This story must be told from the viewpoint of eternity.
        It is not the world in which I myself exist that this story takes place but it must be told in a language understandable to those who dwell in my world.
        As far as we can tell the ancestors of the creature who would become mankind emerged onto the African plains some two or three million years before my time and in a remarkably short time rose to the estate of a true
human being.
        In my world, we named this creature homo habilis.
        H.habilis' reign as the only human being was comparatively short. He beget and was soon superseded by an improved species.
        Homo erectus was larger, smarter and more adventurous than h.habilis.  He used fire and tools made from sticks and stones. In h.erectus, the place of human beings  as a force in the world was established. Thus far, the situation in the world into which I was born and that that I am to explore in this tale are the same.
        In my world, h.erectus spread throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. After several false starts, a species emerged which through cleverness, guile and what can be described as nothing less than genocide, established itself as the sole human species. It was called homo sapiens, and the rest of the story is well known.
        In the world we are to explore in these pages there was a change. With the populations of h.erectus  still confined to eastern central Africa a plague broke out killing the entire population in the heart of erectus' range.
        A group of survivors from the southern end of the range moved further south and settled in the southern veldt. A surviving group from the north made its way into Europe while part of their numbers stayed behind. A group in the east began building primitive boats and took up a fishing lifestyle.
        It took most of half a million years for the numbers to be restored in Africa.  In that time the fishing people of the east coast had disappeared. They had, however left descendants in two places who would take root as peoples in their own right.
        One group had evolved from survivors from boats carried away from the African coast to be deposited in Pakistan. Another group was descended from far fishing expeditions in the Indonesian Archipelago. That members of the species were able to make it that far was nothing short of a miracle.
        The group who had migrated into Europe found a place for themselves roaming along the edge of the great ice sheet where they started to domesticate animals. As the ice sheet retreated, the humans followed the animals that their lives depended on.  By the end of the Pleistocene epoch, they were residents of the far north. They continued to evolve in their restricted environment, becoming a society of herders. In the fullness of time they came to share many of the traits of the other animals of the tundra, a shaggy coat and large size. The great mammoth was their source of milk, meat and power,. It was the most sacred of beasts and they built huge earthen idols to a spirit in its form. They had an uncanny empathy with animals. They were universally polygamous living in large family groups. Before contacting other humans, they never developed civilization, but instead practiced nomadism on a profound scale. They could move across the tundra sometimes in clans of several hundreds along with their mammoth herds, their spoor on the landscape would be several miles wide and it could take a decade or more for these highway-like
scars to heal over. Unique among members of the genus homo, the women were not fertile year round and had adapted to a yearly estrus cycle. Once pregnant, a woman carried her young for nineteen months. Their children
could walk upon birth. There was an actual rutting season, which because they were intelligent beings, was a very formalized period steeped in ceremony , much of which took the form of rough athletic contests.
        We shall call these people homo borealis.
        At the same time as the first European migration, other groups of h.erectus were using boats to explore the Indian Ocean. Their boats were of poor design and construction and few groups survived their various journeys.
One group settled in the Indus valley and it was this successful colony which brought back a devastating plague to eastern Africa which all but wiped out humanity in the mother land.
        The colonies of the Indus valley and the Indonesian archipelago were the only ones who were able to hold on and survive more than a generation or two.
        As the ice sheets retreated the Mammoth herders moved northward leaving southern Europe empty of humans for many centuries until the last of the erectus clans started to make their way north driven by environmental changes in east Africa.  Their first communities were along the Greek and Ionian coasts and in Bulgaria. They had become a more generalized species than their northern cousins, having passed first through a stage resembling the "Neanderthal" type and finally maturing into a racially diversified species. They rapidly spread to the Nile and Mesopotamian regions and finally completely encircled the Mediterranean sea. They were highly aggressive and territorial, not unlike the h. sapiens of my own world. Within about twenty-five-hundred years of building the first city states they were making iron tools. Their first great civilization  emerged in the Italian peninsula so they will be named homo italica.
        By this time the groups in Indonesia and Pakistan had reached various levels of civilization. The Indus people were small of stature (The average height of h.borealis was three times that of the Indus river folk) and they had a marked sexual dimorphism. The women were larger and stronger than the men and also of lower intelligence. It was rare that a woman would learn more than forty or fifty words. They were somewhere between slaves and domestic animals to the men.  They were used for farming and heavy work. They were also trained to be warriors.
        These people were homo indica they built sprawling cities of brick and farmed a variety of crops in the countryside as well as herded sheep and cattle. Their civilization grew wealthy and they started to explore the Indian ocean.
        They fairly quickly encountered the expanding range of the cooperative fisher folk of southeast Asia who, in spite of a grand ethnic unity, had no particular political organization. They were taller and stronger than h.indica  but far less competitive and political. They in fact seemed to have little patience for tribalism and preferred to live in small family groups. They did have a few cities which were their seats of learning and culture concentrated on
the island of Celebes, hence I named them homo sulawesii.
        The h.indica explorer/traders were at first delighted to make contact with these new people in spite of their bizarre appearance. They had long hair growing on their heads and (to the eye of the indica) grotesquely exaggerated sexual characteristics. They were also amazed at the eloquence of their women who were instrumental in decision making in the h.sulawesii culture. Later they were frustrated by their lack of central government. This anarchistic quality of their lives made really profitable trade difficult if not impossible.
        Within a century of first contact, they decided to take control of some of the sulawesii lands. In spite of their lack of high level organization, the h. sulawesii prove to be fierce fighters, but they were still driven from the island of Sri Lanka, their western most outpost by the organized and heavily armed troops from the Indus civilization. From that time on they were on alert.
        Unknown to any but themselves were the inhabitants of the southern regions of Africa. Save for increased brain weight and volume, they were little changed from their h.erectus forbears. They were hunter/gatherers who have no higher organization than that of extended family.  Small bands of them lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle hunting small game and supplementing their diets with wild vegetables and grubs and insects. I will name them homo africanus.
        Around 2350 BC, A fishing party of h.sulawesii based in the Galapagos Islands stopped on the South American mainland. They thought at first that it was another island. There was no move toward colonization for most of a
century.
        A few decades later members of the h.indica race started having regular contact with members of h.borealis who have colonized the Himalayan region. Relations are hostile. There were similar contacts between h.sulawesii and h.borealis in Manchuria. The populations of h.borealis in the two locations are quite different both racially and culturally. The mountain people were smaller (but not small!) and more settled living mostly from goat and sheep
herding. The population in Manchuria, a branch of the mammoth men, were in the process of developing a marauding warlike culture. Their European and American cousins are much more peace loving. A large population of borealis were starting to develop a powerful culture in central Russia which by 2150 bc extended as far south as Uzbekistan. This part of the world will also attract h.italica  and h.indica.
        By 2100 bc h.sulawesii  had many colonies in Ecuador, Peru and Chile. They were now divided into a few civilizations which include several nations within them.  For convenience they will be referred to as Chinese,
Austral (including Australia, Indochina, Indonesia and Japan ), Western Polynesia (New Zealand, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Micronesia) and Eastern Polynesia (Hawaii, Rapa Nui and South America).  These groups may
include various lands at various times, but historically, these were the regions from which the great nations of h.sulawesii  were created. Eastern Polynesia was a separate language group by this time and were only vaguely
aware of the great civilization of the east Indian Ocean. The Chinese group comprises many countries of constantly shifting frontiers and a war being fought somewhere at any given time.
        Several empires centered on the Celebese cities had come and gone, most of whom have been at war with the Chinese and also been occupied with defending their part of the world from incursions by h.indica.  In southeast
Indochina, h.sulawesii  gave birth to what would become their great "classical" culture In the rich lands watered by the Mekong river. To the north , the Chinese nations had been just barely keeping the Mammoth Men from invading.
        To the west, Iran had turned into a killing field where the western most empire of h.indica  was in a state of constant war with the eastern most empire of h.italica. In central Europe, h.italica had begun more or less peaceful trade with Mammoth Men. Ivory became an important luxury item around the Mediterranean as well as Mammoth Men made woolen goods. In the lands of the far north,  Oranges became a sought after luxury food. Trade cities sprung up throughout central Europe over a period of about five hundred years.
        Around 1150 b.c h.indica  conquered Iran but were held from entering Mesopotamia.  An advanced civilization was growing in southern India that was threatening to bring down the empire of the Indus valley. They had spread to Sri Lanka, Madagascar and the African coast. They were at that point held from spreading farther north than the southern Sudan due to the presence of h.italica.
        By 950 b.c.  The Chinese nations of h.sulawesii  began collaboration on constructing a wall across the northern region of China to keep out tribes of Mammoth men. The project continued on and off for some 1200 years. The final wall was some 1800 miles long.  Similar walls are built in South America with a somewhat later start around 100 a.d. They were not in contact with the Chinese culture, it was a parallel development for the same purpose. Mammoths could not cross the walls.
        By 800 b.c. the Indus valley had been invaded and taken over by the southern Indians. A remnant of their civilization was left in Iran, which then broke into several smaller nations. The western most tentatively opened
trade with the eastern nations of h.italica.  Those nations were trading their criminals and social upstarts to the h.indica to be used as food in exchange for fine iron and steel goods.
        Around 500 b.c., h.italica started moving into sub Saharan Africa where they came into violent competition with the Southern Indian Empire of h.indica. They were, after more than a century, able to drive them from the
African mainland. This was an important turning point, for h.indica's range was never this great again. H.africanus  were still Paleolithic hunter/gatherers at this time.
        The First century a.d saw a general collapse of major civilizations among the h.italica.  There followed a short (about fifty year) period of anarchy and general warfare. At the end of this period, the city of Yillo was founded in southern Calabria. The Yilloese started to build a major navy and rose to dominance in the region surrounding the Mediterranean sea. By 170 a.d they were the most important political and economic force among the h.italica. By 400 a.d. the empire had collapsed into several smaller kingdoms which spent a good deal of time at war with one another. The earliest forms of the nations of modern Europe,  Africa and Western Asia were being born.
        Around 950 a.d. a northern nation starts making regular contact with the giant mammoth herders. A war of conquest is launched and for the next thirty years northeastern Europe is a constant battleground. At the conclusion of the war, which was indecisive, A region is established that belongs to no nation or species but is used for general commercial exploitation. Over the ensuing centuries this region became known as the Trader's Reach. The cities that grew up there prospered.
        Around 1600 a series of kings of the powers in the Mediterranean area fought a number of wars and made a number of deals, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the second Middlesea Empire which was governed from Yillo.

copyright 1998,1999,2000 Seth Kallen Deitch

A Sneak at Chapter One.

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