Designing Prehistoric Cultures | Worldbuilding
Вставка
- Опубліковано 1 гру 2022
- Episode 20: Prehistoric Cultures
In this video we discuss worldbuilding prehistoric cultures, looking at how intelligent species go from building fires and using axes, to settling down and developing civilisations of their own.
---
WORLDBUILDING CORNER: www.worldbuildingcorner.com
---
Drawings of the fantasy races created in this video are original content made by Worldbuilding Corner, including the silhouettes used in the thumbnail.
All other music, images, and other media used in this video are available for commercial use with Creative Commons licensing, found on www.pixabay.com and www.pexels.com.
The subsequent listed images are permitted for use under the following Creative Commons license: creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Stone Axe image credit: JMiall
Stone Knife image credit: Västgöten
The subsequent listed images are permitted for use under the following Creative Commons license: creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Stone Tools Illustration image credit: Didier Descouens
First time watching one of your videos "My name is Matthew, or atleast that is what archealogists one day will decide" got me immediately! Good job and thanks!
Having a six hour train ride tomorrow, can't wait to watch this over and over to apply to my world lmao
Good luck with your worldbuilding and enjoy your train ride!
Omg have fun, train rides are always fun
The hard part is not stealing some of his ideas 😝
Megafauna: ha ha i’m in danger
Poor mammoths haha
Keep in mind that cold-blooded organisms still generate body heat, especially at high body temperatures. A 60 kg ectotherm at 30 °C should be producting something like 20 watts at BMR. vs an endotherm at 37 which should be producing around 50.
The first thing we should notice is that necessarily means the body temperature will be elevated above the environmental temperature for BOTH. If the ambient temperature is 25 °C, both species will be pretty happy. Notably, however, the ectotherm is in a state of stable equilibrium. Any dip in body temperature will self-correct from reduced cooling and any spike in body temperature will self-correct from increased cooling. Whereas the endotherm is in a somewhat unstable equilibrium. Any gain in body temperature would become fever if not actively controlled, and any drop would become hypothermia if not actively controlled. This happens automatically in endotherms.
However, an ectotherm that tries to keep its body temperature elevated by more than 10 °C runs into the problem that if its body gets just a little colder it will suddenly have insufficient insulation. And if its body gets just a little warmer, its insulation becomes excessive and its temperature will push well above peak performance and into the pejus regime. Therefore, any Silarin wearing clothing would be able to stay warm so long as they take it off if their body temperature starts increasing, and never let their body temperature drop below a critical level.
Note that at the same body temperature, endotherms still produce slightly more energy. Though only slightly. Especially for large-bodied organisms, we are not talking about multiples, but rather 10s of percent. Small organism like shrews can have higher metabolic rates that expected, but in the size range for humanoids, we are talking a 30% difference between endothermy and ectothermy at the same temperature.
Silarin being cold-blooded seems odd, given their therapod-like ancestors appear to be warm-blooded animals.
It surprised me too given than ectothermy is known to hinder some of the brain functions required to achieve sapience.
Given the spread of these varied species, I would expect many diverse cultures to develop within each species' territories. Will you be addressing this, or just showcasing the first dominant culture for each? Or something else?
There will likely be a huge amount of varied cultures and subcultures, with crossover between cultures even across species. Going in depth into each culture though is likely to make videos very long, and so I'll probably showcase the more prevalent cultures and how they differentiate from each other. I do want to make sure that I'm not giving too much focus onto one species/culture, and I don't want them to be 'samey'.
Great series man!
If I've learned anything from Native American culture/history the idea of metal being a step in evolution if out of date.
That's a really good point, the 'steps' certainly don't need to be in a strict order. Native American societies had established states and many more complex societal structures and technologies before metalworking was introduced, as did many other societies around the world.
It's not out of date, when a society does not have enough easily workable metal it uses stone but once it does have access to metals for tool use it uses metal because it is superior in all aspects. The Americas became as advanced as they could given their environment and time scale and any further development is pure speculation. Technology is completely different from biological evolution, today we're still the same humans as those 10/15/20,000+ years ago, but technologically are completely different.
You can definitely make plenty of developments that in the old world happened after metalworking, but ultimately if you don't have metal tools you're going to start running up against a wall in terms of what's possible. There's no way you're making a musket without metal, for example.
I love your discussion of textiles as that is something often overlooked in worldbuilding. I just wanted to add that fossil evidence has been discovered for the creation and use of fibers spun together into thread going back more than 60K years (used for affixing stone spear-heads to wooden shafts).
I wonder if your bears would colonize the southern hemisphere in prehistory, they would hace to travel through a lot of hot and uncomfortable and difficult to live in terrain on the way to the equator before they ever saw familiar climates, it's hard to imagine they'd continue traveling south. I feel like this would be more likely to occur in a more modern period where colonial bears hear of or find the southern pole with better faster ships and establish colonies there then.
I did consider this, though there is precedent for prehistoric cultures navigating unfavourable climates en-route to more favourable ones. We humans have still not settled in arctic zones even in modern times due to them being unfavourable, but there is evidence we crossed through them in prehistory.
It's also worth clarifying that while Urakan prefer cooler climates, they certainly won't die in warmer weather, especially in wetter conditions. While prehistoric Urakan would certainly be uncomfortable in tropical climate zones, it's possible (and likely) that those voyaging into tropical areas would adapt to the warmer weather (thinner fur, melanin levels, smaller bodies, etc), at least enough to complete the voyages into the southern hemisphere.
@@WorldbuildingCorner - maybe the urakan would be the first to invent scissors and razorblades to thin out their body hair in more equatorial climes.
I fully expected the octopi to be involved in the first wars. Their parasitic nature makes them a threat to all the other races. Furthermore they were already practicing agriculture before they became parasites with how they cultivate the highly nutritious grass of the marshlands. While everyone else was discovering fire and roaming around the octopi were mastering agriculture and other spinoff pursuits such as biological modification of plants through selective pollination and the shaping of plants into desired shapes and structures. Why would they bother with slavery when they can instead leverage their agricultural mastery to become traders and ally themselves with the humans? The humans provide transport and the octopi provide food. It is a very solid interspecies alliance. This alliance would also make them the first true empire in the stone age as the bears and the lizards by themselves and in isolated environments would be unable to withstand the combination of the humans' ingenuity and the octopi's sheer intelligence. There is also no reason why the octopi couldn't craft tubs onto their beasts of burden thus creating the first iteration of the concept of a car all the way in the stone age and one that would only be further developed in the very first stoneage Empire.
Yeah; I would've made the octopi sailors and eventually merchants and pirates, seizing control over the oceans.
I am doing a fantasy project as a learning tool and exploration beside creating a story so to say, I started with one, then I decided to add second story happening couple of thousands years before the first and in the interactions between the two my world building took shape and some depth to it, recently I decided to add yet another story happening at the dawn of these civilizations taking form... this was incredibly helpful to guide me toward principles I should consider for the required additional world building ... thank you... I'll be staying and enjoying even more of your teachings...
I'm planning on making a very similar model to earth that doesn't have the amazing variety of species that this series has, however it is very interesting to track the development of this series' species according to their environment. Wonderfully informative video (and series) that has given me a lot to think about!
Thank you, glad you are enjoying and that the series is thought provoking!
Good luck with your worldbuilding project :)
@@WorldbuildingCorner more importantly when’s your next episode coming out? Very excited!
@@georgesnow5453 I am trying to release new videos fortnightly at this stage. I did weekly for a while when starting out but found it too hard to balance everything else in my life haha.
I'm over here trying to use this to figure out the timeline for my creatures. They're of magic origin, and basically got to speedrun the paleolithic thanks to divine intervention, then left to figure out the rest themselves.
I'm trying to pinpoint how far they would have feasibly gotten during the following 3000 years.
An interesting thing is that this kind of meeting of different sapient species happened in our prehistory, with early humans meeting Neanderthals and even mating with them. Also happened with Denisovans.
Definitely! And somewhat ominous that only one sapient species survived...
@@WorldbuildingCorner less ominous when you realize that we just kinda outfucked them
Some of those island settlements got real lucky there 17:30
Really nice content! I hope this channel gets big really soon!
Thank you! Glad you are enjoying :)
This is so fun to follow!
One thing i'm thinking is that with species from such widely different parts of the evolutionary tree it's unlikely that they would all develop sapience at the same time.
Some would be ahead of the race and others behind right from the outset. Your parasitic octopi could potentially develop sapience before either the urakan or humans evolved.
I believe that was even addressed slightly. The octopi probably *did* develop sapience earlier than the other three, but their physiological breeding limitations led to limited expansion until quickly borrowing other sapient tools to further expand. They even had agriculture before the others, meaning they likely had established settlements earlier too. They probably technologically exceeded the humans that came to them in every way except fire and metal/tool working, the latter which was promptly stolen.
Channel is underrated these vids are so useful
Very helpful Video, will definitly come back to this :)
Been watching/listening your videos during work, and although they're interesting, the music is driving me crazy
Worth mentioning that early instruments would depend also on biology. As most wind instruments require lips to be played, Silarians would be more likely to develop rhythmic instruments such skin drums, shakers, and maybe some early string instruments.
I suspect humans probably had some kind of clothes from 2 million years ago onward. Living in ice age Europe, sometimes even within line of sight of an ice sheet, probably requires clothing. And even very early Erectus lived as far North as Georgia.
It depends if it was a glaciation period or interglaciation.
Look at the world now. Earth is still in an ice age but we're currently in an interglacial period and thanks to the Gulf Stream the southwest of England actually has a subtropical climate in places. There are parts of the western isles of Scotland that have orchards and palm trees despite being as far north as Nova Scotia.
There were lions living in what is now the Thames Valley during one of the prior interglacials and the climate in the area was mediterranean.
Homo erectus could have quite happily lived unclothed during an interglacial period around2 million years ago and they happened on a more regular cycle back then due to changes in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit. Humans have colonised and then retreated from Europe repeatedly over the course of prehistory.
The projected temperature increases due to manmade climate change are lower than the temperatures the world has reached naturally at the heights of previous interglacials, though it's projected that manmade climate change will delay the next glacial period by another 50,000 years.
@@nagillim7915 Eh... I'm not sure nearly hairless mammals would do well in Georgia even today. Nude Sapiens adults shiver at 26 °C and go into runaway hypothermia at around 5 °C with no precipitation. It varies per group and per individual but that's the most normal value. A nude Sapiens infant will begin shivering at about 33 °C and runaway hypothermia can occur as high as 26 °C. Given that an Erectus adult is at most the same size and an Erectus infant is small and likely very very vulnerable to exposure, being in freezing weather seems extremely hazardous.
Note we do not see a single other animal without insulation in these environments except for cold-blooded animals that wait out the winter in water or in burrows or have natural antifreeze or whatnot. Mammals lack the ability to switch to cold-tolerant metabolic enzymes though so hypothermia is fatal long before the body temperature reaches freezing. More like low 20s °C. It seems like complete lack of clothing would be fatal in these conditions especially during the winter.
Also, lions are far from hairless. Lions lived as far North as the Russian Caucasus even one thousand years ago.
Lions, especially those that lived in more Northern climates, have a good amount of insulation. Erectus probably didn't. Look up lions in snow or lion something to see what their winter coat looks like. Erectus would need thicker, more effective insulation, not only in relative but in absolute terms, to achieve the same result because of its lower metabolism to surface area ratio, both due to smaller body size and ~1 °C lower body temperature. Where is it gonna get that insulation from?
@@petersmythe6462 - humans are remarkably adaptable when it comes to temperatures. We may not have fur but we are to the best of my knowledge the only non-aquatic mammal with subcutaneous fat deposits, ie blubber.
Far from shivering at 26°C i'm generally removing clothing as i'm.too warm. Exerting myself at temperatures above 23°C and i'm a mess of active sweat glands.
Summer temperatures here rarely climb much above 20°C and i don't really start shivering until below 15°C. And even then generally only after i get out of the shower and haven't yet dried off. If i'm dry i generally won't shiver naked until it's approaching single figures. Late December and January when outside nighttime temperatures drop below freezing are generally the only time i need a dressing gown to go to the bathroom through night. The rest of the year i don't really feel a chill.
I've been to hotter latitudes on holidays and i'm generally uncomfortable for two or three days before i acclimatise. Similarly after i get back home it takes a few days to get used to the colder weather again. But on those occasions i'm travelling by plane in a matter of hours. I did once travel to Spain by coach, it took nearly 3 days, and i acclimatised during the journey. I imagine had i done it on foot as part of a seasonal migration i wouldn't have even noticed my body adapting to the temperature change.
Fascinating.
Thank you! Glad you are enjoying :)
Cool video :)
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it :)
Awesome insight
Personally, a lot of my personal worldbuilding is kind of "word of god" since it contains a lot of magically modified creatures.
A thing about my personal mixt of creatures is that because they have different needs and advantages, they would have several pluses and minuses.
Elves would be fungivores with some rather weak magic powers, but their fungivory would create an interesting pattern of settlement. In prairies, wetlands and taigas they would be unable to settle, and be at such a disadvantage that they would likely never establish any settlements there. Their longer life cycle would also put them at a huge disadvantage for armed conflicts, so if they have to go fight humans, the odds would not be in their favor. These environments are so hostile to large scale fungi growth that they probably would not be able to build any settlements there. Their ability to fly would also give them very little incentive to invent rafts and boats. However, they would become very quickly masters of fungicultures. Their hollow bones would also give them a significant advantage at high altitudes, because they would be able to take in more oxygen. This would also push them to develop a good knowledge of aerodynamics pretty early on in their pre-history, quickly inventing tools capable of gliding to assist them into carrying their wing-less juveniles, food reserves or really any other things they might need to carry while flying, perhaps the earliest ones dating back to the early Mesolithic, or even late paleolithic. Their sixth sense capable of detecting evil spirits and predators would also lead to them developing religions far earlier. In short, for elves, fungi-culture and aerodynamics, something humans would not discover much, much later in their history. On the other hand, they would be terrible at sea faring, war and transitory environments, but once they find a place where humans and dwarves would be miserable, they would settle, creating some indeed bizarre settlements, in environments humans would consider inhabitable, but elves there would be thriving.
That's really fascinating! And certainly creates some very unique situations to use for worldbuilding in the future. I love hearing about your elves especially, they sound so wonderful and fanciful!
Magic / deities is a great worldbuilding engine, as it addresses any questions of inconsistencies or issues in the process. It is something I am finding more and more, that as Locus deviates away from being earth-like, it is challenging to keep things within the realm of explanation. Especially in ~20 minute videos! Magic / deities solve this without issue.
@@WorldbuildingCorner Thank you!
My fantasy verse is a parallel universe created by Satan in an attempt to ape God. It's a much smaller universe with magic that has altered the DNA of many creatures, allowing many animals that could simply not evolve naturally to exist. Since this verse was created by the devil himself, this magical place is not one that is pleasant. At all, namely because there is an organism living there which has a defense mechanism of cutting off endorphines and provoking an intense sensation of burning in most vertebrates. It also produces oxygen as a bi-product, and doesn't tolerate sun-light very well, and in fact it would die if exposed to sunlight for more than an hour. It renders many cave systems habitable enough to have rich ecosystems. Most vertebrates don't want to live there because the base of the food chain is either toxic or pure torture to eat, but elves are like: we got it boys, and have become a keystone species in this habitat.
Quick question: Could a fully aquatic race ever get out of the paleolithic?
It would never develop fire, but if it learned how to grow coral into specific shapes it might be able to create tools, weapons and architecture without wood, stone or metal.
@@nagillim7915 So they'd get to neolithic at best, but never into the bronze age?
@@MrInitialMan - without fire they couldn't smelt ores so they'd have no access to any metals at all.
They likely wouldn't have access to timber either.
They'd have coral, shell and fishbones. Possibly skins and scales from other sea life. Fronds of algae.
@@MrInitialMan As shown with humanities development in north and south America, a lack of metalworking would greatly delay technological progress, but not cultural progress. Complex civilization would still eventually develop as knowledge was passed from generation to generation. Learning to better use what resources were available would lead to gradual progress. They may be in a neolithic age for much longer than humanity but it's unrealistic to say they would stay there forever. How they would progress beyond becomes a lot more speculative though, which does grant a great deal of potential for a story.
I like it so muchh!!!!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed :)
🙌🙌🙌
🙌🔥👀
Making my own DND world. A whole new realm that is home to almost all of the anthropomorphic races. Like the shadowfell and the feywild, it parallels the prime material plane
Gotta nitpick.
Raising animals for food and other animation products is technically pastoralism, not Agriculture. Does kind of matter since there have been nomadic cultures that were pastoral but not agricultural.
Bigger thing is productive Agriculture is 100% not the point where you get civilization. Civilization requires a city, complex society, usually writing.
the first thing you said was true and WBC was wrong to get pastoralism and agricuture mixed up. but the second paragraph isn't quite right. Agriculture is basicall the main reason for a civilisation to form. not writing, because civilisation is what allows populations to get denser and for more food to be gathered within a smaller space. and besides, if you look at many of the advnaced societies and cultures throughout prehistory, many of them didn't even have writing. the powerful inca empire didn't have writing, and they had an organised empire spanning the size of modern day scandinavia.
First peoples being hunters and gathers, and have quantities of time that can be spended on things that is not food extracting.
They're not just Spanish Polar Bears, they're Spanish Polar Bear Vikings!
I am having trouble with doing these as I have a lot of races, and I have my climate map being made again. I have a lot of races but I am having a tough time with migration
In my world 2 of the races are psionic, thus have underdeveloped technology. No need to make complex tools or written language when you have telekinesis & telepathy.
I want an anthro species of non humans living in the prehistoric after they'll evolved in primordial soup.
i know that you already did the episode about the species evolution, but here this: the humans evolving from primates without having the savannah be a critical step of that evolution is just wrong, if these are meant to be humans they having this evolutionary trajectory of being forest dewellers rather than steppe ones just make it impossible for them to be so similar to us, they should be hairy(because they likely did not eolve for persistence hunting) and should have no incentive to go live on the gorund rather than in the trees.
Also, the reptilian guys. as much as i dislike that they walk upright rather than dino like, the bigger problem, is that an ectorthermic animal should not be capable of having a big brain, such a thing as far as we know only works well in constant high temperature. Even worse your description of their wild close realtives shows us a cursorial animal, but that is simply not posible for a cold bloded animal, these creatures are very lethargic and inactive, they cannot sustain the constante high temperature needed for such a lyfestyle.
Now do not take this to mean what you did is shit, it is awesome, a just think that are some problems. That is all.
There are some semi warm bloods like tuna and some sharks and sea turtles. Just throwing that out there. 😃
@@Beeontree i think they are more like a mesothermic animal, but sure if you say that the animal have an overall cold blooded body, but keeps the temperature of a few key areas(like the legs or brain) always high, i could buy it, just a shame it was not mentioned.
Thanks for the feedback! You are absolutely correct. The humans on Locus do not make sense and we did not evolve to remain in forested environments. Humans on Locus are being deliberately kept exactly as humans are in real life even if it doesn't make scientific sense environmentally. This will continue to be the case moving forward, with humans developing effectively English and similar earth-like trends. They are the 'baseline' or 'control' species for our benefit as viewers. I discuss why I am doing this in the video on creating species :)
I didn't get super into the biology side of creating each species otherwise the video would've been really long. 'Cold-blooded' creatures can absolutely keep particular parts of their bodies consistently warm, and there are a plethora of real life examples of this. It is also possible for alternative means of advanced neurology to develop besides what we use as humans, though that would be beyond anything 'science adjacent' and far beyond the scope of this series.
@@WorldbuildingCorner thanks for the response :).
Well, i think that what you did with humans is then viable for your purposes, agreed.
About the cold blooded, i actually do think that an animal that keeps only parts of its body consistently warm would a be a mesothermic one, not an ectothermic, but that would go a little to deep into the specifics of these definitions, if the "lizard guys" can be how they are because of such traits, than i think it is also fine.
I am however interested in the theretical thing about very different brain structure allowing for intelligence in a very inhuman way, if you would be Willing to explain that here in the comments, despite it being not the focus of anything in this series.
Absolutely, though this is very much science fiction.
On earth, the brains we have are metabolically expensive, and consume a huge amount of energy. Importantly, brain power is tied to this energy, not specifically our body temperature. Our brain cells (and the brain cells of every animal on earth) have evolved to receive this energy primarily through thermal energy, which is why we see endothermic creatures (creatures able to create their own heat) have more consistent neurological activity than ectothermic creatures (creatures reliant on external heat sources). Real-life lizards are far more neurologically active when warmed, and one possible fictional scenario is that an ectothermic intelligent species would be able to achieve human-like intelligence when warmed, but revert back to functioning on instinct when cold. Another possible fictional scenario is that in another tree of life, brain cells are designed to work at lower temperatures than what ours do, meaning that even at low body temperatures, ectothermic creatures wouldn't lose neurological power.
Of course, as you accurately pointed out, ectothermic creatures tend not to develop large brains, and without meeting the minimum brain size threshold, human-like intelligence is unlikely. The question of brain size though is tied to blood pressure rather than temperature, and an ectothermic creature with our existing heart structures and circulation systems simply cannot get enough oxygen to the brain to fuel growth to the point of human-like cognition. However, we have a real-life example of a creature that has overcome this: the Octopus is an ectotherm that has been pressured into evolving a large brain, and overcome the aforementioned problem with having three hearts. A single heart for an ectotherm cannot pump the oxygen required for a large brain, but multiple hearts can, and creatures developing additional hearts already has widespread precedent. It is also possible that a fictional ectotherm in another tree of life may have a different heart structure, though what this fictional heart might look and function like is outside of my knowledge.
This doesn't mean creatures exactly like the Silarin are possible, but we left 'reality' behind a while ago haha. Hope these points satisfy your curiosity!
This is really a video about designing prehistory generally, not prehistoric cultures. At the end of it we know almost nothing about the prehistoric cultures of Locus, or how to design our own. We know nothing - nothing! - about their religions. We know absolutely zero about marriage customs or family/clan organization. We know nothing about what wild plants, prey animals, and techniques the hunter-gatherers depend on in the different regions (do they do fire drives? Traps? Lures?), although, oddly, we do get the crops that the Neolithic farmers adopt. “There are painting and instruments” tells us nothing useful about their art - what do they even paint on? Cave walls? Trees? Leaves? Woven mats? What do the paintings represent? What is *taboo* for painting to represent? There’s not even a meaningful discussion of pottery, which is *the* form of prehistoric art we know most about - whole prehistoric cultures have been identified solely by the kind of pottery they left behind. What are their funerary customs? In the prehistoric Yangshao culture, dead women and men were both buried on their backs facing the sky; in the later Longshan culture, women were buried on their sides with knees drawn up, facing the bones of a male, probably a husband, brother, or father, who himself still faced the sky. These silent bones of illiterate people still speak incredibly powerfully about how different their views of gender were.
Very disappointing video.