Rediculously Broad Anthropological discussion related to "Endless Horizons"

[Xeviat]

[note=Endless Horizons]I recently decided to combine my spirit world and my land of the dead into a single spirit world, both as a way of being more "traditional" and also to divorce myself from "Points of Light", even though I was using the idea first (/bitter). Thus, I have changed my setting's name from "Three Worlds" to "Endless Horizons", which encompasses the large over-theme of exploration and grand size I am going for. Sorry for the confusion.[/note]This is almost a "Meta" thread, though it is directly related to my setting so I stuck it here; no one seems to be hardcore sticklers about thread placement so I think I'll be fine. I need the help of anyone well versed in Ancient History, especially really early or even pre-civilization type stuff. I could also use the help of anyone who just knows how to make things seem "right". The discussion is intended to be so broad that I hope it will create a fun back and forth.

Here's a map of the setting, with elevation and general biomes, that should help with the discussion. Google docs rock.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Here's the gist of what I want to figure out: What's the least amount of time it would take for a race/species to disseminate from a single place (ala the Garden of Eden) if they were brought into being already intelligent? In an effort to keep my setting from being compartmentalized too much, I am looking at the world as a whole. Also, one of my goals is to tackle the foundations of my setting in as realistic of a way as possible. Much of this is going to be behind the scenes in game, especially as it deals with the realities of the setting and not the myth (which is one of my favorite parts, that the two are separate). For those of you who are unfamiliar with my setting (and for everyone else really, because I'm not sure how much has changed), here's a quick rundown of the realities:

• As you may have already noticed, the map looks suspiciously earth-like. That's because the setting is Earth, only 50 million years in the future. I played with the tectonics a bit, using projections I found, though I did a few things just because they're cool (and who can say the projections are 100% accurate anyway, no one agrees on them to begin with).
• Humans as we know them were attacked by something terrible; aliens, Cthulhu, I don't know yet. That, coupled with an ice age and a pole shift, wiped them out for all intents and purposes. The species survived, but the culture and achievements were gone.
• There's magic, there's a spirit world. These have always existed, they're just not around in our time because we don't believe hard enough, or the gods don't like us.
• The "ancients", as in high tech humans, created some human-subspecies. These are the humanoid races in the setting that can interbreed with humans, because they were created from humans. These races include the Giants and the animal-hybrid races, and lycanthropes. Humans can successfully breed with "elves" and "goblins" because they're spiritual reflections of humans.
• The other races that aren't directly related to humans could be stranded aliens or technologically evolved animals. 50 million years isn't enough time for badgers to turn into dwarves, but if the ancients did a little selective genetic engineering it might be.
• In the end, there is going to be about three "subraces"/"cultures" for each of the races, and five or six for humans.
• The elves, giants, and draconians were the first to re-civilize the world. Their war with each other weakened them and put much of their civilizations into ruin. The other now-civilized races are vastly younger, at least as far as their collective recollections go.

What I need to figure out is a time scale for the modern civilized races to spread the world and to differentiate from each other. I want the current player races (except elves) to be young by comparison.

What makes more sense: for each race to have branched out from a single origin point, or for each civilization to arise from wild natives in multiple locations? Looking at humans, there's an amount of cultural progression from one place to another, but it seems we spread out before the culture got there. But I'm dealing with multiple migrating species who are also guided by deific spirits.

Ultimately, I really don't want my Asian-inspired continent (Africa) to feel like a completely separate setting from the rest of the world (as it was shaping out to be). I think by starting at square one and looking at the world as a whole I can avoid that tacked-on feeling. I am also sorry if this post was very stream-of-thought and random.

[LoA]

I'm fairly well versed in ancient history (don't take anything i say as gospel), so i'll tell what i think.

First off, i have read everything you posted, but i haven't read your setting yet, so i'll take a look at it when my head isn't killing me cause of this cold.

But i think that "50 million years" into the future is a very big generalization. We only have roughly 5000 years of recorded history, that we are still trying to figure all out.

But if i may add a new viewpoint, many ancient civilizations were extremely far ahead of there times, to the point where we still use them in modern day life. The architectures of Greece and Rome are still in employment, and were still trying to figure out just how the Ancient Egyptians did what they did (Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt is an interesting read).

And as Eddie Izzard famously said to us, "you are the new Roman Empire" which is extremely true. So if you're going to try to project as far as 50 million years, first you should try to project into the future one-two thousand years, and see how much we influenced the entire course of history. Then you can probably keep on building on those assumptions.

Oh, and have you ever heard of "Man After Man" by Dougal Dixon? It's a weird book, but probably worth something if you're also projecting human evolution.

Sorry i probably made a magnificent moron out of my self in this post...

[Xeviat]

I have read "Man after Man", and also just "After Man". There's also a "Future Evolution" animal planet "documentary" out there too. But I'm not dealing with society that has progressed 50 million years into the future. Human society was wiped out and kicked to the stone age. Language and technology all had to be reinvented, and it was done so by other races. Humans have recovered to end medieval/beginning age of exploration era tech, but the now existence of magic is altering things.

What I'm working out mostly is where the current races originated, if they have a cradle of their civilizations or if their civilizations arose in separate areas from native stock. I'm worrying about where they actually came to be and became civilized, not specifically what myth says. Like how long would it take a human-like race to span the entire world? How would the existence of other species that survive to this day alter that? What about the existence of super predators like drakes and dragons?

[limetom]

Hooray for Zoidberg limetom. Questions I can answer.

What's the least amount of time it would take for a race/species to disseminate from a single place (ala the Garden of Eden) if they were brought into being already intelligent?

Looking at invasive species, basically overnight in evolutionary/geologic terms. For example, common mynas were introduced to the island of O'ahu, where I live, in 1865. They are now one of the most common birds you will find in Honolulu. Looking at this page by a professor here cataloging the common birds on campus here at the University of Hawaii, all of the most common birds are invasive species, and all of them have been in the Hawaiian Islands at most 200 years or so.

Let's take something more along the lines of humans. Humans, for example. The Japanese first started settling in Hokkaido around the 12th or 13th century CE or so. However, their population did not move further than the Oshima Peninsula, the southernmost portion of Hokkaido. This is not because they couldn't; the situation is much more complex than that.

To start with, there were already people there--the Ainu. Many people think the Ainu are an indigenous group of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. This is certainly true nowadays, but it is clear if one really reads the genetic, historical, archaeolgical, and linguistic records as a whole, that they extended throughout the Japanese Archipelago before the Japanese got there from the Korean Peninsula. The Ainu didn't have wet rice agriculture like the Japanese; instead, they had dry field horticulture, raising things like millet, which were better suited to the far north. What they did have, however, was access to fur and hides of various animals, like bears and eagles. The Ainu living in the northern part of Hokkaido and on Sakhalin, and other groups in Sakhalin had already been trading with the Chinese at that point for furs and hides, starting in the Song Dynasty (ca. 900 CE). The Japanese too would come to exploit this, but in a way more reminiscent of the treatment of the indigenous peoples of eastern North America. The Matsumae Domain who came to control southern Hokkaido would fine any Ainu attempting to grow crops, strictly controlled the import of seeds, and . Their tribute to the Shogun was not rice or grain like other feudal domains; instead, it was paid in furs that they got from the Ainu.

Then came the Meiji era, and everything changed. For example, over this summer I participated in an archaeological dig on Rebun Island--about as far north as you can go in Japan. When Meiji came, fishermen and their families from what is today Aomori Prefecture to fish the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. In the space of not even 150 years, the Ainu who once lived on Rebun Island are either gone, have assimilated, or are hiding their identity as Ainu. This is the case over much of Hokkaido.

But that's where there are people. A better example might be the peopling of Polynesia, where the first Polynesians to reach the islands were the first humans to ever set foot on them. Hawaii was first settled by humans around 300 to 800 CE. By 1778 CE, as Kamehameha I was starting to unify the islands and when Cook first visited, the population was probably around 250,000, and the land was very well developed with a complicated tiered system of agriculture and aquaculture. So over the space of not even a millennium, the Hawaiians went from a small band of initial settlers to 250,000 people who had developed the island into about as well developed as you could get it without monoculture crops and genetic engineering.

I've already covered a lot so I'll let you read up on the Out of Africa model of early human migration.

So basically, it depends on the technological level, but very quick by evolutionary/geological standards.

[limetom]

Language... had to be reinvented...

Now, I may be biased as a linguist, but you can't really take language from humans, and if you could the damage would be irreparable and complete--humans would just be smart, hairless monkeys who could maybe make tools, but couldn't do almost any of the things we can do.

You could deal with losing writing, but writing isn't language.

[Xeviat]

If only infants survived some cataclysm, wouldn't language be destroyed? Our capacity is inborn, but our vocabulary is learned. At the very least, if only "average" or even "below average" vocabulary people survived a cataclysm, then language would effectively reinvent itself since they'd be starting from a tiny vocabulary.

How long have we had language? 2 million years? I think I have plenty time for it to recreate itself. Unless it's some horrendous fluke. Or am I off base here?

---

AS for technology level and other things which may paint a clearer picture for you, the Giants and Draconians had technology reaching the level of the pyramid builders in Egypt. This is augmented by their magic, but I figure magical development stays relatively on par with technological development so games can be balanced (a "modern" wand in the hands of a wizard, for instance, is as deadly as a steel dagger in the hands of a rogue). Magic does allow some stuff to be done grander than others. For instance, one giant city in particular has towers that stand hundreds of feet tall, having been augmented by Earth magics.

The culture I've done the most work on is the humans of the holylands. They were slaves to the giants, and their development was repressed. They were not able to have weapons (other than their tools), and any learning magic were killed. A half-giant lead an uprising and the giants were routed. I figure since the human slaves had been a dominant part of the giant labor force, they could have learned enough of giant technology to use that as a spring board.

Humans in the holylands are at about 14th/15th century technology now, but they are the more advanced of the cultures (the others are more firmly medieval). The Great Pyramid was finished in the vicinity of 2560 BC, or so says wikipedia, so that leaves a potential timescale of almost three thousand years for me to work with. I know there were other human cultures in the world during the time of the Egyptians, but they didn't have to contend with other races to limit migration.

If I'm dealing with three thousand years, would that be enough time for humans to spread from China to cover all of the Asian/European/African landmass? Or would I be better suited having indigenous people in other areas of the world (especially Africa) that were left to develop on their own? Would humans be able to spread from China to Russia and India in three thousand years? It seems that cultures can evolve very fast, as Americans are very different from the English.

What do you think? Based on your Japanese example, humans will not spread to cover the entire world. The areas with the most human population "back in the day" seem to match up to temperate forested regions; is there a reason for this, or am I misinterpreting things? I'm looking at Europe and China as centers of Medieval development, and both fit into the Temperate Forest biome structure. If I can marry each race to a biome, I can identify where they would primarily settle, but this assumes an even distribution during the pre-civilization years.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts.

[Superfluous Crow]

I think you are talking about two different ideas of language. Limetom is referring (I think) to abstract capital-L Language and the whole Chomskyan ideal of Universal Grammar. Essentially, the basis of language is part of the human identity and there are some similarities across all languages that vouch for them being developed from the same base concept. (loosely paraphrased from what I remember of the only linguistics book I have read)
Xev, on the other hand, is talking about lower case-L language which can be seen as instances of the above. I believe you are correct when you say that if only infants survived the vocabulary would be lost with the elder generations, but because of the abstract inborn Language, languages would redevelop naturally in time.
That being said, if only infants survived we would be kinda screwed since human newborn are very dependent on their parents (as opposed to the children of most other species). 

[Xeviat]

It was just an example. I'm not saying that humans can't speak in my setting, only that basically everything that can be lost was lost. We had to crawl our way back from the stone age, and the only legends that survive from that time were "the ancients were destroyed by Zion". Now, some modern scholars are beginning to think, rightly, that humans somehow descended from the ancients; exploration of Ancient ruins is one of the big things going on in the age that my games take place in.

This means I have two geological time frames to consider. I'm set on 50 million years in the future because that gets my map where I want it to be. I need to look up how long it took the Earth to bounce back from the KT impact that killed the dinosaurs (and I have to hold to an assumption that humans would make it through, along with other species that they had created at this point). Knowing how long it would take the Earth to bounce back to a state similar to today, I can know how long ago the cataclysm was.

But back to the original question: would it make more sense to give every race an Eden, since most of the races have a god who claims their creation (humans do not), and have these races branch out from there? Or should the races have multiple genesis points? Is this more of an issue of preference?

If, lets say humans, all had one genesis point, what timescale am I looking at for migration to the point that five very major cultures/nations could develop while interacting with the other species? Mesopotamia is considered the cradle of civilization, and they're from like 3000 BC, but there were humans elsewhere in the world already.

Thanks everyone.

[Xeviat]

I think I'm going to use a bit of both. The elemental races (dwarf, ifrit, triton, valkyrie) will have one origin point. Dwarfs and Valkyrie will originate in the "western" side of the world, while Ifrit and Tritons will originate in the "eastern" side of the world. They will have their own gardens of eden, so I need to figure out how long it would take for them to spread out enough to each develop 3 or 4 individual cultures. Humans will have one origin point on each continent; the one in the west were slaves to giants, while the other would have remained free. This leads me to think that the giant slaves would have had a potential technological bump, while their cultural development would have stagnated. Elves pop up all over, and Halflings come from that large northern island. That covers all of the pure blood player races.

If someone can suggest a fair timeline for a humanoid race to spread half the world (valkyrie and tritons will have an easier time because they fly/swim), I can plunk them down and "play" them through the millennia to see how things should be in the modern world.

I also like the idea, though, of making the races incredibly young, as it would be a different way of doing things.

[Xathan]

hmm, timeline for humanoids to pass half the world depends on some variables. A) Are mounts employed at all? B) What is the terrain they have to cover like? C) Do they need to cross large oceans, or is it all possible via land? D) Why are they spreading so far?

[Xeviat]

A) Mounts exist, but I don't know when they would be domesticated. There are mounts like riding ostriches, and there are also flightless drake mounts.
B) The terrain runs the gamut of Earth's terrains. There are some big mountain ranges between the halves of the mega continent (remember, it's Eurasia/Africa), but you can follow the coastline easily enough. There is a big desert in the middle, which would limit non oceanic travel I'd think, but the desert should be fine along the coast.
C) The migrations can be done entirely by land, though that middle point previously mentioned may be a bit rough.
D) I'd figure they're spreading for the same reason we spread: the monkey sphere. Communities have an optimal size before tensions mount and groups split. They're going to spread to find more resources and more space.

[Xathan]

Alright. D was probably the most important there: if it was a deliberate attempt to spread to new lands, it'd happen faster than waiting for the critical limit to come close and then picking up to leave. I'd say, to populate an entire world with those race, given the difficulties you mentioned and the advantages they have...I'd buy a 5000 year time frame, maybe a thousand less for the flyers since Terrain is less of an issue.

[Xeviat]

5,000 is definitely shorter than some setting's histories go. If that's considerably before writing, then the racial histories can be a bit shorter too. Writing started in the 3000s BC, so we're 5,000 years out from writing. Since I'm going for medieval/renaissance tech, and assuming technology progresses close to ours, I think I have a timeline in mind now.

I know I want giants to have had Egyptian level technology cerca the Pyramid building times. The great pyramid was finished in the 2500s BC, meaning I only want humans to have been free for 3000 years. In 3000 years, I think people could have spread from China (geographically speaking) to India and Russia.

This means I'm looking at having the other races be a bit older than humans, which is common place. It doesn't mean they have to be more developed, especially if the Giants and Draconians kept them isolated. I could see Dwarves staying in their mountain homes, digging deeper and deeper as they perfect masonry (augmented by their affinity for earth magic). Valkyries stay in their cold mountain home to the south (though they eventually spread as the climate is unable to support enough meat for their population and they begin to migrate yearly). Tritons are protected by being amphibious, and Ifrit are suited to that big central desert.

I also know I want Dwarves to be among the first writers, and their language is very structured and adheres to its rules so well that it is very much a written trade language between other cultures. Having the oldest humanoid culture, elves present a slight problem, so I may have to make them big on oral tradition and have them not have writing for a while so their history doesn't go to much farther behind the others.

Again, apologies for the stream of consciousness. I just need to get this out on "paper" and have anyone read it right now.