alternatehistory.com

This is the Alternate History background for my novel "All Timelines Lead to Rome", due out September 30th of this year:

Most of you have heard about the Flores "Hobbits"--tiny, primitive sort of humans that supposedly survived on the Indonesian island of Flores until around 12,000 years ago. The AH for "All Timelines" has a similar species of primitive humans arising on one of the Mediterranean islands, probably Sardinia. That part is pretty plausible and may have actually happened.

I'll get back to that in a bit, but now comes the hard part: All of the big Mediterranean islands were settled by Neolithic farmers from the Middle East around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. In the real world, any primitive humans that may have existed on those islands were either wiped out or absorbed by the influx of farmers. However, some smart Neolithic farmers might well have decided that the primitive little people they found on one of the islands (call it Sardinia for reasons that I'll talk about later) would make really good slaves.

"Hobbit" slaves become commonplace in the interior of the island, but have little impact outside of it for the next several thousand years. Historically, the interior of Sardinia developed its own distinctive culture from the initial Neolithic farmers and that culture remained in control of the island until Carthage took at least partial control not long before the first Punic War. In this alternate time-line, not much other than a little population of semi-human slaves changed before Rome took over Sardinia after the first Punic war. Carthage might export a few of the 'hobbits' to North Africa, but not much else would change.

At this point I can see the "Butterfly posse" mounting up and getting ready to charge in. I'm agnostic on indirect butterflies, at least in terms of their ability to change major things about a culture with no direct contact--ie they could almost certainly change the genetic composition of the players but I'm not convinced that they would necessarily change the big patterns of history. More to the point, I don't feel they should be used as a club to cut off otherwise interesting lines of alternate history speculation, which is often how they are used in this and similar forums. If you want to mentally substitute "entities that play approximately the same roles as Carthage and Rome" in when I say Carthage and Rome, feel free.

In any case, Rome takes over Sardinia and gradually finds more and more uses for the Hobbits, until they become a major factor in Roman life, displacing human slaves for many functions. A few hundred years later, hobbits spread across the ancient world, across the middle east, to India, China and even Japan and the Indonesian islands.
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