A fascinating book set in the Stone Age, with a fantastical twist, is Children of the Dark People by Frank Dalby Davison. Set 'in the days before the coming of the white man', this is the story of Jackadgery and Nimmitybelle, two children 'who wander lost in the bush and have many curious magical experiences before they come safely home again'. They are chased by a witchdoctor named Adaminaby, and 'befriended by the good spirits of the bush: the Spirit of the Billabong, Grandfather Gumtree, the Spirit of the Mist, Mickatharra, the Brumby Boy, and others. Finally they meet Old Mr Bunyip who leads them back home' A heap of fantasy ideas in a Stone Age setting
Love this series already, looking forward to further installments. I have to make a couple of corrections though. 1. New Zealand did not have a land bridge in the ice age, it wasn't settled until around 1200-1300 CE, thousands of years after Australia. 2. Cats were probably not domesticated until post agricultural revolution (so neolithic), because rodents weren't really a problem for us until we had granaries to protect. 3. The reason swords can't be made out of stone is because they would be too fragile, not because they'd be too heavy.
Yeah, my mouth confused NZ with Indonesia. For some reason I decided that NZ was North and West of Oz instead of South and West. Good point on the swords, though I do think the weight could be a problem. And yeah, I know cats came later, but hey, I don't think anyone is going to object to early cat domestication. After all, they buy magic :)
36:43 Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that for mine. But making fire would be difficult, as while magic is abundant, it's in scarce amounts. Everyone can do it, but almost everyone can barely do it. Though the big limitation of this world is metals aren't available, except for biologically. Because no one knows about metal, no one knows of things like concentrating huge masses of blood to make iron. Which blood would be a vital nutrition source, especially for iron. No one would come close to trying to do this. Like how people aren't collecting apple seeds to make arsenic weapons. This is an amazing video. Just subscribed to your channel, and will check out the one on animalism next! (Probably misspelled)
_Guns, Germs and Steel_ postulates that people start agriculture when it's more profitable to grow food rather than collect it, and that this is a gradual process. As such, I don't think having control over fire good enough that you can make copper tools would lead to our classic understanding of the Copper Age. They would have copper tools, but everything else would stay the same, including being hunter-gatherers. So you can still have a world or story with hunter-gatherers even if hot fire and copper tools are available.
Hmm, perhaps. But copper tools would make agriculture more profitable much faster. The advantage of copper tipped plough tips would make it much, much easier to till the land. I don't think it would be instantaneous, but it would hurry the process along substantially (IMO). That being said, there are ways for any given world builder to have a copper tooled hunter-gather culture. Readers swallow magic, dragons, and all manner of other things. Just make sure it works in your world and readers will swallow it whole and not even burp.
Will you mentioned about fire going into the Bronze Age just because someone has the innate ability to wield it doesn't mean they could begin to bring it to his potential
A note regarding magic: Shapeshifters of any kind would either be a valuable member of the community, (imagine how helpful in hunting it would be if Susie could turn into an eagle, or Jack into a huge wolf) or a danger if you use old werewolf ideas.
You can't imagine how happy this video makes me 😊 I work in a stone age adjacent field, and have always had a passion for the archaeology of the epipaleolithic and neolithic. It's wonderful to see someone passionate bring the stone age to a worldbuilding audience. There's a few good documentaries about the stone age village of Ba'ja, which brings the period to live in a beautiful way.
My absolute pleasure. I plan to return to the stone age sometime soon and talk about magic and its impact at a deeper level, especially for the changes it would create in human societies.
The oldest continuous culture in the world - the Australian Aboriginal - is a great template for this era. And we get a number of interesting aspects - boomerangs as a unique weapon; didgeridoos as a unique musical instrument; corroboree as a sort of story-telling dance; initiation rites for girls and boys; a wealth of spiritual beliefs with the Dreamtime; the witchdoctors as the shaman; the various funerary practices including putting bodies in trees, then gathering the bones later on; pointing the bone at malefactors, which would cause them to waste away and die; and so on And there would have been a small strait to traverse from SE Asia/indonesia landmass, to the Australian - New Guinea land mass - in fact, Australia was settled by homo sapiens 10-20 thousand years before Europe. And New Zealand could NEVER be a stepping stone to Australia, and there never was a landmass connecting the Australian landmass to New Zealand. In fact NZ was the last land inhabited by humans on the earth, apart from Antarctica, being settled only in about 1200 CE
It works as long as your Stone Age area is an isolated community. If the one part of your world is densely populated and has a lot of trade, I think they’d naturally have a much faster innovation speed, because they have more people to have more ideas with.
The TTRPG world I brewed has an area that is in the same time, but the flora, fauna, and rules of magic are prehistoric and chaotic. Hoping to get some ideas from this video
Well, I'm getting back on track with the lessons. a great video as allways. I saw covers of a trilogy by a writer called Harry Harrison, tiltled Eden. It might be a story set on a stone age time, but I haven't checked haha
I am just now getting to the end of your economics section, and I am loving the video so far! The one thing that I would like to say is that, if we look at two different types of culture, one which is in an area that has a lack of resources or some other natural impediment to human survival, then you see people forced to band together, and that results in a natural tendency towards high trust societies. When you have the society or community with abundant resources, there is less of a need for reliance on one another, and people don’t learn the same degree of respect for need. I guess my take away would be. I disagree with your assumption that a community with natural abundance would be the catalyst for a high trust society. Instead, I would say that both great abundance and overwhelming lack would lead to less interpersonal respect, while an environment with regular hardships and and incentive for group loyalty would be the actual catalyst for a high trust mentality.
That is absolutely fair. I can't remember exactly what I said in the video but if it was that societies with less resources would always be low trust, I must have eaten a strange mushroom that day. The country I live in (Finland) is proof of what you say, lack of resources or very limited resources (like our winters) often leads to extremely high trust societies because people have to band together to survive.
What about a video about the minimum number of adults required to raise an encampment out of nothing. And at what number the shared labor resulted in specialized labors and then at what number does a family split off to make a new one?
hermaphroditism is the term used to describe the phenomenon of having male and female sexual organs in plants and animals, but the term for humans is intersex. hermaphrodite is a slur when applied to humans. intersex is a common umbrella condition that ranges from hormonal imbalances to chromosomal variance to secondary sex characteristic variance and is found in at least 1/100 people, likely far higher considering that conditions like genetic chimerism are severely underreported. there are more intersex people on earth than there are natural redheads.
Again, late to the party, oh well. My personal favorite series of novels along this line are the Beyond the Sea of Ice: The First Americans series. Stone age, migration, stone age magic, action, adult. Again, probably read it before I should have, but whatever... Anything broken in me has nothing to do with what I read. Also, they did have pants...
I don't mind a bit of comment necromancy, as long as you don't expect me to remember exactly what I said in the video! Thanks for the recommendations and thoughts.
@@JustInTimeWorlds Cool, I`m a necromancer now! Bwa haw haw ha! No, I barely remember what I did yesterday so no worries. The wonderful perk of multiple head injuries, that and being able to look in multiple directions at the same time. 0/10 would not recommend. That they had pants is the thing that I find interesting. Even looking at the Inuit and Eskimo tribes, they had pants as well yet were technically stone age civilizations. Whereas in both the middle east and Europe, pants came around a lot further on in the development of those cultures, at least as far as I understand it. No idea about when the east got them. When did ancient China develop pants? Are pants some sort of cultural milestone, or just a natural response to the environment? Are pants inevitable for a civilization? If so, Why did so many cultures restrict pants to men? The cultural aspects of clothing can be quite fascinating.
@@JustInTimeWorlds Did you ever make a video on what a planetary ring would do to a world? What I have so far is that it would cause long hot summers , with nights almost as bright as day. Long cold winters, with daytime nearly as dark as twilight. The occasional meteor storm from rocks falling from the ring, mostly along the equator but also falling further north and south every once in a while. This would make civilizations far less likely to appear anywhere near the equator, and if they did appear they wouldn't last very long unless they decided to build underground or in canyons. So civilizations like Petra, the Pueblos, or Derinkuyu near the equator, with more typical civilizations like the vikings developing further north and south. I have no idea what it would do to their religion or culture, though I do imagine it would be significant.
Nice voice. I'm curious about what you are talking about. Some kind of world building? What is that? Just guessing from your words. Nice chant behind your voice.
Thanks. Yeah, on my channel I chat about fantasy world building, so how to create worlds and cultures other than our own for the purpose of writing stories, like Game of Thrones or other stories along those lines.
Algunas cosas que me parecen interesantes de tratar en esta época son las "razas" y el tiempo, vayamos con el primero: 1) Creo que la raza prehistórica más famosa, después del humano, son los dinosaurios inteligentes, sin embargo, creo que se puede hacer algo mejor que el ser escamoso que ya estoy cansado de ver: Los dinosaurios tenían plumas, eran, básicamente, pájaros con cola, dientes y sin pico, por lo que algo cómo un hombre lagarto, pero cubierto de plumas en lugar de escamas, sería más acertado para tener una identidad propia (es mejor agarrar algo ya existente y darle un giro, que pretender que todo es nuevo todo el tiempo). O, si no aceptas pulpo cómo animal de compañía, también están los neandertales (mini hulks sumos blancos, narizones y pelirrojos), los homo denisovanos (gente de anaranjada, amarillenta o de color bronce) y el homo floresiensis (imagina a Frodo o Gimly del señor de los anillos, pero negro y pelirrojo). 2) Si nos basamos en lo encontrado, tal parece que nuestros ancestros percibían el tiempo cómo un ciclo (no existe, pasado, presente o futuro, solo el ciclo, el ciclo siempre existió, siempre existe y siempre existirá). Por lo general, en la ficción occidental el ciclo es percibido cómo algo negativo y que debe romperse para alcanzar la libertad, mientras que en la mayoría de las historias de ficción orientales, el ciclo es visto cómo algo que es bueno por ser poderoso, cómo si una cosa implicara a la otra. Es posible que estas dos visiones también las tuvieran nuestros ancestros y que generara conflicto entre ellos, pero al haber tan pocos de los nuestros, es posible de que dijeran "no vale la pena matarnos entre nosotros" o "si nos agarramos a golpes aquí, vamos a terminar todos muertos" o algo por el estilo.
I think that a lot of conflict used to be solved by simply walking away. Back when there was a lot of space, there was less reason to fight. Or at least, the losers could walk away if there was a fight.
This is a very enjoyable video, but you seem to have massive misconceptions about paleolithic and mesolithic society and lifestyle. Active lifestyles like hunter-gatherers use cause human women to ovulate irregularly and infrequently, meaning despite frequent procreation very few children are had over several years, this is part of why the population stayed so low until settled societies came about; you simply couldn't populate rapidly without settling down. Similarly, we have nigh endless evidence of infanticide, class stratification, etcetera from paleolithic societies all over the world. There is evidence of Iberian tree sap being used as hair gel in Britain, the oldest (disputed) grave goods are older than clothes at 130,000 years ago, and from Neanderthals at that! Modern racial traits, particularly in Europe, such as blue or green eyes or blonde hair are phenotypical markers of genetic relations, the number of infants killed for not being blonde or having the wrong eye color is simply unknowable. That's another thing too, during the time period you're covering, the Paleolithic, anatomically modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, are not alone in the world, we were kept out of Europe for thousands of years by Neanderthals, from various parts of Asia by up to a dozen different human species, all of which had different appearances, cultures, and beliefs, no matter how similar they were. This all isn't to say that your video isn't good advice, but its simply very uninformed on the vast, vast complexities of an over 2 million year long period you're trying to condense into a 40 minute video.
A fascinating book set in the Stone Age, with a fantastical twist, is Children of the Dark People by Frank Dalby Davison. Set 'in the days before the coming of the white man', this is the story of Jackadgery and Nimmitybelle, two children 'who wander lost in the bush and have many curious magical experiences before they come safely home again'. They are chased by a witchdoctor named Adaminaby, and 'befriended by the good spirits of the bush: the Spirit of the Billabong, Grandfather Gumtree, the Spirit of the Mist, Mickatharra, the Brumby Boy, and others. Finally they meet Old Mr Bunyip who leads them back home' A heap of fantasy ideas in a Stone Age setting
Very creative. Studying anthropology has been very interesting in fleshing out my own worldbuilding.
It's fascinating to go back and think about how certain things in your world came to be.
Finally someone talks about this!!!
A pleasure and more to come :)
Love this series already, looking forward to further installments. I have to make a couple of corrections though.
1. New Zealand did not have a land bridge in the ice age, it wasn't settled until around 1200-1300 CE, thousands of years after Australia.
2. Cats were probably not domesticated until post agricultural revolution (so neolithic), because rodents weren't really a problem for us until we had granaries to protect.
3. The reason swords can't be made out of stone is because they would be too fragile, not because they'd be too heavy.
Yeah, my mouth confused NZ with Indonesia. For some reason I decided that NZ was North and West of Oz instead of South and West.
Good point on the swords, though I do think the weight could be a problem.
And yeah, I know cats came later, but hey, I don't think anyone is going to object to early cat domestication. After all, they buy magic :)
36:43 Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that for mine. But making fire would be difficult, as while magic is abundant, it's in scarce amounts. Everyone can do it, but almost everyone can barely do it. Though the big limitation of this world is metals aren't available, except for biologically. Because no one knows about metal, no one knows of things like concentrating huge masses of blood to make iron. Which blood would be a vital nutrition source, especially for iron. No one would come close to trying to do this. Like how people aren't collecting apple seeds to make arsenic weapons.
This is an amazing video. Just subscribed to your channel, and will check out the one on animalism next! (Probably misspelled)
Welcome to my little corner of UA-cam :)
When you mention Magic it made me think fire Mages would be venerated
_Guns, Germs and Steel_ postulates that people start agriculture when it's more profitable to grow food rather than collect it, and that this is a gradual process. As such, I don't think having control over fire good enough that you can make copper tools would lead to our classic understanding of the Copper Age. They would have copper tools, but everything else would stay the same, including being hunter-gatherers. So you can still have a world or story with hunter-gatherers even if hot fire and copper tools are available.
Hmm, perhaps. But copper tools would make agriculture more profitable much faster. The advantage of copper tipped plough tips would make it much, much easier to till the land. I don't think it would be instantaneous, but it would hurry the process along substantially (IMO). That being said, there are ways for any given world builder to have a copper tooled hunter-gather culture. Readers swallow magic, dragons, and all manner of other things. Just make sure it works in your world and readers will swallow it whole and not even burp.
Will you mentioned about fire going into the Bronze Age just because someone has the innate ability to wield it doesn't mean they could begin to bring it to his potential
Absolutely, it’s just something to bear in mind.
A note regarding magic: Shapeshifters of any kind would either be a valuable member of the community, (imagine how helpful in hunting it would be if Susie could turn into an eagle, or Jack into a huge wolf) or a danger if you use old werewolf ideas.
💯 and it would fit the time period. That lion man statue they found points to our ancient ancestors believing in shape shifting.
You can't imagine how happy this video makes me 😊 I work in a stone age adjacent field, and have always had a passion for the archaeology of the epipaleolithic and neolithic. It's wonderful to see someone passionate bring the stone age to a worldbuilding audience.
There's a few good documentaries about the stone age village of Ba'ja, which brings the period to live in a beautiful way.
My absolute pleasure. I plan to return to the stone age sometime soon and talk about magic and its impact at a deeper level, especially for the changes it would create in human societies.
The oldest continuous culture in the world - the Australian Aboriginal - is a great template for this era. And we get a number of interesting aspects - boomerangs as a unique weapon; didgeridoos as a unique musical instrument; corroboree as a sort of story-telling dance; initiation rites for girls and boys; a wealth of spiritual beliefs with the Dreamtime; the witchdoctors as the shaman; the various funerary practices including putting bodies in trees, then gathering the bones later on; pointing the bone at malefactors, which would cause them to waste away and die; and so on
And there would have been a small strait to traverse from SE Asia/indonesia landmass, to the Australian - New Guinea land mass - in fact, Australia was settled by homo sapiens 10-20 thousand years before Europe. And New Zealand could NEVER be a stepping stone to Australia, and there never was a landmass connecting the Australian landmass to New Zealand. In fact NZ was the last land inhabited by humans on the earth, apart from Antarctica, being settled only in about 1200 CE
I did not know that about NZ.
Oh I see what I did, I mixed Indonesia and NZ in the video. My geography got confused and put NZ north-east of Aus instead of south-east.
What's your thoughts on mixing time periods for example the countryside being in the Stone Age but the coastal cities Brian the Renaissance
It works as long as your Stone Age area is an isolated community. If the one part of your world is densely populated and has a lot of trade, I think they’d naturally have a much faster innovation speed, because they have more people to have more ideas with.
The TTRPG world I brewed has an area that is in the same time, but the flora, fauna, and rules of magic are prehistoric and chaotic. Hoping to get some ideas from this video
Well, I'm getting back on track with the lessons. a great video as allways. I saw covers of a trilogy by a writer called Harry Harrison, tiltled Eden. It might be a story set on a stone age time, but I haven't checked haha
This is such an amazing channel! Love this thorough broad-perspective scientific lecture approach
Glad you enjoyed the video
I am just now getting to the end of your economics section, and I am loving the video so far!
The one thing that I would like to say is that, if we look at two different types of culture, one which is in an area that has a lack of resources or some other natural impediment to human survival, then you see people forced to band together, and that results in a natural tendency towards high trust societies. When you have the society or community with abundant resources, there is less of a need for reliance on one another, and people don’t learn the same degree of respect for need.
I guess my take away would be. I disagree with your assumption that a community with natural abundance would be the catalyst for a high trust society. Instead, I would say that both great abundance and overwhelming lack would lead to less interpersonal respect, while an environment with regular hardships and and incentive for group loyalty would be the actual catalyst for a high trust mentality.
That is absolutely fair. I can't remember exactly what I said in the video but if it was that societies with less resources would always be low trust, I must have eaten a strange mushroom that day. The country I live in (Finland) is proof of what you say, lack of resources or very limited resources (like our winters) often leads to extremely high trust societies because people have to band together to survive.
I'm getting Jean M Auel flashbacks.
Hahahaha. My mom used to read her to me. Then she'd say: Oh wait, grown up content... and page through for a while.
The closest you'd get to a stone sword would be a club with flakes inserted into it like a spiked bat or macuahuitl
What about a video about the minimum number of adults required to raise an encampment out of nothing. And at what number the shared labor resulted in specialized labors and then at what number does a family split off to make a new one?
hermaphroditism is the term used to describe the phenomenon of having male and female sexual organs in plants and animals, but the term for humans is intersex. hermaphrodite is a slur when applied to humans. intersex is a common umbrella condition that ranges from hormonal imbalances to chromosomal variance to secondary sex characteristic variance and is found in at least 1/100 people, likely far higher considering that conditions like genetic chimerism are severely underreported. there are more intersex people on earth than there are natural redheads.
No slur meant, and my apologies any intersex people.
Again, late to the party, oh well. My personal favorite series of novels along this line are the Beyond the Sea of Ice: The First Americans series. Stone age, migration, stone age magic, action, adult. Again, probably read it before I should have, but whatever... Anything broken in me has nothing to do with what I read. Also, they did have pants...
I don't mind a bit of comment necromancy, as long as you don't expect me to remember exactly what I said in the video! Thanks for the recommendations and thoughts.
@@JustInTimeWorlds Cool, I`m a necromancer now! Bwa haw haw ha!
No, I barely remember what I did yesterday so no worries. The wonderful perk of multiple head injuries, that and being able to look in multiple directions at the same time. 0/10 would not recommend.
That they had pants is the thing that I find interesting. Even looking at the Inuit and Eskimo tribes, they had pants as well yet were technically stone age civilizations. Whereas in both the middle east and Europe, pants came around a lot further on in the development of those cultures, at least as far as I understand it. No idea about when the east got them. When did ancient China develop pants? Are pants some sort of cultural milestone, or just a natural response to the environment? Are pants inevitable for a civilization? If so, Why did so many cultures restrict pants to men?
The cultural aspects of clothing can be quite fascinating.
I actually did a video on weaving because I found the history of cloth to be super fascinating :D
@@JustInTimeWorlds Did you ever make a video on what a planetary ring would do to a world?
What I have so far is that it would cause long hot summers , with nights almost as bright as day.
Long cold winters, with daytime nearly as dark as twilight.
The occasional meteor storm from rocks falling from the ring, mostly along the equator but also falling further north and south every once in a while. This would make civilizations far less likely to appear anywhere near the equator, and if they did appear they wouldn't last very long unless they decided to build underground or in canyons. So civilizations like Petra, the Pueblos, or Derinkuyu near the equator, with more typical civilizations like the vikings developing further north and south.
I have no idea what it would do to their religion or culture, though I do imagine it would be significant.
Nice voice. I'm curious about what you are talking about. Some kind of world building? What is that? Just guessing from your words. Nice chant behind your voice.
Thanks. Yeah, on my channel I chat about fantasy world building, so how to create worlds and cultures other than our own for the purpose of writing stories, like Game of Thrones or other stories along those lines.
Algunas cosas que me parecen interesantes de tratar en esta época son las "razas" y el tiempo, vayamos con el primero:
1) Creo que la raza prehistórica más famosa, después del humano, son los dinosaurios inteligentes, sin embargo, creo que se puede hacer algo mejor que el ser escamoso que ya estoy cansado de ver:
Los dinosaurios tenían plumas, eran, básicamente, pájaros con cola, dientes y sin pico, por lo que algo cómo un hombre lagarto, pero cubierto de plumas en lugar de escamas, sería más acertado para tener una identidad propia (es mejor agarrar algo ya existente y darle un giro, que pretender que todo es nuevo todo el tiempo).
O, si no aceptas pulpo cómo animal de compañía, también están los neandertales (mini hulks sumos blancos, narizones y pelirrojos), los homo denisovanos (gente de anaranjada, amarillenta o de color bronce) y el homo floresiensis (imagina a Frodo o Gimly del señor de los anillos, pero negro y pelirrojo).
2) Si nos basamos en lo encontrado, tal parece que nuestros ancestros percibían el tiempo cómo un ciclo (no existe, pasado, presente o futuro, solo el ciclo, el ciclo siempre existió, siempre existe y siempre existirá).
Por lo general, en la ficción occidental el ciclo es percibido cómo algo negativo y que debe romperse para alcanzar la libertad, mientras que en la mayoría de las historias de ficción orientales, el ciclo es visto cómo algo que es bueno por ser poderoso, cómo si una cosa implicara a la otra.
Es posible que estas dos visiones también las tuvieran nuestros ancestros y que generara conflicto entre ellos, pero al haber tan pocos de los nuestros, es posible de que dijeran "no vale la pena matarnos entre nosotros" o "si nos agarramos a golpes aquí, vamos a terminar todos muertos" o algo por el estilo.
I think that a lot of conflict used to be solved by simply walking away. Back when there was a lot of space, there was less reason to fight. Or at least, the losers could walk away if there was a fight.
@@JustInTimeWorlds También es una opción.
This is a very enjoyable video, but you seem to have massive misconceptions about paleolithic and mesolithic society and lifestyle.
Active lifestyles like hunter-gatherers use cause human women to ovulate irregularly and infrequently, meaning despite frequent procreation very few children are had over several years, this is part of why the population stayed so low until settled societies came about; you simply couldn't populate rapidly without settling down.
Similarly, we have nigh endless evidence of infanticide, class stratification, etcetera from paleolithic societies all over the world. There is evidence of Iberian tree sap being used as hair gel in Britain, the oldest (disputed) grave goods are older than clothes at 130,000 years ago, and from Neanderthals at that! Modern racial traits, particularly in Europe, such as blue or green eyes or blonde hair are phenotypical markers of genetic relations, the number of infants killed for not being blonde or having the wrong eye color is simply unknowable.
That's another thing too, during the time period you're covering, the Paleolithic, anatomically modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, are not alone in the world, we were kept out of Europe for thousands of years by Neanderthals, from various parts of Asia by up to a dozen different human species, all of which had different appearances, cultures, and beliefs, no matter how similar they were.
This all isn't to say that your video isn't good advice, but its simply very uninformed on the vast, vast complexities of an over 2 million year long period you're trying to condense into a 40 minute video.
So you didn't watch the first 2 minutes of the video where she said she wasn't an expert.