While I do world-building for my fantasy novel-in-progress (The Curse of Steel), one frustrating feature of the process is that I have a hard time keeping all of my ideas for the back-history straight.

Now that I’ve managed to finish a world-overview map that I’m happy with, the idea came to me to build a series of “historical atlas” maps, some taking in the whole continent-scale view, others narrower in scope. Inspiration comes from sources like Colin McEvedy’s Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, which is full of nice, clean schematic maps describing the Western world through late antiquity. Here I’ve decided to try my own hand in the same style, using some color instead of David Woodroffe’s extensive use of cross-hatching.

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page for this map.

Historical Context

The earliest history of the Great Lands begins about 100,000 years before the time of Krava the Swift.

At this time, the world had been enjoying a long period of warm climates, with almost no glacial ice and forests reaching up into the polar regions. The planet was inhabited by a humanoid species, the “Elder Folk” (Homo antecessor). These people were small and gracile, not very bright by modern standards, but capable of simple language, tool use, and some exploitation of naturally occurring fire. They had evolved in the southern continent of the Great Lands over a million years before, pursuing a flexible hunter-gatherer lifestyle that permitted them to spread across much of the planet.

Now a new evolutionary challenge was about to arise, one that the Elder Folk were ill-equipped to meet: the resurgence of a deep glacial age, longer and more bitter than any that had come before. As the climate shifted and ice began to move south, the Elder Folk were driven before it. Many of the scattered bands perished, unable to adapt to the new conditions.

It was at this juncture that something intervened, rescuing thousands of the Elder Folk from the western regions of the Great Lands. The rescued people were moved across the sea, and then into the oceans of heaven, to live among some benevolent spirits or gods. There they grew and changed over many generations, someday to return to the world in a new guise.

The survivors who remained behind adapted or died out. At least three new human species appeared over the tens of thousands of years of the Ice Age, all descended from the Elder Folk.

In the northern continent, the people who would one day be called the “Smith-folk” (Homo faber) appeared. These people were taller than their ancestors, and much more robust, stocky, tough, and very strong. Even early in their history they had a gift for making, for adapting the natural materials they found into useful tools. They also had an unusual relationship with spirits of the natural world. They learned to capture spirits, bargain with them, and bind them into made things to produce powerful artifacts of enchantment. All of these new skills gave the Smith-folk the chance to survive the worst that the Ice Age world could do to them. They preferred the hills and mountain slopes, where they could hunt both beasts and spirits, and where they eventually learned to find the ores of useful metal.

In the southern continent, the “Common Folk” of later eras (Homo sapiens, the analogues of our own humanity) arose in the sahel zone south of the great desert. The Common Folk grew even taller than their northern cousins, but not as robust or strong. They failed to develop the same spiritual gifts, tending to fear spirits rather than think of them as partners or servants. On the other hand, their capability for abstract thought and spoken language was more sophisticated, destined to help them develop the richest cultures on the planet. Slowly, they spread along the coasts of the southern continent, keeping away from the heart of the desert.

Far away in the east, another population of Elder Folk survivors evolved in a different direction. Amid a rich archipelago, the “Island-folk” (Homo insularum) grew small and nimble, but also bright and quick of mind, the better to hunt the abundant game (and avoid larger predators). The Islanders remained far distant from the rest of the world, to appear in a far distant era.

All four of these survivor species grew in isolation, as the abandoned Elder Folk populations dwindled and became extinct. Not for many thousands of years would they all come into contact, in the centuries leading up to Krava’s time . . .