albeit it hard for seal to believe. He had never seen an expanse of water any larger than a river or a lake, and had trouble accepting Mussel's accounts of a lake so large that you could not see nor swim to its end, that also tasted like salt and could not be drank for fear of losing one's mind. It sounded rather fanciful, but interesting. Mussel also described how he and his people used to hunt seals on the beach, waiting every summer for them to give birth and killing their pups, resulting in such a surplus of food that they only had to move twice a year. He said that the sea often froze however, and because it froze, they journeyed south, where the conditions weren't so harsh, and seals could be found lounging on the beach. But Mussel was equally as interested in life in the South Lands, as well as how Seal had killed Silkie on the ice. Seal probably told him the story a thousand times over during his two year stay, and even took him and many other members of the band out on the ice to teach them about walking and hunting on it. Of course, as previously mentioned, otters were the only animals using breathing holes in the Yonne, the real game was up north, with where the Others lived.





After so long, Seal had nearly grown into a man, as he was now 11 years old and probably about 17 physically, when compared to modern humans. Had he been an official member of the band, his marriage would have been arranged with Doe, the girl who was stolen by the Others. But Seal was actually unaware of his unofficial status for the duration of the two years, as the decision had been made long before he understood the signs of the band. But as an especially cold winter approached that year, talk of the Others arrival began to circulate amongst them.
The first sighting of the others was by the woman who had given him so much trouble on his arrival, a woman that the band called Sap. With the temperatures that winter, the band was expecting their rivals, and so the first sighting was no surprise to them. They had been spotted moving through the hills, following herds of reindeer that were migrating south. Much to Seal's surprise, when the Others showed up, everyone was rather calm. They had seemed rather panicked about the issue when he first met them, which left him a little bit perplexed. He was in for quite the surprise.




When Seal first saw the Others as they approached the cave in which the band was staying, but kept their distance, he was afraid. Not just because he had never seen battle before, but because they looked rather fierce, comparatively speaking. The band he had been staying with painted themselves from time to time with brown ochre, which they held in high regard, but to him, only made them appear dirty. His own people had made limited use of red and yellow ochres for special occasions (like the acceptance of a new member of the band), however, these people came in the color of heather flowers – they were purple. Unlike his own people, and his adopted band, these people did not paint themselves in designs, but covered their hole bodies in the paint, giving off the image that purple was their natural skin color. They also had a slightly richer artistic tradition than his adopted band. They wore spotted coats, and spotted pants and foot wrappings like Seal's, as they had presumably come from animals like Silkie, but they also wore necklaces of teeth, and some of claws, and they cut their hair in away that made them look alien to Seal's eyes. Some had half their heads shaved, others shaved the sides, some the back, others leaving only their bangs. Some of them wore fur hats, and others dawned the cold, but they all had a generally rough, and angry look about them. Seal was also surprised to see how many had red hair. In his own band, his father had been the only redhead, passing the trait onto him, as his mother was a dirty blonde, and his uncles all brunettes. In this band, everyone was a brunette. But the Others seemed to be majority redheads. In fact, 28 out of 54 of them were. The rest were mostly blonds, save doe, the brunette of similar age to Seal.
“Sat! Nowòn!” Her father, a man named Lichen called out verbally. These verbal commands were rather simple: sat was the equivalent of hey, and nowòn was a command to come that was used over distances when signing was not practical. Doe could see her father, but she paid him no attention. He continued to call after her, signing and shouting, but to no avail; to her, it was like he was not even there.
“If you wish to enter this camp, you must offer us a gift!” Polar Bear, the elder signed to them.
“We are not here to talk.” Said one of the Others, a particularly large man with a graying beard that grew only on his throat, “These are our winter hunting grounds.”
“Interesting. If they are your winter hunting grounds, then why did you not use them last winter, or the winter before that?” Polar Bear asked.
“The river has ran steadily for the past two winters,” The big man signed, “there was no need to move.”
“So, these are only your lands when it freezes?”
“They are our lands whether or not the river freezes, but whether we choose to use them in one year is entirely our business. We won them from you in battle, and you're trespassing! You may leave, or we will kill you, and the flesh of all of you will sustain us for most of the winter.”
“I find it interesting,” The elder began, “your people have lived on the Great River since time began, and yet, you have not yet discovered how to hunt your staple when the river freezes... how many times has the river frozen since the beginning of time? Has it really been so few that you have not had the opportunity to learn?”
“We are not fools, you decrepit old sack!” The big man signed furiously, “It is not possible to hunt seals when the river freezes! They cannot get up for air, and so they return to the sea, where ice does not block their ability to breathe!”
“Oh, but you're wrong...” Polar Bear signed. An open aisle all of the sudden appeared that led to Seal, drawing the attention of the Others to a boy dressed in seal skins with a necklace of their bones. “This boy wears a seal that he killed on the ice.”
The others started laughing, all of them, even Doe. “You should've left this old man for the world a long time ago it seems.” The man signed, “Such is the way of our people. Men start to get funny in the head as the years go by. A man of such a rotten old age must fill your heads with all manners of nonsense.”
“It's true!” Seal signed, “I killed a seal on the ice two years ago. I am from the South Lands, and I hunted her as I would have hunted an otter.”
The others laughed again. “As you would have hunted an otter? I was unaware that seals journeyed so far onto land...”
“Otters break holes in the ice from which they can access the water to hunt, and the air to breathe, you fool!” Seal rolled his eyes. His band laughed, but the Others were not amused. The big man's expression changed from one of humor to one of anger. He did not like being insulted, especially by a boy making outlandish claims.
“I am not the one telling lies...” The man said.
“I don't think anyone's telling lies here.” Seal told him, “I killed a seal on the ice. I lodged my spear in her eye as she tried to kill me. They come up to breathe. They're like otters this way. They cannot stay under water all day.”
“The boy will show you!” Polar Bear signed. All of the sudden, the aisle that formed to make him visible turned into a river of hands, as each band member grabbed him, pulling him forward and passing him to the next. The word what was all that could go through the boy's mind. What exactly did Polar Bear mean that he'd show them? That wasn't part of the deal, was it? I mean, the only way that he could actually show them was if he went to live with them, in their country, and he was in theory a member of the band now, right?
“Polar Bear, Polar Bear!” He signed as everyone passed him to the front of the cave. “Sat!” He finally cried out verbally, “I am one of you, you can't just give me to them!”
“But you're not...” Polar bear said, “We accepted your gifts of rabbit skulls for the making of pitch so that you could enter our camp. You have been our guest, but not our kin.”
“What do I want with this whining boy?” The big man scoffed at the offer.
“This boy can teach you how to survive on the ice!” Mussel interjected, “With his knowledge, you will not need to venture south and fight for the right to hunt anymore.”
“Why would we want survive on the ice when we can hunt reindeer in open pastures?” The man asked.
“Because in order to do so, you will have to fight us first. And fight us now, and we will break you. Our spirits are high, and you are tired after a long journey. If I were you, I wouldn't take the risk.” Mussel told him.




The Others conferred amongst themselves for a few minutes, some signing rather furiously, indicating their anger at the present situation. They had come all the way south to hunt here for the winter, and they didn't expect their enemies to be so cocky after their rather devastating defeat 2 years earlier. But their enemies were also right that they were tired, and in no condition to win a battle at the moment, or at least, win as well as they had the last time. If they tried to engage them now, they could lose half the band. But if they did, their enemies would probably be so depleted that they would be able to absorb the remainder into their own ranks, strengthening their own band for when another uppity group from further south decided to claim these hunting pastures.
But the men of the band agreed that the potential loss was too severe to risk. It would take them generations to recover consequences of their conquest, and as neanderthals lived considerably shorter lives, they had a shorter vision of the future. So, take the boy, march 25-30 miles back, and see what he has to offer, or risk everything right here and right now? If the boy wasn't of any value, they could always kill him, and come back. They had already journeyed this deep into the territory and could certainly hunt some reindeer on the way back. It's not like they were going to go hungry if the boy turned out to be useless. So they agreed to take him.




Seal was going to go with the Others as a gift to guarantee his band's safety, but that's not how he saw it. He felt betrayed, and indeed he was betrayed. He had been made to feel as though he was at home, while all the while, his hosts intended to give him away to save their own skins. He would never forget the debt that he owed his hosts, especially Mussel, the man who had been his friend...

Ripples: An Unrecognizable World




So what ever happened to Seal, and what is the significance of his story?




After Seal was given away to the Others, he spent the winter teaching them how to hunt seals on the ice. The Others were surprised at the technique, and caught on rather quickly, but they did not express any gratitude nor did they treat him with any kind of kindness. He had expected to get something from Doe, at least, as she had been in a similar situation to his, but he didn't. Doe had a heart of stone, and was actually the woman of another. Seal spent two more years with these people as their prisoner, slowly gaining their trust until he ran away South, searching for his original. family. That's when he found his mother with another child, and decided that the only real home he had was hunting seals in the Fleuve Manche. When he returned, he orchestrated an ambush in which the Yonne band, his previous hosts, were butchered, and the remainder absorbed into the Others, who called themselves the People of the Purple. In this ambush, he killed the aforementioned big man, a man named Hears-Voices-On-The-Water, and took control of the breeding rights of his woman, Feathers-In-Her-Nose (called such because she had made a nose piercing for herself with ptarmigan feathers, which gave her the appearance of having a mustache). But instead of moving south whenever the river froze, the band hunted the seals on the river's ice, gradually progressing north over the years until the great glacial lake that was the source of the Fleuve Manche was discovered. This lake had an abundant population of freshwater seals that had been there since its inception hundreds of thousands of years previously, and fed on the rich food resources that it provided.




Now, the adoption of seal-hunting as a survival strategy has little to no effect for the first several generations that its practiced. Neanderthal bands of descendant generations stay around the lake until the Saalian Glacial Period enters its Warthe Stage, in which the glaciers will retreat all the way back to the coasts of Denmark. But the population does slowly grow. Within 1,000 years, it sky rockets from around 65 to a little over 1,600 individuals. Needless to say, the original band splits several times during the first millennium. Most bands remain at under 100 individuals, but some are as large as 300 or more. Mind you, this lake was very large, and with the changing climate, became more and more capable of supporting a larger and larger population. By the time 2,000 years had passed, a lot had changed. Areas that were previously open step were being swallowed up by expanding southern woodlands. The southern and western coasts of the lake, along the Netherlands and Belgium were wooded, and not just along the lake's shores. But even as the climate is warming and there is an expansion of taiga, the lake still consistently freezes, furthering the technological development of the neanderthals living along its shores. New spears, better adapted for lodging into the flesh of seals without the possibility of sliding out of their blubbery flesh are developed. The first harpoons appear. But its actually during the summer, when the ice is melted, that the real shit starts to happen. By 3,000 years on the lake, at 173,000 BP, the neanderthals were active spear fishers. This got started with the North Atlantic Salmon Run on the Fleuve Manche about 174,000 years BP, but fish do not appear as a major staple in the neanderthal diet of the area until a millennium later. Learning to hunt seals on the ice has taught the neanderthals that aquatic environments are good for survival year round, and need not only be pursued seasonally. When there is no ice, you can hunt seals on the shore, go fishing, or forage for mussels, and when the lake/river freezes, you can still hunt seals. But every year, rather consistently, the salmon came swimming up the Fleuve Manche to spawn, and the seals followed, replenishing the diminishing population with a new, equally naïve group that foraged on the lake's rich resources, and providing the neanderthals with a yearly supply of food.
But as the population grew, and the band broke apart various times, each generation produced more offspring with a better chance of making it to adulthood. Living off of the resources of the water was a considerably less stressful lifestyle than the one they had been living a few millennia ago. Land animals, when hunted, as they still were, were still hunted in the up-close-and-personal manner of their predecessors, but because the primary source of food had shifted from large terrestrial prey to aquatic prey, people had a far better chance of surviving as they did not engage in this kind of dangerous hunting as often, nor did they have to live constantly on the move. In fact, they became rather sedentary. Every band that split to make its own band became larger and larger, until the old social hierarchy steadily began to be realized as defunct.
See, previously, a band was made up of a dominant kin group of neanderthal males. Females married into these male kin groups, and on occasion, adolescent males were accepted into bands via their marriage to a daughter of the dominant male lineage or by gift-giving. Adolescent females and males also had to prove their hunting prowess, to show that they would be productive members of the band. Our boy, Seal, did the latter by giving away Silkie's skull to the People of the Purple when he was given away by the Yonne band, and he did the latter by demonstrating how to successfully hunt seals on the frozen shores of the Fleuve Manche. Life was very egalitarian in these times, with little division of labor, and both boys and girls participating in the ceremonial saiga hunt (at least for the South Landers). But there was a key problem with this social system – the lack of social interaction between groups. The only real social interaction, was when wandering, sexually mature males or females would attempt to join new bands, which happened fairly frequently as bands got too large or members were exiled. Another possibility, was when males would steal females from other bands to avoid inbreeding and keep the gene pool diverse. The final option, which was comparatively rare, was when one band came into conflict over another over overlapping ranges, and the winner would butcher the males and keep the females (i.e. the People of the Purple and the Yonne People).
Well, more people subsisting off of the same resources meant constant conflict over said resources. Band territories shrank significantly, as the idea of one band owning the entire lake, which was considered to be the best source of sustenance, became simply absurd. Therefore, the social structure began to change to be more socially inclusive. At one point, there were over 100 small bands roaming the lakes shores, but by the time in question, this had decreased to around 11, with almost every band containing upwards of 100 people. As groups became large, and interacted with one another, social mediators became necessary, and it quickly became apparent that whoever had the big stick wasn't always the best at solving conflicts. Therefore, a form of social hierarchy began to develop in times of conflict around band elders, who were considered to be the wisest of a band given their life experience.
But another problem confronted the growing community. As generations passed as quickly as they did for neanderthals, language changed rapidly. Within 4,000 years of the first ice-hunting band, the signs had changed such that they were completely and utterly unrecognizable. One band from just a few miles away had trouble understanding the signs of the other, and so when agreements over hunting rights or land usage were reached, accusations of cheating and trickery became very common. To combat the problem, neanderthal elders decided to record agreements in a language that future generations would be able to understand: pictures. Of course these paintings will be long gone by the days of cities and farms, as the lake in question will be just a minor part of the North Sea, but in their time, they served as valuable records kept to ensure peaceful interactions between groups. The paintings were complex, with hand signs painted above depictions of people and groups of people to distinguish who was being depicted. Two groups could be painted as fighting one another, or two people, with the sign indicating the name of the person or group painted above them. They could also be depicted as hunting large game with a specific landmark nearby, such as a distinctive rock, or tree, signifying the terms of the agreement. These paintings were generally made on large rocks where they were plainly visible to all, and served to cement band names for longer periods of time, although they, just as the significance of the paintings, were often forgotten. When war erupted between two friendly bands or conditions changed, the paintings were painted over, or new paintings in a new spot were painted, while the older ones were left to the weather and not maintained. This tradition of elders mediating gave birth to the first shamanic traditions, as people began to believe that as one aged, they were preparing to return to the Earth from whence all life comes, and therefore had a closer connection to the world around them, as they were “between worlds”, so to speak.
As this “between worlds” doctrine began to grow around the lake, the elders began to take advantage, as their wisdom in determining matters of survival, be it in war or otherwise, began to accord them special privileges. Specifically, more often than not, they no longer had to participate in hunting and gathering, but rather, were expected to communicate with the world around them for the good of the band. An elder might predict the abundance of game or plants in specific areas, things he would know through a life's experience of hunting and gathering, but were taken to be the byproduct of his/her ability to communicate with nature. This didn't always work, as an elder's prediction gone wrong could put him on the level of any man in the group, but if an elder's prediction was of extraordinary profit for the band, he could retain or even increase his/her revered status.




But the world was changing rapidly, and new hunting pastures as well as lakes and rivers to forage and fish were opening up. As Ireland and England were exposed by the retreating ice, and the population around the lake and along the great Fleuve Manche grew, new communities of explorers set out to settle the north. These settlers followed the great river south west until they reached the sea, and slowly colonized along its shores, hunting seals and fishing salmon in the cool glacial rivers that spilled into the Atlantic Ocean. Although the permanent glaciers were gone, the sea froze up every winter, and here, the variety of seal types was much greater. There were ringed seals, harbor seals, harp seals, bearded seals, and hooded seals. But one animal, something that was not quite a seal, became an especially prized commodity. This animal was the walrus, whose tusks, as they were much later in our timeline, became of great value. For what? Well, as spiritual traditions gradually became more complex, the first carvings of sacred figures, be they Gods, or simply good luck talismans, appeared between 170-165,000 years ago. However, unlike early Paleolithic figures of our timeline, like the Venus of Berekhat Ram, which was likely created by an earlier hominin, such as Homo erectus, which depicted the female form in stone, these carvings were made out of bone and ivory, and depicted animals. Scimitar-cats, polar bears, hyenas, seals, and walruses become common, and the precision with which they are carved is impressive, given the time period. The figurines that come from this period seem to be an attempt at the most realistic depiction of the animal being depicted as possible, and by 163,000 years ago, they had gotten fairly decent. But more importantly, an entirely new tool kit comes out of this period, and the ivory of the walrus was prized as the hilt for knives. The neanderthals have begun working with bone, and have even started to make needles by 161,000 years BP, but the knives in question are not made in a fashion all that different from how they constructed their spears and harpoons, it's just miniaturized, that's all.
The first hilted knives among these northern neanderthals appeared as tools around the same time as the harpoon, but like everything did at the time, the technology took a very long time to go anywhere. By 161,000 years ago, knives with hilts could be found from Ireland to the Black Sea. They were used primarily for carving and scraping the finer parts of the harpoons used to hunt seals. But, like any human tool in a society where technology is limited, they doubled in use as weapons. Bone of course, was the first item used as the hilt of a blade, but as the millennia went by, deer antler became more common. The straight antlers of Megaloceros savini were most commonly used. Ivory however, was first used rather practically by the communities that lived in the more marginalized northern areas where deer were a lot less common. But even as the climate was warming, and populations of various kinds of deer moved north (reindeer, roe deer, and Megaloceros savini), walrus ivory retained its value amongst the neanderthal seagoers. Why? Because the walrus came to be venerated as the “Great Sabre Tooth of the Sea”. That's right, the neanderthals actually believed that walruses were the marine analogy to the sabre-tooth cats they knew on land. Of course we know that the notion of a walrus as a predator of anything bigger than a clam is just silly, but these neanderthals were not diving with them, but only observing them as they emerged on the ice, or Ireland's arctic shores. The only thing that they really had observed about their place on the food chain was that they were predated by killer whales, and by polar bears, and the latter of which mostly hunted the calves. So it was perfectly excusable, as sabre-tooth cubs were prey for wolves, lions, hyenas, and bears. However, their tusks gave the illusion of an animal that held a powerful place in its aquatic environment, and so the tusks were prized for trivial purposes as trophies as well as spiritual. But hunting walruses, especially year round kinda sorta required the neanderthals to make long voyages, and as the first of them were venturing out onto the ice on foot, only going as far as they could drag seals/walruses back to their camps on land, an innovation was needed... boats.
What? Neanderthals, in boats? Well, actually the concept of seagoing neanderthals is not unheard of. It is known that neanderthals must have at least utilized rafts to get to some of the more remote islands of the Aegean. Of course no such rafts have been found, as they were definitely made out of wood, which would have long rotted away by now. For all we know, they might have used proper boats in our own timeline. However, seeing as the time in question in this one is mid-way between the known beginning of the neanderthal rain over Europe and their demise, such an innovation is kind of revolutionary. The lake bands had of course utilized rafts, but the river bands of the Fleuve Manche had made the first dugout canoes. They were a far cry from the finally crafted canoes that we know from indigenous cultures today, in fact they were rather crude, but they still served their purpose efficiently, and as the years went by the neanderthals got a little bit better at making them. The first canoes were rather boxy, appearing about 165,000 years BP, but by 160,000 years BP, they had achieved a rather fine, elongated shape.
The invention of the boat would have a revolutionary impact on neanderthal society across Europe, an impact that was remarkably swift. It was not 1,000 years before neanderthals from the Fleuve Manche, south to the Garonne, and east on the Danube were riding them into their respective seas. Over the course of 16,000 years, from 176-160,000 BP, an unprecedented shift in neanderthal behavior occurred, as bands began to focus more and more on the resources in the water than they did on those that were on land. All of the sudden, the neanderthal life expectancy jumped upwards by at least 10 years, as bands ceased to engage in the rather dangerous hunting practices of their predecessors. Fishing, seal-hunting, and whaling became the norm, and people turned to the rivers and the sea for sustenance, and in many areas, especially around rivers and coasts, the practice of hunting large game saw a decrease in frequency. Land animals became useful for their fur, their bones, and their fat primarily, but fish, seals, and molluscs made up the primary food source of the majority of Eurasia's bands, which were now centered on bodies of water.
Canoe-wrecked...









The earliest known hominid remains in the Americas in this timeline will date back to between 155-160,000 years BP, and they will not be from a modern human. No, they will in fact be of a neanderthal woman, who will be unearthed in what we would know as the Chesapeake Bay area. How she got here is a mystery until the cave site around her is excavated a little more, revealing what we will call for the purpose of reader intelligibility, Dingle Bay Tools. This tool kit is not a massive leap from the Aurignacian tool kit that we know from our own timeline, but its signature is a single-edged stone knife with an ivory hilt, more like the Châtelperronian knives that we know today. At first, the dating of her remains is considered to be highly disputed, as it is believed that neanderthals did not arrive in the Americas until they were imported as slaves from Europe, but as these tools are discovered, the discussion will shift. These tools look a whole lot like tools that originated in a very specific area of Pleistocene Europe, so, how did a neanderthal woman carry them all the way from there to here? Were they even from Europe in the first place, or did neanderthals arrive in the Americas at a much earlier date, and the technologies of the American and European groups evolve convergently? The question will make archeologists in the Kingdom of Kacin scratch their heads for quite awhile, but how neanderthals got to the Americas is actually quite a bit simpler than anyone in this timeline will think – totally, and completely, accidentally.




As aforementioned, neanderthals were rowing their way along the North Atlantic Ice hunting walruses 160,000 years BP, having gone through something of a Paleolithic Revolution over the past 16,000 years. Hunting parties made their way north, following the ice as far as Iceland rather frequently, but always returned home once the prize animal had been killed. But in a time before compasses and any kind of navigation beyond the stars and landmarks, it can be difficult to find your way back home when you've traveled such a distance. If something on a glacier looks a little different from when you last rowed past it, or the sky is full of clouds, you can be in for a bit of trouble, directionally speaking. So, getting lost on walrus hunts was a very frequent reality for many a neanderthal that hunted them, and most people who did simply froze to death or drowned. A very select few however, would occasionally wind up very far away from indeed, on America's eastern shores. But, often times the unfortunate shipwrecked neanderthals didn't make it more than a few years in the “promise land”. It was chuck full of completely unfamiliar plants, and animals, and was every bit as harsh, if not perhaps a little harsher for lack of knowledge, as the lands from whence they came. The woman who was unearthed near the Chesapeake Bay was just one of many unfortunate stragglers; she lasted 2 years before she died from wounds sustained in an ugly run in with American wolves.
But, while some neanderthals just crashed into the icy glacial coasts of what was New England and Canada, and others died alone in alien surroundings, gradually, and ever so gradually, people began to survive. Most neanderthals that survived in groups didn't do so in more than groups of 2-3 individuals, and had died off by the time another lonely sailor (not really a sailor, but seagoer) would arrive on the scene. But fate was not going to be so cruel forever. Around 156,000 years BP, 6 neanderthals washed up on the cold shores of Virginia, as the only survivors of a 50 man hunting party that had gone north after walruses that summer. They would be the first group of neanderthals to survive long enough to encounter more stragglers. Well, not them, but their children, as the group comprised 3 men and 2 women. The next unfortunate bunch was a little larger, with 10 unrelated individuals, 7 men, and 3 women. They arrived by the time the members of the previous group were in their late teens to early twenties. The previous group had engaged in incestuous relations, and so there were a few inbred children, but the new group brought new people into the genetic pool and quickly solved the problem. The band went from 22 to 35 individuals within just a few years, and a band of 35 had a better chance of surviving on the cruel American coasts. Like they had in Europe, they exploited the arctic rivers for fish and seals, and hunted large terrestrial game for cloth, bone, and antler. By the time the next group of stragglers came along, the band had grown to just over 100, and within a few centuries, there were more than 3,000 neanderthals on North America's east coast, ranging from Maryland south to Georgia, and west into the Appalachian Mountains.
Although it had been the sea that had brought them to this harsh land of plenty, and water that had sustained their growth over so many thousands of years, the new game opportunities took a number of neanderthals further and further inland, increasing their reliance once again on terrestrial prey. The further inland they went, the less important certain technological innovations like the harpoon became, and life on the water became something seasonal, rather than a year round subsistence strategy as it had been for the first neanderthals that walked America's cold shores. Fishing remained important, but only when the rivers were unfrozen. The rest of the year, America's rich terrestrial fauna became the primary staples for the more inland groups, especially those that crossed the Appalachian Mountains 146,000 years ago. Stag-moose, mastodons, ground sloths, white tail deer, horses, and antelocaprines will turn up in great quantities in neanderthal garbage pits during the rest of what we know as the Saalian Glacial Period. By its end, approximately 131,000 years BP, the neanderthals will have spread from the Chesapeake Bay to Mexico's Central Plateau, and as far west as the Great Plains, which they will not penetrate. Their total population on the continent by the onset of the Eemian Interglacial will be 100,000 individuals, with over 2 million of them and growing in Eurasia.




To date, no hominid species had been as successful as the neanderthals, yet... their growth was unprecedented, unpredictable, and completely unstable. It could not, and would not last forever.
Edited by Zirojtan, Jun 7 2013, 05:53 PM.
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The Eemian: Radiation and Invasion




The Eemian Invasion








So Silkie the Seal was the kick start to a massive revolution in in the neanderthal lifestyle as well as their technology. This shift in lifestyle coupled with some technological innovation has boosted the global neanderthal population from 50,000 to 2.1 million in 45,000 years. But the world was still changing, and still very rapidly. During this period of revolutionary population growth for the neanderthals, the world had been warming – fast. The Saalian Glacial Period saw ice sheets hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet high cover the hole of Northern Europe, Northern North America, the Pyrenees, the Alps, Anatolia, and much of the Horn of South America. The ice had retreated at alarming speeds during the Warthe Stage of the Saalian Glaciation from the modern day coasts of Southwest Britain all the way to Denmark in a mere few thousand years. Within 45,000 years of the ptarmigan that escaped the fox, Northern Europe was free of ice, the Fleuve Manche and the great glacial lake that fed it had been engulfed by the sea, Britain was an island, and so was Scandinavia. Sea levels had risen to an average of 15 ft. higher than they are in the present day, and the climate had become considerably warmer, and far more stable. Hippopotamuses had begun to colonize the Seine and the Rhine rivers, and where one sees bare tundra at the tops of the cliffs of North Cape, Norway, today, the green of pines could be seen for miles adorning the skyline. Even the southern portion of the now barren Baffin Island was forested. Clearly, this was a time of plenty.




As the ice retreated ever northward, the seal and walrus hunting neanderthals followed it ever northward, and as the climate became more agreeable, and new routes of travel opened up, they took advantage of them. The neanderthals who went north would become very settled in the British and Scandinavian archipelagos, while those that followed newly opened passages traveled into Anatolia and the Middle East, bringing with them their advanced tool kits and their seagoing technology. Mousterian tools quickly fell into disuse as the population expanded and the Dingle Bay tools spread into the Levant, and when the technology hit this fateful region, something rather radical happened – the neanderthals invaded Africa.




Yes, you read that properly. See, neanderthals in our time didn't eat much in the way of fish, therefore their seagoing technology was rather primitive. They competed with modern humans in the Levant for large game, not for control of river systems, and modern humans eventually won out, due in part most probably to some key technological innovations, one of which being projectile weapons, and probably also to their exploitation of aquatic food stuffs. Now, these neanderthals still favor their short spears, their knives, and their harpoons, but a strong fishing tradition has made the coasts of the Levant a more habitable place, and once that coast has led them south to the Nile River Delta... well, it just sort of speaks for itself. Anyone who appreciates what's in the water knows that the Nile is just too good to pass up. So, instead of anatomically modern humans coming into conflict with neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe because of our expansion, the situation is in fact reversed – neanderthals are on the expansion, and modern humans have some catch up to do if they want to survive, because neanderthals aren't interested in negotiating. At this point in time however, anatomically modern humans were actually not present on the Lower Nile, but in fact, lived primarily in the Horn of Africa, the Southern Sahara, and over on the Barbary Coast. So the invading Eurasian neanderthals had a rather plentiful area all to themselves. The trouble was, they had a problem with the heat, and the open country.
With their stocky bodies, neanderthals were rather compactly built, and therefore not well suited to dissipating heat, at least not in the same way that the anatomically modern human population that was flourishing further to the south was. These stocky bodies had allowed them over millennia to retain heat in cold environments, as well as take down very powerful prey animals in ambush attacks. While their lifestyle had shifted drastically, their overall physiology had not done so just yet, simply because they had not yet radiated into wider areas. The large neanderthal bands (more properly called tribes due to their size) that were invading the Nile River Delta had crossed some limited open country, albeit much of the Levant at the time was still dry woodland. Amongst these Middle Eastern neanderthals, there was still a deep stigma on open lands. Unlike the neanderthals in Europe, who had conquered new steppe frontiers by utilizing the rivers that ran through them, these neanderthals still hunted primarily in woodlands, and didn't like venturing out where predators could have an easy go at them. So, the invasion of Africa was going to stay along the Nile River, because it was here that the vegetation grew the thickest, and where they had the most cover from many an African predator that would have fancied them for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. During their stay on this plentiful African water way, the neanderthals would learn to utilize the “Gift of the Nile” in a very different way than the fathers and mothers of our own Egyptian civilization did.




For us, the Nile's annual flooding has always been an easy way to irrigate crops, thus resulting in abundant harvests of various grains and cereals. However, these neanderthals don't do much in the way of gardening, and so will be using the annual river floods to create fish ponds for aquaculture. It is indeed, Earth's first form of animal husbandry, and will sustain neanderthal populations traveling further and further upriver as they journey deep into Africa's interior. One would think of course, that such an innovation would trigger a population boom: well, it did, but not as big as one would expect. Africa had its own lines of defenses that were keeping the neanderthals at bay, the first of which being sleeping sickness. Now, as we all know very well, human sleeping sickness is typically spread by the Tsetse Fly, but said fly is native to Sub-Saharan Africa, right? Well, today, yes. They thrive in vegetated environments between Africa's two greatest deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari. But the Sahara of the Eemian was not the hellish desert that we know so well today. In fact, much of it, especially within the Nile watershed, was forested, while the rest was generally open or mixed savannah. So, during this time, the Lower Nile was certainly within the fly's range. That of course, coupled with malaria, posed a serious problem for Neanderthal advancement within the continent. By 124,000 years BP, neanderthals in Africa only numbered maybe 50,000 along the Nile River banks, and only living as far south as our Kosti, Sudan. Still, they had made it within just hundreds of miles of modern humans, and contact, be it good or bad, at some point, had just simply become inevitable...








A Violent Clash Far to the North





Siberia about 125,000 years ago was not a bad place at all to live. Much of it was rather temperate, and enjoyed very warm summers and some considerably more mild winters in comparison to today. The land was plentiful with wild game, such as deer, elk, rhinoceros, and wild horse, but also with rich river systems in which to fish. The earliest pottery on earth is a neanderthal innovation, beginning on the Scandinavian Archipelago and quickly spreading to the coastal peoples of northwestern Russia. Its earliest usage in these early sedentary societies was to boil the pathogens out of water, but soon found other uses, such as the storage of meat, and wild mushrooms. It was these pottery building neanderthals that wandered ever deeper into the densely forested interior of Siberia, primarily via canoeing down rivers that cut their way through the countryside on their journey to the sea. This journey of course, came with its set of new predators to get used to, such as big cats that looked and behaved rather differently than those that they were more accustomed to in Europe. But there was another predator with which they would come in much more direct conflict with – there were other humans here. Not just any humans mind you; we would know these people as Denisovans, but the very first of them which the neanderthals contacted knew themselves as hyıno, or “us”. The Hyıno lived not far south of the considerably widened Kara Sea, in the valley of the Ob River, which they knew as the Şäş. Unlike their neanderthal counterparts, they ate a more varied diet of nuts, wild berries, vegetables, roots, tubers, and seeds, as well as fish from the river that gave them life, and game from the woods. As Denisovans, they were close relatives of neanderthals, but with a considerably different appearance that made the first neanderthals that they contacted think them to be evil spirits.
Their skin was darker, their brows not quite as pronounced, their foreheads sloping slightly backward, with pronounced chins, gaunt faces, and bulbous, bridgeless noses. And their eyes... black as tar, with epicanthic folds. Their hair was black, their bodies less compact, their fingers abnormally long, as well as their tongues. When the first neanderthal, a girl named Glelno, encountered two of the Hyıno in the woods, she was incredibly frightened. Not only had she never seen people like these before, but the Hyıno had never seen her, and so they crinkled their faces, stuck out their long tongues and widened their eyes in an expression called qlaqő. Their appearance, and they length of their tongues, convinced the girl that these could not have been humans, and so when she returned to her camp, she spoke of having encountered the Kåiråi, an evil self-duplicating spirit of her people's folklore.




For a long time, upwards of a century or two, Neanderthal-Denisovan interactions were limited to these kinds of encounters. The stories of the Kåiråi spread, and it became the most common way to explain the sightings of their fellow hominins. Settlement of a number of areas along the Şäş River were abandoned, as the neanderthal tribes began to say that the river flowed into the underworld, and therefore served as a gateway for demons and other entities. But as the years went by, and the sighting became more frequent, even in areas far from the Haunted River (as the neanderthals knew it), a new doctrine spread as shamans sought to explain what was happening. The doctrine was rather simple: there were demons in the woods, and they were on the offensive. If the demons were not stopped, then they would consume the neanderthal race. So began the world's very first holy war.
So instead of fleeing in fear from Denisovans, neanderthal warriors began actively pursuing them up and down the Şäş. At first, they only encountered small hunting parties, and believing these to be self-replicating demons, they butchered them on the spot. But it was not long before the first seasonal settlements of Denisovan tribes and bands were discovered, and when they were, the neanderthals committed holy genocide to cleanse the forest of the evil that plagued it. Unlike more modern warfare, in which the invaders consider the invaded to be at least of the same world as they, the women in these settlements were not raped or taken back as prisoners of war to be forced into marriages as war brides. No, they, and their children, were as evil as their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, and their cousins. Men, women, and children were slaughtered, and their bodies cast into the river so that they may go back “from whence they came”.Of course, victories were not always easy, but the neanderthals had technology on their side: they had their short spears, they had their knives, but they also had stone axes. The poor Denisovans had only their short spears to defend themselves against the onslaught of stocky savages. Within 10 years, the Denisovan population along their sacred river had shrank from 4,000 to less than 1,000. They didn't know why they were so hated by the newcomers, but each time they tried to organize a resistance, they found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, so to speak (there were no projectile weapons yet).
But the genocide that the immigrating neanderthal tribes had committed would come with consequences. See, casting dead bodies into a river that you plan to drink out of is normally a pretty bad idea, and the neanderthals had been doing this en masse. Finding a dead Denisovan body while you bathed or while you went to the river for drink became a very common occurrence, which obviously polluted the water. The resulting spread of disease deterred the neanderthals temporarily, who came to believe that the river was simply cursed, retracting settlement westward toward the Urals, for the time being. But the Denisovans had found in their enemies some knew and very useful technologies, and they aimed to use them the next time that they came prowling into their lands.




Although it will be lost to history in the coming millennia, this historic meeting was just the beginning of what would become a very long, and very fierce rivalry between two subspecies of human. There will of course, be some degree of peaceful interaction and interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans, but it will be greatly outweighed by the hate and the violence as the two battle for the place of Asia's apex predator.
Homo sapiens idaltu and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis




The First Meeting








May 7th, 123,897 years ago was the day of the very first modern human-neanderthal meeting. It was a hot day, as most days were in Africa during the period. The neanderthals had been expanding southward, some of them leaving the safety of the densely forested banks of the White Nile and began to explore the slightly more open tropical forests around them. They had a special taste for Sivatherium, zebras, and hartebeest, and pursued them ever southward into the woods that make up modern day South Sudan.
On this fateful day, a man named Yarheúntez of the Potosî people had set out to gather honey. Like the Hadza do today, he whistled a series of whistles that he had perfected over a very long career of hunting and gathering to communicate with the honeyguide bird, which he knew would eventually lead him to the hive. But there was an eavesdropper on the whistle exchange that would change the world forever after, and that eavesdropper was a neanderthal man named Näton. Näton was of the Säd Hö, a group of neanderthals who had abandoned aquaculture in their push south at least a thousand years prior to this moment. He was about 16, which for a neanderthal meant that he was a young adult in the prime of his life, and had gone out into the forest to be alone, as he had just lost his second child to the sleeping sickness of the Tsetse Fly. He and his wife had been far more hopeful this time than the first, as their baby had made it to two years of age. For neanderthals, this was the equivalent of making it to 3-4. His people had a custom of not naming children until they reached this age, as naming implied a level of permanency to the existence of a person, which simply was not guaranteed during the first two years of life. His little girl had finally reached that stage, and received a name: Jöihel, meaning “river flower”. But only weeks after her naming ceremony, she had been bitten by a Tsetse Fly, and like many young children did, contracted sleeping sickness, and afterward, it didn't take very long for the illness to claim her life.




Näton was not eavesdropping on the exchange in hopes to get anything out of it. Indeed his own people whistled at the honeyguide bird for the very same purpose, and so he could hear that one of the whistlers was human. But what he could not discern, was the fact that this human, was not of his own people. Definitely not. Yarheúntez may not have been the most modern of modern humans, being of the subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu, which at the time ranged from the Northern Ethiopian Highlands into the forests of South Sudan and Uganda, but was certainly no neanderthal. He had a slender build, a significantly less sloped forehead, a less prominent brow, and that oh-so-modern trait – a pronounced chin. He was also significantly darker than Näton, who's skin shade was only comparable to your typical modern day Middle Easterner. Yarheúntez was so black that one might see a hint of blue in his skin, and he had the frizzy black hair of any African, whereas Näton's hair despite the darkness of his skin was a but curly golden blonde.




Näton was the first one to lay eyes on another species of human in this instance. He had been moving through the underbrush of the forest rather quietly, so as not to disturb the whistler in his quest for honey. After all, he had no real reason to expect why it would've been anyone else but a member of his own tribe; it could even have been a member of his own family. Perhaps someone had followed him to give him comfort, and then seen a honeyguide and decided to find some honey? He could not have been more surprised at what he saw. Unlike the neanderthals in Siberia, who encountered the Hyıno people, his people had no tales or myths to which he could refer to in beholding this very strange creature. The forest of course, was full of primates, and even humans 124,000 years BP could appreciate the similarities between these animals and themselves, especially when they encountered chimpanzees. But this... he could never have imagined something so similar, yet simultaneously so very different. What was it? His people had never observed chimpanzees, or any other primate whistling, especially not the song of the honeyguide. Yet, this clearly was no monkey or chimpanzee. He stood there rather dumbfounded, until he noticed that the whistling had abruptly stopped, and that the strange creature was looking straight at him.




Yarheúntez was just as surprised at what he was looking at. Lighter skin, more body hair, virtually no chin to speak of, a prominent brow, and a backward sloping forehead, as well as that strange golden hair, and that heavy build. It couldn't be human, that much was plain in his mind.




But whatever it was, he couldn't stop looking, and the same was true for the other spectator. The two looked at each other for just under five minutes, until Yarheúntez darted to his right, and ran as fast as he could back to his village. The sudden movement frightened Näton, who reached for his hilted stone knife that was sheathed in his belt (the belt being the only article of clothing that he was wearing in the African heat). Both went back to their respective villages with little to say, looking as though they had both seen a ghost. But neither of them could explain what they had seen, and so both of them asked other members of their respective groups for a second opinion, leading to the decision of both sides to seek out the other.
While the neanderthals' initial decision was to catch a human and kill it in order to dissect it to see if it could be considered one of them, the humans wanted to find the neanderthals and observe their behavior so as to make a determination on what exactly they were. The Säd Hö practiced ritual cannibalism, in which the bodies of their dead were defleshed and the meat consumed by the tribe while the bones were laid to rest in a grave. They did this in the belief that if anything but a neanderthal consumed the flesh of the dead, the soul would not make it to the next life. The practice had given them a very good idea of what to look for when potentially dissecting a modern human. The first and only human that they caught was a little boy of the same tribe as Yarheúntez named Haşzek, but they did not kill him, as it became very apparent the way that he screamed and cried out in his own tongue that he had to be some kind of human, as speech was a definitive marker of man vs. animal to them. The boy's abduction was witnessed by his friend, Nejniş, and soon, the entire tribe knew that it had been the stocky creatures that Yarheúntez had seen in the woods that had taken him. When Nejniş took a rescue party to the sight of the abduction, they were able to track the neanderthals all the way back to their camp just three miles away. The meeting was a big moment for both groups...




The First Interactions





When the Potosî arrived ad the Säd Hö camp, there was, as one might expect, a lot of tension. But the Säd Hö did not feign ownership over the boy as one might over any other stolen object, instead giving him back without any trouble. To apologize, they offered the Potosî a rather exotic food item – fish. Now when I say that fish was exotic to them, I would like to clarify that to mean “not commonly eaten”. Potosî, as many African groups of anatomically modern humans, were not total strangers to the slippery food items that could be found swimming in their rivers and in the sea. However, they still went about trying to catch them with their hands, and not with specialized spears (or spears at all). Hand fishing is a very difficult practice, and so was seldom undertaken by them, thus fish was rarely eaten, except in times when wild game was scarce, or fish could easily be gathered in the mud after an especially dry summer. How on earth the Säd Hö had so many hanging around their camp when the rivers were running full was a mystery to them, but the food was readily accepted, and what could have been a moment that would define early human-neanderthal relations in violence instead passed with relative ease. The Potosî took their boy, and went home.




But of course, that was not the last time that the two groups interacted with one another. Indeed, they began to notice each other quite a bit over that same stretch of forest in a place that we would know as Panyagor. The Potosî men and women watched the Säd Hö as they fished the rivers on occasion with spears, as they made their intricate tools out of bone and horn, and as they smoked and salted their meats to make them last longer. Eventually, after they had spent enough time observing from a distance and attempting themselves, they returned to the Säd Hö to learn some of their techniques, in exchange, the Potosî taught them about a number of the nutritious forest plants that were available to them in times when the wild game was scarce.




The exchange changed everything.




Had the meeting of the Potosî and the Säd Hö gone any differently, an entirely different precedent could have been set for their relationship, which could have spelled death for modern humans as they were technologically beneath their invading cousins. But modern humans of this timeline will owe their conquest of the world to the good temperament of a few of their ancestors, as well as a few neanderthals who showed those ancestors a few new tricks. And like modern humans of our own time, they were able to build on those tricks rather quickly. Well, speaking in terms of paleontology. The first meetings of neanderthals and humans will have occurred around 124,000 years ago. The interaction between the two groups and the technological exchange will see neanderthal tools make a very rapid expanse across the savannas of the Sahara, and into Sub-Saharan Africa over the course of the Eemian Interglacial. By the end of the period, some 113,000 years BP, modern humans may have numbered as many 1.3 million across the African continent, with the highest population densities in the Great Rift Valley, along the Zambezi River, and along the Niger, where rich aquacultural traditions were practiced. But as the population of modern humans in Africa grew, the population of neanderthals waned as they intermarried with them, and by the onset of the next glacial period, they were not found south of the Lower Nile.
The Weichselian




Decline of Neanderthals Along the Nile





Just like anthropologists do in our time, the anthropologists of this time will debate very furiously about why the neanderthals suddenly began to decline after having been so successful in Africa. They will never know of the story of the Potosî and the Säd Hö, and will be forced to speculation, as we are today in the case of all out neanderthal extinction, as to the factors that made history unfold as it did. Was the change in the environment at the onset of the Weichselian? Was it a disease that modern humans introduced that devastated their already suffering populations? Was it their carnivorous diet? Was it a war?




Fortunately, we will not be left to ask these questions as they will, as we are the audience, and they are the show. The answer is all of the above.




The first factor that caused the success of idaltu in the area was his more varied diet. When idaltu taught neanderthals about the many rich edible plants available to them in the forest, their specialized digestive systems found little use for them. It's not that neanderthals were entirely incapable of digesting plant matter. On the contrary, like any species of cat or dog, they consumed plants for medicinal purposes as well as in times of little game. But to neanderthals, leaves, seeds, tubers, stems, flowers, and any other edible plant matter were not a regular part of their diet and they did not take a particular liking to them. There was plenty of meat to be had in Africa's waterways or walking her fertile woodlands to sustain a sizable population. So when fishing and aquaculture were introduced to idaltu, he now had four major subsistence strategies from which to choose: hunting wild game, fishing, cultivating fish, or gathering plants. Neanderthals were missing the latter, which limited them to areas where large game and fish were readily available, which meant that they were more easily absorbed by the human populations that came to surround them in the most southerly areas of their range.
The second major factor of course would be the increased aridity that the Sahara experienced as the world began to cool at the start of the Weichselian Glaciation. During the Eemian, the Sahara had been a fertile mixed woodland savanna that supported vast herds of wild game and vast river and lake systems that offered both modern humans and neanderthals the opportunity to utilize to their benefit. The Nile River specifically was bordered by dense woodlands, which was the preferred habitat of the neanderthals that had colonized Africa, as they, just like the rest of their kind, were not adapted to hunting in wide open environments the way that their modern human competitors were. So as the Sahara rather rapidly dried up, and the woodlands that supported them with it, the ranges of both neanderthals and idaltu became marginalized. Neanderthal-idaltu hybrids either went south, where they were further absorbed by Homo sapiens sapiens, or they died out, while the neanderthals of the Lower Nile became marginalized to the green shores of the river, with a drastically reduced population of under 2,000 individuals.




Beyond these two major contributors to the decline of neanderthals in Africa, there is war, which happened over the disappearing natural resources in far too many instances to be counted here, and diseases, both those introduced by idaltu but also the prevalence of malaria and sleeping sickness along the Nile, but also a kuru-like disease that began to appear amongst the neanderthals of the Nile due to their cannibalistic traditions. All of these factors combined however, meant that neanderthals all but disappeared from most of Africa during the beginning of the Weichselian, and eventually abandoned it altogether, further abandoning Arabia for Persia as the climate there also became too extreme, making their push into into India and South East Asia.








Effects of the Eurasian Radiation of the Eemian Felt in the Weichselian




Neanderthal interaction with their denisovan cousins were rarely peaceful over the course of their run for Asia. As aforementioned, the very first meeting resulted in the genocide of the Hyino people along what was then known as the Şäş River (Ob). This did set a precedent for the majority of their interactions from those days in the early Eemian onward, as neanderthals pressed very hard into the Siberian woodlands at the cost of the technologically inferior denisovans. Competition for game often meant that denisovans had to develop very close relationships with specific kinds of game that neanderthals did not have a taste for, which would lay the ground work for the domestication of some of these animals in the future. By the end of the period, neanderthals had either killed off (with disease, or in war) or absorbed the majority of denisovan populations from the Ob to the Yana, with the final remnants of denisovans in Siberia holding out in Kamchatka.
But the neanderthals did not turn south into Central Asia and China until Siberia began to cool down and dry up as the Eemian came to a close. They quickly invaded Amur, headed directly for China, which together made up the population center of denisovan Asia. Here, conquest was not as easy, and the denisovans of this region had a few weapons that neanderthals did not, namely, javelins and slings. The bombardment of small stones, clay balls, and spears was something that the neanderthals had never faced before, and repelled them very quickly. Between 113-110,000 years ago, neanderthals abandoned settlement of the Amur River Basin.




In the north however, as the climate began to cool, and their lands to the west were infested with heavily built savages that seemed bent on their destruction, denisovans began to look east, across the waterway, to the visible lands of the Americas. This is a moment that scientists will debate as to the dating and the motivations behind it, but before the end of the Eemian denisovans had begun to colonize Alaska, and before the full advance of the Illinoian Ice Sheet, populations of them had escaped its all-devouring, icy jaws into Washington state. Here they would multiply, and lacking the same specialization to woodlands of neanderthals, they would radiate across the Great Plains and into Mexico.




Although not all of the denisovans met such a happy ending. One might be inclined to ask why neanderthals were so successful in their push into East Asia. The denisovans after all had a more varied diet, they knew their environment, and neanderthals were equally as susceptible to foreign diseases as they. Like the success of our Viking Age, we can point to environmental factors as the cause for neanderthals to so actively on the offensive, but their real success lies not in their technology, not in the environment, not in their adaptations, but in their culture.
Now what drove such an aggressive culture can certainly be attributed to some of the aforementioned factors. Neanderthals had a considerably more selective diet as carnivores, and as carnivores, killing took a more central role in their societies than it did in the societies of the denisovans. They were very much like Spartans, except naturally selected to be the way that they were. Their diet, and their environment demanded it of them. Now pare that with the fact that they seldom viewed denisovans as human beings, and on par with any other prey animal, and the denisovans, with their varied diet and their considerably less death-centered society, and they're in for a rough run. Furthermore, as the environment began to demand more of the neanderthals in Siberia, a culture of taking what you could and leaving others to die emerged rather quickly, and last for a very long time. By their nature, and by the environmental pressure being put on them, the neanderthals in Siberia became a formidable yet cruel fighting force that was bent on sustaining the large population that it had developed in the millennia that had past, even if it was at the direct expense of another human group.








How Homo sapiens sapiens Left Africa




So idaltu saw a rather substantial, yet short lived radiation during the fertile yet climatically unreliable Eemian period. By about 105,000 years ago, the Sahara had almost completely dried up, its rivers and lakes that had supported its herds of wild game now gone. But there was a pocket far to the northwest of this Saharan paleo-environment in which humanity was still able to flourish, and that pocket was the savanna of Morocco and Northern Algeria. Here, humanity had been introduced to neanderthal technologies during the Eemian period through peaceful trade across the Straits of Gibraltar. There were still some hunter-gatherers of large game, but many societies were coastal, gathering muscles, spear fishing, and seal hunting.
Within these coastal villages, people interacted rather frequently with the neanderthals across the Strait of Gibraltar, sharing in a common gift giving practice called maihira, which was not dissimilar to the Pacific Northwest potlatch. The word maihira had come to the people of Morocco's northern coast, who knew themselves as the Keterunu, via the neanderthal word maohano, which meant “kindness”. For the neanderthals who invented the ceremony, it was deeply wrapped in their spiritual traditions and worship of nature, symbolizing the wild game that the mother goddess has provided for man to hunt. These neanderthals of course, as their population had grown and their society gotten more complex with it, had an advanced concept of property, which was inherited through the mother's line. Neanderthal witches who were also family matriarchs would use the practice to represent themselves as being alike to the mother goddess in their gifts to the community, strengthening their social positions within it as distributors of wealth.
Although by the time in question, the original meaning of mimicking goddesses had mostly been lost, and was especially irrelevant to the humans across the water way in Africa who had adopted the tradition. The maihira, or muvelu as it had come to be called by the neanderthals across the strait, had become solely about establishing the influence of certain families, or in the case of neanderthal-human maihira, about establishing racial supremacy. It was held annually with the winter solstace. Like the potlatch, it was held at this time of year so that families could spend the summer months accumulating the wealth in question. Shell and bone necklaces, bone, wood and antler figurines, skin blankets, Pelorovis horns, weapons, canoes, and pottery (the first of which was invented by modern humans in this very place) were some of the items exchanged at these events, although at the most extravagant maihira, where a chief or matriarch (depending on the village) had enough children to spare, arrangements of marriage were made. One such marriage, which arranged by the great warrior Piputongor, of the village of Orasu (located at modern day Ceuta) was the event that brought the first permanent population of Homo sapiens sapiens out of Africa and into Europe – as slaves.
As the story goes, Piputongor, the greatest hunter and warrior in the area had intended on arranging the marriage of his 14 year old son, Mambarram, to the neaderthal princess of the village of Taelej (Gibraltar), in order to give the ultimate gift. The giving of such a gift was not dissimilar to giving away a dog from a line of show dogs. Mambarram's blood was believed to be the blood of a great hunter and a great warrior, and when bred with a neanderthal princess, the gift of his and his family's natural prowess would be given to the neanderthal village, putting them forever in the debt of the village of Orasu. But when the maihira took place at Piputongor's village, his son was awkwardly caught screwing another neanderthal girl for which he claimed to have pledged to marry when the two were much younger. Although neither groups practiced any kind of institutionalized monogamy, they did hold a very high importance on the concept in this context. Mambarram was being given away to the neanderthals to be bred, and so him breeding with another woman at the event in which his sperm was becoming confiscated was very seriously shameful for his father, and required that the neanderthals be paid a debt – his son's life. Unwilling to kill his son for his mistake, the neanderthals took over the village, burned it, and took as many of its inhabitants that remained alive back across the Strait of Gibraltar as prisoners of war.






While this event might seem rather insignificant, it was the beginning of the end of the neanderthal rain of dominance over the world. Why? Because it was the first time neanderthals had actually raided the coast of Africa and brought back human slaves, and it started a trend. Humans were began to be brought back from Africa as meat, as sacrifices, as slaves, and as brides, which served to gradually introduce a stable population. But this inter-tribal warfare did not always end with a neanderthal victory, and a number of times found neanderthals being put in similar positions. But the most important aspect of it all was the population exchange. Before Piputongor's botched gift to the neanderthals Taelej, while marriages did happen between the two, population exchange was non-existant. Neanderthal families did not move to Africa, and human families did not move to Europe, as there was a common understanding that one group belonged here, and the other there. This event tore down the barrier, and formally introduced stable populations of Homo sapiens sapiens, a species with a more varied diet which allowed it to interact with the world around it in a completely different manner than neanderthals, to Europe, thus sealing the latter's fate.

The Domestication of Dogs: Humans Invade Europe




Neanderthals never particularly liked wolves, or any other predator for that matter. While they did not actively engage in hunting other predators to eliminate competition, they did, as carnivores, view them as competition, in the same way that they viewed lions, hyens, bears, and scimitar cats as such. Their adaptation to a carnivorous diet therefore had caused them to think a certain way about an animal that we call “man's best friend”, making them unable to appreciate what this animal had to offer. Dogs did indeed scavenge human garbage around human villages, but were not treated with any kind of tolerance when they did, and so therefore did so with no greater frequency than hyenas. This rule applied to the Eurasian Gray Wolf as much as it applied to the African Wild Dog during the neanderthals' short lived invasion of the continent. And at first applied to modern humans in Iberia as well, as they resembled neanderthals well enough to the canine eye.
However, the population of neanderthals in Iberia, just as their population in general, had been on a slow decline since the Weichselian cool down began. At their peak population during the height of the Eemian Interglacial, they numbered as many as 5 million worldwide, with the highest population concentrations in Siberia and Scandinavia. These days, with the ice swallowing up the rich habitats in which they had flourished, drying up rivers or altering their courses, causing untold amounts of damage to the aquatic prey animals and their habitats which had allowed them to conquer open step environments, their population had decreased by half, with the greatest densities being a long ways from Iberia. Here, there were only about 20,000 of them across the whole peninsula, isolated in tiny pockets along coast lines and river systems, occupying the lowlands and the valleys where the rivers ran smoother and slower, and the fish were more abundant. Atlantic salmon runs were of especial import to them, driving many populations to the coast.
So as modern humans penetrated into the interior, moving away from the majority of the peninsula's neanderthal population, they were able to interact with the Iberian Wolf in a different way – like tolerating their presence. But one must ask why wolves were tolerated by these early humans, and hyenas were not, and the answer would be because the majority of the wolves that were scavenging on human garbage were outcasts of the pack, excluded because their calm temperament made them unable to compete in the social hierarchy. Hyenas on the other hand, regularly showed up to scavenge aggressively en masse, often with the intention of eating left overs and the humans who had left said left overs, which caused humans to drive them away, and not the wolf exiles. Over the years, these exiled wolves began to breed with one another, and a number of times independently bred a tamer wolf, completely free of human selective breeding. Without the regularity of human garbage off which to subsist, which was present especially given the level of technology that humans had at this point in time that allowed them to live a more sedentary lifestyle, these wolves would have either died, or developed more aggressive temperaments to survive in a pack. But with the garbage, they were allowed to breed, breeding their calm temperaments amongst themselves, and a general comfort with the presence of another predator, as that predator didn't seem to take the same interest in killing them or their pups as neanderthals did. Slowly, but not as slowly as fishing technology spread amongst the neanderthals during the Saalian Glaciation, the humans in Iberia, who lived mostly in the peninsula's inner highlands, began to accept and even take a liking to the presence of the wolves, as the wolves that subsisted primarily off of human garbage also guarded the villages from other predators. Not out of loyalty to humans, but to protect their food source.
This relationship already gave humans a very significant advantage over their neanderthal cousins, as the wolves protected villages from predators and in so doing sounded the alarm to danger. By 97,000 years BP, even though they were rather similar in appearance and scent, these wolves knew how to distinguish neanderthals from humans, and thus often alerted humans early to neanderthal raids, allowing them to pick up and move, or be better prepared. They had also begun to accompany humans on hunts. Humans had not yet harnessed their ability to be trained, but the animals knew that if they helped out in the hunt in whatever which way, perhaps a single wolf helping humans corner a large prey animal or even helping to take it down, they would get their share of the food when all was said and done. Neanderthals, because of the way they thought of wolves as fellow carnivores, were not privy to this cooperation between predators, but furthermore, experienced limited population growth in comparison to humans, who had wolves to protect them and fed on a greater variety of foods.
Humans were also capable of living longer than neanderthals under the right conditions, in sedentary fishing communities reaching ages of 50, which was two years shy a decade of the oldest neanderthal. A longer life meant an increased rate of reproduction, especially when you had a canine alert system around to let you know of danger, and as humans had more time to have more children, the fast growing neanderthals had only a short window in comparison. The ability to have more children over more time increased the chances of infant survival, while neanderthals in their short window might go their entire reproductive lives without having one child that made it to adulthood. This reproductive edge meant that it took much less time for the human population of Iberia to dwarf the neanderthal one. Within just 9,000 years of having been imported to the continent of Europe as slaves by neanderthal fishing communities, their population was double the size of their cousins', at 41,000. Just as well, by this time, they had mostly swallowed up the neanderthal communities of Iberia's east coast, and had begun to push outward into the Mediterranean Sea, establishing communities on the already inhabited islands of Ibiza, Majorca, and Menorca (although the latter two were connected at the time), and following the coastal trade routes along the coast of the Ligurian Sea directly into Italy.



From here, it was a rather straight and easy walk through the drastically expanded Po River Valley into the Balkans. In both places, modern humans would develop similar interactions with wolves, which allowed them to properly conquer new step environments in which neanderthals had been limited to the rivers, as their bodies were not designed for the hunting of wild game in the open, and they did not have the same furry companions that humans did. But true domestic dogs did not occur until humans began to take control of the breeding of the wolves that guarded their camps, scavenged on their garbage, and accompanied them on the hunt. This happened in Iberia, when humans began




But true domestic dogs did not appear until 91,000 years BP, when humans in Iberia began nursing the orphaned pups of the wolves that had guarded their villages. This began from one event in the northeast of the peninsula near modern day Besalú, after a she-wolf got into a tussle with a scimitar cat that had taken an interest in her pups, who had had a den constructed for them by the humans whose seasonal village she protected. When the cat killed her, the inhabitants of the village raised her pups as their own, thus resulting in the first human control over a wolf's offspring, which spread rather rapidly over the course of the next 4,000 years as humans began to realize the use in dogs that could be trained to hunt along side them.
Edited by Zirojtan, Jun 7 2013, 05:59 PM.
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Zirojtan Aug 19 2013, 10:31 PM Post #4
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What's in a species?


In a world where we are the only surviving species and subspecies within the genus Homo, it can sometimes be difficult to imagine what other members of our genus would have been like. We tend to think of a thick line between man and beast, as indeed today there seems to be; because of this line, it is often very difficult for everyone, both layman and scientist to picture something in between the enormously removed creature that man is today and the clever apes that we know to be our closest living relatives.


But things were not always so black and white. The Plio-Pleistocene was a time when many lines that are now clear today were still blurred. Habitats and seasons were far more mixed and variable, and many seemingly intermediate creatures blurred the lines between animals that we would today view as entirely separate. For example, the aforementioned bovid, Leptobos – an animal somewhere between cow and antelope, closely related to the prehistoric Eobison that may have contributed to the evolution of the modern bison and yak. Or even stranger yet, the last of the amphicyonids, Arctamphicyon, lived during the early Pleistocene, belonging to a family of animals that seemed to blur the now clear line between bear and dog. But still, the antelocaprids, which remain today in our timeline in the form of pronghorns, seem to be a strange mix of antelope and deer with their shedding horns.
Similarly, the line between human and ape was not as clearly drawn during this time, as there were still two seemingly basal members of the genus Homo still roaming the world – Homo erectus, and Homo floresiensis. The latter of these early humans was a textbook example of insular dwarfism, and was unique to its island home of Flores-Komodo. But the first of these belonged to an ancient and extremely long-lived Eurasian species that signified an enormous step in human evolution. While sporting considerable diversity in size, shape, and appearance over its range, the Erecti all had a few things in common: the Acheulean Tool Industry, and the use of fire. Their advanced tools were the first stone tools to chip flakes off of a stone to get at lithic cores, making the first hand-axes, their minds were capable of complex problem solving and advanced communication, they had a varied diet that included large game and a number of different plant varieties, especially tubers, and their bodies were evolved for hunting in open habitats. With all of these traits, they might seem a worthy challenge for the Neanderthals or the Denisovans...


So what was it about the Erecti that had been eclipsed when other, more modern humans came onto the scene? The varied diet of modern humans had given them an edge over Neanderthals in that they could interact with animals in ways that Neanderthals didn't, cooperatively hunting with predators that Neanderthals viewed as competition. Their taller, leaner bodies allowed them to exploit open habitats along with closed ones, like mountains and forests, whereas the Neanderthals stocky bodies meant that they were suited for ambush hunting, limiting their ability to utilize the world around them. The eEecti had both of these traits in common with modern humans, so one might expect that their peas were in the pod when compared to Neanderthals and Denisovans. And yet, they weren't. Something else was afoot in these other humans, in fact a few other things, things that made all the difference when it came down to which one of the three distinct types of human were going to rule the world.
To start off, a larger and more capable brain. While the average size of a modern human brain was 1500 cubic centimeters, and the average size of a Neanderthal/Denisovan brain around 16-1700 cubic centimeters, the average size of the an erectus brain was just 900 cubic centimeters – and intermediate size between that of humans and higher apes, which today would average between 5-600 cubic centimeters. Their minds therefore, were not as capable as those of their counterparts at not only solving complex problems, but at abstract thought, and that most humanizing of characteristics – language. Indeed, the various languages of the Erecti, while verbal, were still rather primitive when compared to those of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the Eurasian competitor, modern humans. As abstract thought was not possible for erectus in the same way that it is for us, their languages lacked distinctions between verbs and adjectives, meaning that spoken conversation was nearly always interpreted within context. For example, women did not speak of pregnancy in their social units if no one was in fact pregnant likely to become pregnant. But just as their minds were not as suited for many of the aspects of Neanderthal/Denisovan/Sapiens, neither were the structures used for speech. They lacked a true chin, which rendered them incapable of pronouncing certain sounds, but their mouths and throats were proportioned differently as well, such that they could not produce non-nasalized speech. This clearly limited the phonemic inventory of any erectus language, even when tones were added to the mix (and they frequently were).
While their speech capacity and their radically different approach to linguistics was indeed a factor in defining their interactions with other human species, there something else that was far more important – their social system.


As has been well established, variations in global climate had led to alternating wet and dry periods of both Africa and Central and South Asia during the Pliocene and the Pleistocene epochs, which put a strain on a number of different animals, including early hominins. The various Ice Ages of the Pleistocene especially saw a dramatic increase in aridity that transformed much of Eurasia into a cold desert steppe from France to Siberia during the Saalian and Weichselian eras. This desertification process also dried out much of the Middle East as aforementioned, creating isolated pockets of oasis habitat around water resources that served as refuges for large mammal species that once roamed freely across a wetter Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Levant. Likewise, India had also been adversely affected, and much of her rich forests had been hollowed entirely making way for open grasslands across most of the subcontinent, and the Thar Desert had nearly tripled in size. It was in these harsh environments that selective pressure had been put on the Erecti in the area of energy acquisition, which together with the increase of reproductive cost on females, had favored small foraging groups over generations of evolution that by this time included multiple generations of related females. These small groups were headed by a resident male, who, because of a significant difference in size and strength due to higher levels of sexual dimorphism was able to secure exclusive sexual access to these small female groups in order to protect his progeny from both predators and unrelated, infanticidal males looking to establish themselves over a group of females. Furthermore, these heads of Erecti harems cooperated with their close male relatives in hunting/scavenging efforts, the acquisition of resources, and most importantly, the exchange of females.


It is therefore very easy to see how such a closed social system based almost entirely off of kin and dominance would have been difficult for members of another species to enter. In fact, the only Erecti that were welcome at the most basic level of their societies, i.e., the single-male group (consisting of a male and his harem) were possibly younger male relatives who helped in child rearing and harem protection while the older, dominant male was away hunting, and newly acquired females, who mostly entered groups through sexual exchange raiding, or territorial conflicts resulting in the death of their dominant males. Combined with a lesser capacity for complex social interaction and an entirely different approach to linguistics, interactions between Erecti, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens, were damned long before they occurred.


Now, modern humans from Persia had taken a different route than Neanderthals during their invasion of the Indian Subcontinent. During the Eemian Interglacial, Neanderthals had followed Northern India's river systems, and so had concentrated populations along the Hindus and Ganges rivers. Anatomically modern humans on the other hand had stuck to Asia's southern coast, thus coming into direct conflict with the Erecti in the drastically expanded Thar Desert. Neanderthals that they had met along the way didn't help the first encounters either. Neanderthals in the area had had a long history of violent and savage interactions with the Erecti. These Indian Neanderthals, having given up cannibalism for the most part, told many stories about savage beasts, half man, half monkey (due of course to the more primitive appearance of their faces) that ate men alive. These tales had stemmed from the habit of Erecti to kill and eat anything that strayed into their territory, whether Neanderthal, human, Denisovan, or Erectus. Naturally, when the very first modern humans met Erecti for the first time, they knew exactly what to expect, and treated them with equal hostility.


See, Neanderthals and Denisovans were recent migrants to the region, and therefore were not evolutionarily adapted to the fluctuating climate. Their bodies were specialized to closed hunting environments, as mentioned many times before, and so they did not directly compete with Erecti for anything other than water resources (which had caused their disappearance in some regions). The Erecti, were very much like modern humans in their adaptation to open grasslands and deserts, something that a few million years of evolution in Central Asia had afforded them, which put them in direct competition with modern humans, who were rapidly taking over Asia via their ability to exploit the very same habitats. So, like analogues to the Neanderthals in Siberia at the start of the Weichselian, modern humans dedicated themselves to the annihilation of their competitors, which, considering the social skills of the latter, was not as difficult. As Erecti groups were generally centered around single male units who controlled the reproduction and the social interaction of females and whose males only interacted with their relatives, resistance was not as strong as Denisovan resistance against Neanderthal expansion. The hunting bands and tribes of modern humans were comprised primarily of extended family groups, but social interaction between unrelated extended families was much better, which allowed for extensive cooperation that was lacking on the Erecti side of the battle. During this time of increased pressure, large unrelated family groups did develop as they always had in times of pressure, but their social interaction and cooperation was not on par with that of their human counterparts. In fact, these groups were barely affiliated with one another beyond sharing a specific range of territory and at times places of sleeping. Unrelated males acknowledged one another's presence peacefully, but did not interact, and became very possessive over their females during these times. There was a degree of interaction between females outside of their single-male units, even with females in the single-male units of other male kin groups, but these, when discovered, could result in violent retaliation by their males against the rebellious female or the unrelated female with whom she was interacting, sparking conflict between male kin groups. Conflict could also be brought about when the younger bachelors of a single-male unit copulated with females from another single-male unit, especially if said female was outside of the male kin-group.


This clear inability organize posed a serious problem in coordinating defense of territories against large groups of humans, or attacks to secure resources from them, and ultimately cost them their lives as a species. The Erecti would be restricted to the most remote regions of the Indian Subcontinent within less than a thousand years after the arrival of modern humans. The pressure of the three other, significantly more advanced human groups would prove too much for them in the end, although they would not completely disappear until after the Toba Eruption.


Catastrophe: The Eruption That Changed The World


By 73,000 years BP, the world had changed rather significantly. The range of Neanderthals in Europe had dramatically declined as populations were forced to their knees with the continued advance of the glaciers out of Scandinavia, which had swallowed up the important seal-hunting waters of the Baltic Sea, and continued to swallow the North Sea, making their way to Britain. Many fled west, many to Britain to hunt seals in great variety as more northerly species began to show themselves along the peninsula's coasts as they had during the Saalian Glaciation, but the refuge would be temporary. Others fled south, following the rivers of the Loire and the Rhine to ancestral woodlands that were now populated with modern humans and their wretched dogs. In Eastern Europe, populations held strong in Western Anatolia and the Southern Balkans, exploiting the rich marine, woodland, and alpine hunting.


Modern humans made up a clear majority however, and that majority rule applied from the shores of France, east and south to the Western Ghats, and north to the Altai Mountains, where descendants of the migrants from the Horn of Africa and descendants from migrants across the Strait of Gibraltar met with Neanderthals and Denisovans. They now began their expansion into China on two fronts, just as the Neanderthals had done before them, from the north and from the south. Although the points of entrance were slightly different (the northern Neanderthal route had been by invasion from the Amur River Valley), the concept was still very much the same. However the China that they were invading was itself very much changed from the China of the Late Eemian-Early Weichselian, as the advance of the glaciers in Europe and North America and the increase of aridity caused by such environmental phenomenona had turned much of the region into a cold desert, leaving woodlands and forests restricted to the south towards the great Sundaland Subcontinent. Despite their variable diet, Denisovans too were suffering from the changes in the environment, with majority populations in Eurasia now concentrated in South China, the Japonic Peninsula (Japan and Sakhalin), Sundaland, the Philippines, and Sulawesi.


But just because modern humans had been more successful, does not mean that they too were not suffering from this cycle of global cooling. Their population, which formerly had been 2-3 million from the tip of Africa across Eurasia to just over 1 million as the cooling cost increased aridity along the equator, making places like the Horn of Africa and Southern Arabia nearly uninhabitable, cutting off the flow of human migration from Africa and starving populations in the Middle East. Genetic diversity amongst modern humans would reach its peak 10,000 years later because of the marginalization of populations caused during this period. A stale mate in the race for special dominance over the world seemed to have been reached, but there was something looming beneath the earth that was about to change the balance of power.


In Sundaland, a place of varied habitats where giant apes trumped through forests, small loose-headed primates chased insects in the night, and elephants and tigers ruled the open savanna, there was a great mountain that was especially sacred to the people who lived around it. These people were the Toqquz, a widespread culture of Denisovans whose spiritual lives centered around this holy mountain which they called Kønluca, which was said to be the home of their father deity, Fngaraöşlan. In another time, this mountain would be called Toba...


Of course the Toqquz people knew to stay far away from this mountain, as smaller eruptions, which they took to be expressions of Fngaraöşlan's anger with them, had cost many them many lives in the past. While much of the rest of the world was suffering in a time of extreme drought, the Toqquz were enjoying the plentiful resources of their tropical rainforest environment, which provided them with rich wild game and equally rich sources of plant foods. Denisovans as they were, it was the perfect place for their shorter bodies, which were less adapted to running great distances and more adapted to ambush hunting (although they were not as heavily built as the Neanderthals in India and South China). So full of food was there environment that it allowed them to create permanent villages along the shores of rivers and at the tops of trees, mirroring tribes that we would know in the Irian Jaya region of New Guinea. This rich tropical environment combined with the fact that there had been no recent eruptions from their holy mountain had these people under the impression that their father god was content with them; little did they know that the mountain, and not some obscure and ego-centric god, was about to change the face of the entire planet, killing them in its fit of destruction.


The Toqquz did not record years, and so the precise date of their nature-perpetuated genocide cannot be accurately stated, but it was sometime between 73-72,000 years ago, when they, as a civilization based on fishing, were at their height, when the holy mountain exploded. It happened at night, when most were already sleep, and began with earthquakes that brought the highest trees of the jungle canopy to the ground, taking down tree houses or smashing the stick, mud and leaf shelters below. Those who lived on the ground knew only that the Earth was trembling, but those who lived in trees that had not yet fallen rushed to the tree tops, suspecting the mountain as the culprit. Only a few eyes pairs of human eyes were ever able to behold the apocalyptic sight of hundreds of thousands of pounds of rock and ash spewing into the sky before being wiped out by pyroclastic clouds that wiped out an area of over 7,000 square miles. Yet in the absence of sets of eyes to see, every set of ears from Sundaland to South China, and all the way to India could hear it. Human-Neanderthal fishing based villages at the Mouth of the Ganges awoke in terror at the sound, as did hunter-gatherers in South China. Some feared a great and terrible beast, while others feared that there was a war in the heavens, and still others believed that the gods were breaking the Earth apart. The sound was unlike anything any man, woman, or child has ever heard since – a deep and dreadful bellow that seemed to come from the core of the Earth itself. Some 200 cubic miles of dense volcanic ash exploded from the mountain in an eruptive column some 50 miles high, and rained down on the land from Sundaland to South China to India that would bury everything beneath it at an average depth of 6 inches. All life surrounding the volcano, including the ancient Toqquz of the West Sundaland rainforests were extinguished before the night was over. The eruption would continue for a week, and the ash cloud would be carried by the monsoon winds to deposit itself over India's rainforests and grasslands at depths of up to 12 ft., while spouts of lava shot from the caldera to heights of up to 36 miles releasing 2 billion tons of an invisible killer – sulfuric acid gas. These acid droplets blocked out the sun, which triggered a 6 year winter the world over in which the global temperature decreased by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as poisoned water sources all over South and Southeast Asia. In the increasingly arid Horn of Africa, temperatures actually reached below freezing, and the brief summer rains came as frost.



It was the most catastrophic event that modern humans both in our own timeline, and in this one, have ever born witness to. Yet it gave them a curious advantage, for during the course of this disaster, although many human lives were lost, Neanderthals and Denisovans almost entirely disappeared from both Sundaland and South China. Indian Neanderthals became an exclusive of the Ganges River Floodplain in the northern portion of the subcontinent, and Denisovans populations were marginalized to the fringes of Asia in the Japonic Peninsula, Sulawesi, and the Philippines. The road to reclaim what had been lost would be long, dark, and cold, but this time, it would be modern humans, and not Neanderthals or Denisovans who would repopulate Asia. The Denisovans as a human subspecies had reached their climax long ago, but with the eruption of the sacred mountain of Kønluca came the end of their era, and the beginning of a new one.






The Toba Eruption Aftermath: Not so dark... at least not for everybody


Although the super-eruption of the holy mountain of Kønluca was a devastating blow to many species the world over in the years that followed it, life bounced back, and it did so relatively quickly. Within just a thousand years of the eruption, it was difficult to tell that anything had happened at all in many places without knowledge as to what the world was like before. If someone, somewhere had managed to live for the duration of those thousand years, they would’ve been able to tell you that the world was quite a bit emptier in terms of humans… i.e., a lot of people were dead. The Denisovan population of Sundaland in specific had been severely reduced. They were so reduced in fact, that only a few communities were clinging onto life in the peripheral north and east of the subcontinent, in places that we would know today as Sulawesi and the Philippines. This region had been one of the wealthiest in the world in terms of food resources previously, allowing for the creation of permanent settlements without any kind of agriculture with populations up to 200 or so, but the eruption had sort of buried most of those people in a sweeping cloud of ash, and many that had managed to survive that unearthly week of horror ended up dead of starvation or illnesses caused by the inhalation of chemicals and ash. The ensuing volcanic winter thereafter and the temporary climate change triggered a shift back to a nomadic lifestyle as food sources were temporarily brief. Living in a permanent settlement was no longer feasible, and large groups splintered to ease the pressure of feeding all of their members. Old kinship systems and social norms rapidly disappeared, and many died of starvation or in conflicts over food, causing a further population crash to just a fraction of what it had been previously.
The story was very much the same elsewhere in India and China, and so by 71,000 years ago, the world in terms of human population had… changed. Neanderthals were especially heavily impacted because of the immediate death of scores of fish that were vital sources of food in environments that they had trouble using, like the grasslands of the Indian Subcontinent. The temporary death of forest habitats over a wide area also saw them exposed, which in previous millennia would have been of serious detriment because they had not yet made use of ranged weapons. Still, even with spears and slings, hunting in the open was difficult, especially under these impromptu circumstances, and Neanderthal and Denisovan bands were not as successful in these environments as those of anatomically modern humans in these shortly lived open habitats. But where there is death, there is normally the opportunity for new life, and new life there certainly would be. Although Neanderthals and Denisovans at this point had most of the technological tricks of modern humans up their sleeves, there was still one that is often underestimated in the sheer quantity of its importance, and that trick was the domestic dog. Neanderthals had a deeply imprinted hatred of dogs that went back to where Neanderthals lived on the food web – as mostly hypercarnivorous predators. Denisovans on the other hand did not have the same specialized diet, but traditionally saw dogs not as competition, but as prey. The modern humans that colonized Asia’s southern coast from the Horn of Africa did not keep dogs, and so the custom was still alien by the time population from Central Asia, which was then the melting pot of the three subspecies, introduced them as they filled the open lands left by those that had perished. Although even as this new hunting companion was introduced to them, their population numbers in China were just too low, and the amount of humans pouring in was just too high. They could not sustain their hold on their old homeland for much longer…

Elsewhere in the world, the effects of the eruption were being felt as well. It had plunged the entire planet in fact into a few years of volcanic winter that chiseled back on the populations of both modern humans and Neanderthals in Western Asia and the Middle East, but had also turned up some bad fishing the world over. On the West African coast of present-day Mauritania, this had been especially damaging, as communities here had long been stuck to the coasts after the rich savannas had dried up at the close of the Eemian. The bad fishing forced the innovation of better seagoing vessels in a number of these small communities as fisherman strove to find more fish, and in turn, prompted the discovery and permanent settlement of the Cape Verde Islands, thus facilitating a third invasion of the two American continents.



Now hold on a moment… what? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The process of human colonization of the Americas from Africa took a few thousand years. Yes, it was in the immediate aftermath of the Toba Super-Eruption that the fishermen tried their hands at fishing deeper waters and followed the current to the Cape Verde Islands, but even the lush Cape Verde archipelago is a far cry from either of the American continents. Even the settling of the islands itself was a very gradual process, as once they were discovered, some 350 miles off the coast from which the fishermen had set sail, human habitation was not immediate. In fact, their discovery actually prompted movement in the other direction, along the West African Coast as the fishermen learned to exploit the Guinea Current. The very first fishermen that reached the Cape Verde Islands fished their tropical reefs and went home, while later generations that used the current to sail the coasts would sometimes bring back a large game animal that they had hunted on the southern savannas, or stalked in the coastal rainforests. The Niger River Phenotype, which inhabited much of Northwestern Africa at the time, experienced a short population boom with the advent of seagoing canoes that could also sail up the Niger River, prompting the displacement of older phenotypes, especially the West African Pygmies that lived in the tropical rainforests. But the boom was short-lived in some areas, especially the place where it had originated on the desert coasts of Mauritania, as it led to the exhaustion of coastal trees that were vital for the construction of the canoes. Those coastal populations that found themselves in this predicament either looked increasingly to the desert for sustenance as their canoes fell victim to age or moved – across the water.
It was actually the permanent settlement of the Cape Verde Islands that resulted in the very first modern human travel to the island of Montserrat. Yes, Montserrat. Although no permanent human settlement of the island would begin for another 4,000 years, the tropical Caribbean island of Montserrat was the place that would invade the dreams of humans for generations to come, as the stories of the fisherman and his family who had been blown off course there resonated for years amongst his countrymen in the Cape Verde Islands. Although, the stories were not of a tropical paradise, like the kind of story you would expect from a European sailor blown off course to such a place. No, the Cape Verde Islands were paradise enough for he and his family, and so the story came as that of a very far off place where many strange and unfamiliar birds roosted and odd looking trees grew. Of course, he would not be the only person to wind up in the Caribbean Sea in the four millennia that preceded permanent human settlement. As the prevailing currents of the that section of the Atlantic actually go in just that direct, quite a few people fishing off of the Cape Verde Isles wound up very far away from home indeed. All of the Lesser Antilles Islands in fact were visited on a number of occasions, as well as the Antilles, the northern coast of South America, and even a bloated and dry Florida. Many of these people who found themselves in the Caribbean Sea or the Americas never made it home, and died alone where their canoes had wrecked. But many still were able to find their way back, some getting caught in the Gulf Stream and sailing as far as Europe before finally returning.
Still, none of these canoe-wrecks ever resulted in a permanent settlement. No, permanent settlement of the Americas was actually undertaken in an organized effort some 68,000 years ago by explorers from the Cape Verde Archipelago. Indeed this organized effort to settle the Lesser Antilles Islands was actually the first of its kind. Humans of course had been settling the vast continents of Eurasia and Africa for some time now, but never had a faraway location been discovered, and news of it brought back to a group, sparking the curious and adventurous minds of the group to undertake a journey to said place. The Americas had first been settled by canoe-wrecked Neanderthals who had been lucky enough to live long enough to see another Neanderthal wash up on the shore. It was then settled by Denisovans who were marginalized to the coastal Siberia, who then decided that to escape the Neanderthal onslaught, they’d cross the water to the land that became visible on a clear day. Eurasia had begun settlement by modern humans who were taken back to Iberia as slaves from North Africa, and finally, the Cape Verde Islands had simply been settled out of practicality over time as fishermen frequented its coral reefs. But the Lesser Antilles Islands were a very big step for humanity. Over the years of tales and tales brought back from fishermen, the islands of the far west came to be associated with myths of an island paradise where the sun god lived with his wife, which prompted the young and adventurous minds of a tribe on an island we know today as Santa Antão to seek them out.


These adventurous minds comprised a few small, nuclear families, whose intent in seeking out these mythical islands was to escape the mortal world and avoid the underworld, where it was said that all human souls were destined to go after death. If they could make it to the land of the sun god, they figured that they could perhaps not only cheat death, and the sun god’s evil twin brother who lived deep within the Earth, but also broker an agreement with the sun god for all of mankind. A noble goal indeed, but it was soon all but abandoned by these families as they arrived on the island of Martinique, where they found the evil twin of the sun god still at work at Mt. Pelée. Initially, as they landed on the southern end of the island, they believed that they had arrived in this celestial paradise, a land that in their myths was known as Ipaśiba. But as the reality of their situation slowly sank in, this older name was lost, and the island came to be known by several names as the original five original families grew into distinct villages on separate ends of the island. Those on the southern end called it Kērmenīs, or “plentiful place”, named for the rich fishing and hunting, especially of the endemic rice rat, especially Megalomys desmarestii, while those on the northern end called it Galunes, for the rice rats that inhabited the island. But the spirit of exploration did not die with the disappointment of one or even a few generations. While it set in that the island that had become their home was not in fact the Ipaśiba of myth and legend, future generations would carry out the search for centuries to come, slowly advancing human settlement north, into the Leeward Islands, and eventually, by 67,500 BP, to the Greater Antilles. Of course by this time, regular contact with the original homeland of Santa Antão, or furthermore, the African Coast, had stopped altogether, all due to the attack of an invisible killer.

A Silent Murderer


67,850 years ago, a young man named Šeimans from the Island of Druskos (Sal, Cape Verde), unknowingly brought something back that would not only kill him, but the entire population of his island home. This killer belonged to a family of microscopic predators, who, despite their small size, have had enormous success over the course of their run on this planet. This family of microscopic predators is Poxviridae, a family of viruses that may have originated as far back as the Pliocene, and by the time in question had split into a number of diverse lineages, one of which was a phenotype of Avipoxvirus that specialized in a specific kind of bird called Psittacivariola, which, as the name indicates infected parrots. It just so happens that Šeimans, who traded fish with the peoples of the Niger River with his father, had a pet Senegal Parrot named Milejonai that contracted this special form of pox on one of their trips to the African Coast. Now, poxviruses of the time behaved a little differently than poxviruses of today, specifically in that they were not yet airborne, but transferred by insect vectors that normally came in the form of mosquitoes. Multiple species of mosquito carried these viruses, and those same species of mosquitoes preyed upon the parrots of West Africa, many different species of whom were common pets of the Cape Verdean fishermen and traders. Šeimans’ parrot Milejonai was the first of the Cape Verdean pets to contract the virus, and when it began to develop the pustules and sores that are characteristic of any poxvirus, he was promptly told by the locals of the Niger River to dispose of the bird.
But it was already too late, for a mosquito that the bird had flick off of its shoulder after it had drawn out a little of its blood post infection had already transferred the virus mechanically to Šeimans, and while it was not fatal to him, it meant that his blood carried the virus. Indeed, Šeimans was only sick for a few days the trip home from Africa, but from the moment he set foot on his native shores, his fate, and the fate of his people was sealed. The virus quickly spread as mosquitoes transmitted it mechanically from Šeimans to the other locals of the island and their parrots, and as the parrots began to die, so too did the local avian fauna as it was still capable of causing death in them as well. A few of the youngest human children found themselves unable to withstand the sickness, and succumbed within a few days of infection. But the full effect would actually not be felt for a few more years, as the virus mutated in the bodies of the local fauna, and became more and more efficient at attacking a wider variety of hosts. By this time, it had spread across the archipelago, devastating populations of birds, and over time, humans as well. The Island of Druskos was completely uninhabited within 20 years, and within 50, every island save the Island of Salźojo (Brava) were absent of human habitation.


However, taken into retrospect, this was just one of a million tragedies that had thus far made up the human story. The Cape Verde Islands supported a total population of maybe 800 individuals during the period of the first pox, and while the epidemic left all but one of the islands uninhabited, it selected for those few whose immune systems could win the battle against the virus. These few people, who numbered no more than 60, would actually become the ancestors of the vast majority of the anatomically modern humans in the American Continents. They had faced the brink of extinction, and theirs was a progeny destined for success.
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