Tsalal*
Since the discovery of Antarctica in 1774 during the doomed Second Cook Expedition, the indigenous inhabitants of that blighted land have filled the nightmares of the Old World with horrors. Rather than delve into the fanciful and wild-eyed stereotyping typical of discussions of the Tsalal we will instead concern ourselves with the facts. Antarctica was initially settled by a founding population of Tasmanians, brought south in a series of small waves by a succession of storms roughly 20,000 years ago. This initial population would be gradually bolstered by successive influxes of Yaghan and Maori, who would quickly find themselves subsumed into the dominant culture that had preceded them.
A series of mutations and adaptations would produce the Tsalal as they currently exist, with an extreme tolerance for variation in the sleep cycle, a greater than average endurance and resistance to famine, highly developed night vision (with a corresponding commonality of red-green colorblindness), and an ability to digest the incredibly starchy and alkaline staple crops of the continent at the expense of an almost complete intolerance to gluten. Although phenotyped as black, the presence of ice binding proteins in their tissues actually gives the Tsalal a somewhat grayish cast to their skin, a trait best observed in their unusually dark sclera, while their famed black teeth are actually a result of staining from the vegetable portion of the Tsalal diet. Tsalal hair is coarse and most commonly black, though it is rarely blonde or red. The most common body type is stout (to better retain heat during the polar winter), while faces tend to be long and thin, with noticeable mandibular prognathism. The relatively small founding population has led to a common continental blood type, creating a society where tissue rejection is almost unheard of.
The history of Antarctic civilization tends to revolve around the push and pull between the
Yag centered around Paant'n Lul and the
Tcho heartland in Tsalmothua. The former boasts the longest republican tradition in human history, having maintained a cultural continuity that stretches from before the the unification of the highland and lowland Yag to the expansion into Azul and Ptahr and on to the present day. The latter expanded during the Coal Age, creating a succession of empires and corprocracies centered around the famed Sunken Cities that have expanded and receded ever since. The other major Antarctic nations have seen themselves shaped irrevocably by the conflict between the two core regions of the continent. For example, Yag suppression of the barbarian
Ptahr was a deciding factor that enabled the
Leng peoples to dominate the Wang Gash region, while the
Hali culture caught between the three preserved itself by cultivating a well-earned reputation as the most skilled experts in medicine, torture, and armaments on the continent.
Even the outlying Antarctic civilizations would find themselves broken against the twin pillars of Yag and Tsalmothua. Although the
Zhudan enjoyed a brief period of supremacy as a naval thalassocracy, the eventual collapse of their imperial project would see them transform into the matriarchal
Ghault culture still centered around Zhudan Lul. The
Dragon Islanders would briefly invade the mainland, penetrating almost to Lake Vos, and after being turned back would transition from a loosely connected horde to a proper confederation. The Cold Islands were settled much later than the rest of the continent by a series of competing settler colonial projects, with the harsh social and environmental conditions breeding the equally harsh and utilitarian
Crystal Islander culture that would ironically inspire as much fear in the Tsalal as they themselves would go on to inspire in the rest of the world.
Much hay has been made in the wider world by the worrying propensity for incest, cannibalism, coprophagia and other obscenities in the Tsalal cultural record, but these traits are best understood as desperate survival mechanisms that thankfully became obsolete as agriculture and architecture transformed the continent and made the horrors of the Antarctic winter more bearable. This is best seen in the Tsalal from the late 19th century on— despite the survival of the institution of slavery, in the modern Antarctica incest and pedophilia are outlawed, cannibalism is thankfully rare (and absent altogether in Yag), genocides are unheard of, and even the Hali's famed love of recreational torture has given way to the mere practice of cruel and unusual punishment. Rumors persist that the Crystal Islanders continue to hew closer to the old ways in these matters, but absent concrete evidence we cannot credit those allegations.
Ancestry: Tasmanian, Yaghan, Maori
Language: Tsalal language family
Religion: Suffering Path, Knaaresh, syncretic/regional polytheism, Yhriqism**
Population: ~445 million
*For a series in the Flag Thread I'm planning for a tweaked Green Antarctica called
A Lighter Shade of Black!
**The classification of Yhriqism as a religion is disputed.