What was Africa like during the Pleistocene?
Oh it was pretty cool. (￣ー￣)
Human population bottleneck theories vary quite a bit but the most recent, most reliable synthesis I am familiar with guesses the total human population reduced to somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 individuals for 5,000 to 10,000 years some time in the Pleistocene, say maybe about 70,000 years ago, possibly in what is now north east Africa.
WHAT IF we created some kind of RPG set within that forge of mankind? Its a tantalising reality; a closed environment, surrounded by, well probably not ice, as the ice walls would be further north, but probably dry land and super-deserts, then ice. Plus the mountains of Africa would probably have substantial glaciers so there's your 'Ice Walls', title still counts.
The entirety of humanity being about 7'000 people. If we go by Dunbars numbers and eyeball it we could say four or five 'tribes', each with say 15 lineage groups with about three bands each. So depending on the kind of game you play, you could 'encounter' pretty much everyone who exists.
WHAT WAS THAT ENVIRONMENT LIKE?
In Africa? Warm and wet I think, especially wet. BIG lakes, big rivers, Glaciers coming down from the mountains. Africa probably quite a bit chonkier side-to-side due to lower sea levels. May possibly have joined with Arabia at points. Pretty big north-to-south as well but you can't actually get north due to the arid super-sahara and beyond that.. the valley of the Mediterranean? No idea what that would have been like. North of that maybe some microclimates in the alps then permafrost for a few 100 miles then ICE SHEETS.
"In Eurasia, large lakes developed as a result of the runoff from the glaciers. Rivers were larger, had a more copious flow, and were braided. African lakes were fuller, apparently from decreased evaporation. Deserts, on the other hand, were drier and more extensive. Rainfall was lower because of the decreases in oceanic and other evaporation." - from Wikipedia
FUNKY ANIMALS
I could build you a list of 'cool' Pleistocene animals to encounter but, tbh, the African 'Big Animal' set doesn't look like it was *that much* different during that era. There are various theories about this, the main one is that this biosphere had longer to get used to human behaviour and wasn't hugely changed when humans as we know them spread out after the last glacial maximum.
Most importantly, several cool animals were *quite larger*, i.e. Super-Hippos, Murder-Baboons. And humanity really had utterly crap technology to deal with them.
And also some very fun art has been made of this environment
Got this one off pintrest
Its quite wonderful for a D&D type game as everything is so sublimely dangerous.
DIFFERENT HUMAN STRAINS
A fascinating but somewhat morally-complex element is the vast potential range of human strains.
(Please don't comment about what exactly a species or subspecies or race or whatever is or is not, the matter is in development.)
A trend in Prehistory(?) currently is the gradual expansion of a much greater variety of human and humanlike 'types'. (I will just call these 'human strains'). Previously we knew that 'Sapiens' and Neanderthal co-existed, but genetics has unravelled that this bottleneck population, or something close to them, interbred with Neanderthal enough to leave a tangible trace in their genetics. We know about Florensis, the little hobbit dudes and from Denovisian Cave we know that a bunch of human strains were effectively hanging out in what seems to have been the Mos Eisley Cantina of prehistory. We also know that a lot of current African populations have 'ghost populations' in their genetics; traces of some kind of lost strain for which we have no evidence except for the faint echo they left behind in a surviving Sapiens population.
The 'out of Africa theory remains broadly in place but with massive, (I can't emphasise this enough, MASSIVE) complexification, with loop-backs, bottlenecks, strain-crossing, evidence of these strains hanging out just a lot of stuff.
If the pre-21stC version of Homo origins was a nice neat set of spreading lines and a few discreet 'subspecies' who may have barely interacted but displaced each other through environmental effects, then the new version is.. basically Jabbas Palace. Way, way way more types and strains of Homo, way more crossbreeding, way more interaction, way more messy strange bullshit.
The very-rare nature of pre-glacial-maximum remains (plus the fact that many are probably in Africa and even with a massive input of wealth and tech, are probably covered by rainforest and won't be found without a truly sci-fi level of tech), and the massive increase in types, and genetic and archaeological evidence of mutual-existence and interaction, has strongly tilted the general view of pre-historic human-strain history into kind of more like an American post-Tolkien fantasy novel. Its not really stupid any more to say hey, maybe a surviving *Erectus*, a Neanderthal and Denovisian and a Sapiens team up to fight a fucking giant tiger or something.
Its still not probably likely but it feels way more likely than it was.
I think this is by Marucio Anton
THE GENETIC SQUEEZE-BOX
This 'Bottleneck', (both the real one and the one we are simulating in this game), may well have acted as a genetic sausage machine for a variety of human strains. This means the populations going in to the bottleneck might have a pretty high level of diversity, but the population coming out, is singular; after several millennia with less than 10,000 individuals they have the very low-diversity genome we associate with the extra-African Sapiens population.
Peter Schouten
WHAT IS THE ACTUAL GAME LIKE?
WHO is the RPG player playing?
The tribe? The person? The Gene-line? Is this a survival/crafting game? A cultural development game? A game of genetics? A game about exploring the boundaries of your world, or a game about surviving within the boundaries of a closing world?
I honestly don't know and in fact it sounds more like a series of games.
At the 'top end' a genetics/environmental-influenced Microscope.
Below that a crafting/cultural/technology semi-simulator in the middle. Battles and diplomacy in a closed and shrinking world (maybe something patterned like Pendragon).
At the bottom end a very BX-like survive-the-monsters, gather food D&D-esque game.
I suppose you could combine these into one vast Fantasy Heartbreaker with each player playing a Gene-line at the top level, then after that 'round' of game time is played, they go down a level and play the 'tribe' or Culture-line, with abilities and developments influenced by the gene-tree, then you zoom down to the deep granular history and generate a bunch of Homo who's stats/equipment/abilities etc are all influenced by the previous two rounds. Then this little D&D team faces one of the crisis points of their small, closed world.
Depending on how they do in that mission they get more or less points to feed back into the next loop of gameplay.
PLAYING THE GENE-LINE
I don't actually know enough about genetics to even begin to attempt this, and I think possibly humanity doesn't know enough for anyone to simulate it. So I would be really very largely making it up. Which, from a political point of view may actually be better as this is one of the most politically and morally complex and dangerous parts of this extremely politically and morally sensitive game (see below for 'Things Which Won't Be In This Game').
THE TECH/TRIBE/CULTURE TREE
This might be a very-great compression but I would probably be going from starting out something like a very-clever Erectus, who might occasionally sharpen a rock, and ending up as something a bit like an Aboriginal Australian culture.
I have to base a extra-African just-post-Glacial-Maximum culture/technology group on something and Aboriginal Australians seem like the closest we are going to get any good info on. Their tech and culture feels pretty "early stone age".
POSSIBLE TECH/CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS
Most Important; textiles, bags, containers, glues, attachment materials, hooks and lines, woven string and rope.
We would go from "Pick it up, drop it or bury it" to "Put it in the bag/gourd". This is a pretty big deal. Lines and cords are, as anyone who has played D&D will know, a very big deal. Clothing is maybe the most vital technology in allowing Sapiens to enter such a wide range of environments. Sewing is a killer app.
Most Charismatic; weapons, spears, boomerangs, atlatls, slings, hunting clubs, throwing sticks, early simple bow technology? Probably the simple bow was invented independently a bunch of times. Shields and armour are both important too. Aboriginal Australian cultural beliefs about shields are interesting.
Travel; canoes, (dugout and bark), initial canoes more likely to be used in lakes of which there were apparently quite a lot during the Pleistocene. I think even strapping things to friendly animals is quite a way off. Complexity of language and the cultural complexity required to receive, remember and transmit that information would be important. Going from "I will show you the way" to "I can tell you ALL the way" is a big deal and would fundamentally change the capacities of a society.
Cultural; message sticks, drumming, dance and Communal Performance as a 'living law book' capable of harmonising and transmitting a shared culture across many more people. Drumming and dance also seem really important in building shared identities and a 'communal self' probably enabling larger group sizes, mor sophisticated group actions giving you something to actually do or exchange if you go visit other humans other than just material things, and also just making life less shit. Complexity of language would be another; the development of syntax and tenses, descriptions of actual and supernatural things. This cultural complexity and the firmware needed to carry it helps you hang on to those cool inventions like slings and atlatls and sharp rocks. Most of these things were probably invented hundreds of times by increasingly clever Homo until finally someone found a way to jam them into the culture, transmit and preserve the information even if the original inventor wasn't there to show you how to do it. The relationship with, and inner conceptualisation of animals a main thing, you have to build the animal in your mind before you can interact with it.
Agricultural/Survival Shifts; from scavenging to hunting to possible-pastoralism and maybe some mild agriculture. Finding a new thing to eat and a new way to eat it is a big deal. Curiously in later pre-history there seem to have been some Neolithic culture groups who really liked fish, and others living in exactly the same environments who just would not eat fish, even over long periods. People are pretty interesting. One of the side-effects of culture may be... I suppose we would call it 'bugs', like "We are not eating shellfish fuck no not even if it means starving that stuff is banned by the spirits for a reason."
Dogs.
THE REAL-TIME GAME; EARLY HOLOCENE CATASTROPHES
All those melting glaciers, shrinking lakes, expanding land and changing rivers open the possibility for some quite-sudden catastrophic events. Not to mention the fucking MONSTER ANIMALS. Plus ALIEN HUMAN STRAINS!
Gigantic things, or the axial points of super long-term processes, can happen over a day, or a few hours, like an ice barrier breaks, tectonic shifts tilt a super-lake slightly against a thinning rock wall, a super-lake drains away mysteriously. Tunguska events. Again not likely of *common* but at least a few of these must have happened.
Or even slightly less catastrophic sudden arrivals of super-predators, giant unbeatable animals either driven south by expanding ice walls, or displaced by warming and its knock-on events. The arrival of a *last of its kind* forgotten mega-predator in an 'alien' environment would be fit fuel for an adventure. You want to try taking on that thing with sticks?
The arrival or displacement of an 'alien' human strain (i.e anyone sufficiently different from you) would be another. Its a limited resource-poor environment after all, and you can't really leave till the glacial maximum ends. Will this be a matter of SUPER WAR where you use all your cultural sophistication to turn your whole tribe into a SUPER HUNT gathered together and synchronised at an heretofore unimagined scale. An army of hundreds in one place?
Or could it be a Pleistocene Star Trek where your Sapiens/Neanderthal cross uses the power of imagination and intelligence to perform cross-strain diplomacy for the first time, entering into the gaze of an unknowable Other in attempts to bridge an unimaginable cognitive gap and form some common understanding?
Your kin-group is starving, your kin-group is sick, a new environmental possibility has opened up, another has closed down. Literally any kind of megafauna is fucking with you. Fucking MURDER BABBOONS?
nooooooooooooooooooo
THINGS THAT PROBABLY HAPPENED THAT YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT IN YOUR GAME
Probably more than any other game I can imagine, this one would need a VERY long introduction, explanation, disclaimer and probably you have to sign something before you play promising not to cancel or sue the makers.
Starting with things that probably happened quite a lot in pre-history but which won't be happening (much) in this game;
- Rape
- Slavery
- Patriarchy
- Mutilation and torture
- Genocide
- Intensely weird sexual stuff
- Human sacrifice
- Cannibalism
- Batshit Xenophobia
I don't mean to say (and we don't fundamentally know) if this stuff was universal, much less common in pre-history, but what we know of many Stone Age peoples (and since) strongly suggests the normalised nature of most if not all of this.
RPG players will tend strongly towards leb-leftism, but even if they didn't, on a greater scale, there is probably a hard limit to how much rape, abduction, genocide, mutilation, human sacrifice etc ANY person can reasonably expect to actually play out.
Any game which functions *as a game* will inevitably be presenting a very 'softened' interpretation of human capacities and nature, and this is ok, so long as I am very clear about the fact that this is a fantasy with softened corners and less sharp edges. Be aware you are participating in a real-seeming dream, and NOT a simulation.
Its just a limitation of the form. It is what it is I guess.
And... GENETICS
The beloved Science of Human Inequality raises its Janus-split face. It is genetics, to a large degree, with a fair amount of archaeology, we can thank for our expanding deep-view of our own prehistoric origins and all of the wonderful and sometimes awful complexity and detail that has emerged. Our genes really are a telescope in time.
Unfortunately our own society is based around a rather hard-won principal of the broadly equality of human life, and genetics is the science of precisely-described human inequality. This 'bottleneck' whether it was one event or several, created a deep shared structure in the *extra-african* Sapiens line (which then looped back into Africa in several ways). Enough of a commonality so that when this line spread out across Eurasia and into America, it seems to have either murdered the fuck out of every big animal it could find, or at least disrupted the environment so much those megafauna couldn't survive.
We don't know how and how much genetics interacted with culture and technology to produce this hyper-successful strain but I doubt it was *zero*. And that fact that it isn't *zero* is a meaningful moral challenge to the mainstream of our society.
Gene-line or 'descent' differences aren't the same as 19th Century concepts of race, but they speak the same language and unlike race, modern genetics speaks *precisely*. Genticists have largely gotten around this with a combination of blather and mild autism; "ah yes the 19thc century concept of 'race', oh no we wouldn't use anything like that any more, rather disproven you know, anyway, here's your childs likely IQ, to within a 5 pt margin."
On a deep level the genetic history of humanity teaches interwoven strands of truth. One strand is quite nice; it’s about shared human origins, a deep diversity of human strains, a shared struggle and a shared environment where everything effects everything else. The Force does indeed bind and link us all Obi-Wan.
But the other strand, which is equally true, is about utterly ruthless competition, hominids murdering and raping the fuck out of each other, displacing each other from environments and differences in genetic advantage cascading into and/or synthesising with cultural and technological advantages. It’s about humans as the monsters from a science fiction movie and has kind of a 'there can only be one' Highlander vibe.
And both of these are true. It just depends which lens you look through. There is a level of choice in what we emphasise and find meaning in, and in the lessons we take, but there is no choice in the facts.
Which is a main reason this game will probably never exist, or if it does, it will come with something you have to sign before you play.
That was a little depressing so to end the article;
'POSSIBLE' THEORETICAL PLEISTOCENE DEVELOPMENTS
Previously I was working in the realm of the 'likely', based on our current understanding of history. But fuck that, what if we ignored 'likely' and went straight for 'possible'!
Pleistocene Empires baby! Can't find them? That's because their cities are UNDER THE SEA. The Inca of the Glacial Maximum! Polynesians of the Great Lakes!
We could just take *every* kind of *possible* Stone-Age technology and culture and jam it all together in a Conan-the-Barbarian style mashup of cool things. You can't prove it didn't happen! Glaciers took the evidence!
So; Very large boats. Oceanic vessels. Intra-oceanic navigation (it is *possible* as the Polynesians have proved, but what if it also happened at a previous time?) Inter-oceanic navigation (even less likely but *possible* at least in theory). A worldwide coastal empire, why not?
Super-stonehenge Ziggurat cities, cave-cities (we know they turned up later). Mass scale Imperial warfare. Grass suspension bridges with villages whose whole purpose is to continually re-weave the bridge (Inca did it). Catapults. Sieges. Terror-bird cavalry. Trained super-baboons and mega-hippos.
Neanderthal shock troops and Florensis advisors wearing capes of humming bird feathers. Super wars to crack open the gates to the Mediterranean basin and drown the Empire of the Morlocks. Eating small horses for dinner. Crowns of amber and bone. Flutes of mammoth ivory. You could do an entire Pleistocene-Elric series or 'forgotten Aztecs' game set in some early inter-glacial period when the world looked an utterly different shape.
It would have quite an elegiac lost-summr feel as this civilisation grew too soon, and the glaciers were coming back, and then after that the glaciers were shrinking waaay too much and the seas rising so even the ruins of these Inca/Minoan/Polynesian cities were drowned and forgotten.
Honestly if you just jammed in every cool thing from every stone age 'high' civilisation
and all of the 'homo' descent groups you could imagine, plus all of the Pleistocene fauna you could think of, it would be pretty fucking great.
Like being an extinct homo species and calling your Florensis slave to your ziggurat to bring you a humming bird quill so your can write poetry on calfskin about the doom of your civilisation before riding forth on your war-glyptodont to battle the savage raiders for the last time. Behold! how an empire ends!
