ArcBuilder Universe© Time Line Page

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5.0 million years ago: Human ancestors speciate away from the ancestors of chimpanzees, giving rise to the earliest known member of the Human branch, Orrorin tugenensis, which inhabited the region of what would come to be known as Kenya. The environment of the time was woodland, with areas of open grassland, and it was much more lush than other regions of Africa.	What's New May 30, 2007 Reformatted the page, integrating it fully into the rest of the site. February 20, 2007 Added some minor information on the Arim-Ojefo-Joi. September 8, 2006: Information pertaining to the Tsubar'ey was added. I've also updated my email address at the bottom of the page. August 17, 2006: I've established this page, and begun adding its data. And I managed to complete it in one day, too.
4.829 million years ago: The Arim-Ojefo-Joi arise on a Dunwalli ring world. They will experience a brief surge of high civilization as they develop an industrial civilization. However, their ring world cannot support the environmental changes that their civilization incurs, and the result is the collapse of the biosphere and the extinction of the civilization.
4.8 million years ago: The hominid species Ardipithecus is the first known hominid to walk upright. About the size of a modern chimpanzee, this species continued to live in the woodlands of the Kenyan region, and likely had learned to exploit resources on both the ground and the trees. It is also closely related to chimpanzees, and may well be one of the first species that split from that line of great apes.
3.7 million years ago: The earliest Australopithecines evolve, and are evidenced by fossilized footprints found in the volcanic ash sediments of Laetoli, Kenya. The footprints infer full bipedalism, and their form hints at a likely earlier evolution of this species from as of yet undiscovered ancestors.
2.5 million years ago The earliest known species of Human, homo habilis, evolves in what will become east Africa. In appearance habilis looked the least like his Human descendents, with rather long arms and a brain capacity somewhat less than half of modern Humans. He was also the earliest known tool user, utilizing stone flakes for a variety of simple functions. It cannot be known for certain, but it seems unlikely that habilis had learned to use fire.
2.0 million years ago: The Tsubar'ey successfully provolve the Aagüla from animals that inhabit the methane seas of their homeworld.
1.8 million years ago: Homo erectus evolves in Africa, but will eventually spread throughout Europe and Asia. In appearance they looked very similar to Humans, though they possessed sloping foreheads and a cranial capacity only 75% that of modern people. On average they were just over 5 feet in height, with sexual differentialism very similar to their descendents. Tool use was much more advanced than previous hominids, with specialized tools being created, including double-sided hand-axes. It is believed that they knew and utilized fire.
800,000 years ago: The ArcBuilder civilization arises on the world of Alba, orbiting 37 Geminorum, in the Local Neighborhood. This species will come to spread across the Local Neighborhood, their colonized worlds held together by their ArcWay network, devices which allow for the instantaneous travel between star systems. Because of this, the ArcBuilders will have the single greatest impact over Humanity, far above any other non-Terrestrial influences.
216,000 years ago: The Aagüla begin to colonize worlds around other stars for the first time, and are contacted by the Tsubar'ey, who have left them alone since they were first provolved. The Aagüla, despite their technological status, believe the Tsubar'ey are gods and seek to appease and worship them.
215,000 years ago: The ArcBuilders, facing major population and resource problems, are nearly destroyed in a major nuclear confrontation. While the species survives, it will take some time for them to truly recover. However, the causes of the war are the primary reason why they begin to invest in off-world travel, and to eventually create the ArcWays.
200,000 years ago: The ArcBuilders, well into their interstellar period of ArcWay construction, arrive within the Xi Scorpii C system and build an ArcWay on the world of Amasha. While there is nothing to distinguish this colony from any other that the ArcBuilders had founded, in time this world will be home to the technologically advanced and fascist Lost Colony of the so-called Voter Republic.
195,000 years ago: The earliest known representatives of Homo sapiens sapiens appear in Africa, in the Ethiopia region, near where the modern Omo River flows. A very rare species, these people did not migrate from Africa for tens of thousands of years, and lived in direct competition with other hominids for some time.
150,000 years ago: The rough time period in which Mitochondrial Eve lived. From Africa, this specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens was the last female ancestor common to all mitochondrial lineages of in Humans alive in the modern era. Her existence was determined in the late 20th Century through a technique of measuring the molecular clock and correlating the elapsed time with observed genetic drift.
130,000 years ago: Homo neanderthalensis evolves and lives in Europe and the Middle East. A supreme tool maker and likely possessing spiritual beliefs, he represents many of the aspects that are often attributed to modern humans and their descendants. His body form was also supremely adapted to glacial conditions, being short and stocky, and supremely strong.
122,000 years ago: The ArcBuilders arrive on Earth and establish their ArcWay-supported colony. This would be one of the last such colonies founded by them, and it would be continuously inhabited until the final disappearance of their civilization.
120,000 years ago: The ArcBuilder civilization falls, literally over night, through the actions of the Enemy, a malevolent force that seemingly exists within the ArcWay network itself. Before its final collapse, the network is placed in what amounts to a "stand-by" mode, and will remain unused for tens of thousands of years to come.
74,000 years ago: The super volcano Toba, in Sumatra, erupts with the force of one gigaton, ejecting 2,800 cubic kilometers of material. The result was a deposition of up to 5 meters of ash in various regions thousands of miles away, a mean temperature drop of 3 degrees Celsius, and an mini-ice age that lasted for approximately 1,000 years. More significantly, there is evidence that the environmental changes nearly made Humanity extinct, reducing the world-wide population to between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals. This population bottleneck is detectable in Human genetics to this day.
70,000 years ago: The most recent ice age, the Wisconsin Glaciation, begins. It is possible that it began in response to the Toba Eruption, but dating uncertainties make this connection merely hypothetical. This glaciation is responsible for many of the modern characteristics of the Earth, most of which have since been re-covered by the present glacial period.
30,000 years ago: The first Humans migrate into North America. A process that occurs over several thousand years and in numerous waves, most of these peoples will survive and become the modern North American and South American Indians, though some of the earliest waves will leave no genetic descendents. Some migrations come from Europe and even Africa, but these races will eventually die out.
18,000 years ago: The Wisconsin Glaciation is at its height, with ice sheets extending as far south as Germany in Europe, and the upper Midwest in North America.
16,000 years ago: The Sivata develop a civilization on the world of Pangaia, orbiting 18 Scorpii. It does not take them long to discover the slumbering ArcWay on their world, and relatively swiftly they move out through the network and into the Local Neighborhood.
12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE): The Sivata arrive on Earth via the ArcWays. Encountering a world still steeped within the last ice age, they establish their colony and begin to explore the planet. During this period, they will encounter a local population of Humans and foster them, bringing them into a roughly equal state of social and technological advancement within a couple of generations. These people will be the precursors of the Lost Civilization.
11,000 years ago (9000 BCE): The people of the Lost Civilization begin to travel through the ArcWays and settle other planets, most often with the aid of the Sivata, some of which they live with on these planets.
10,900 years ago (8900 BCE): Various individuals from the Lost Civilization begin to travel the Earth, observing and sometimes living among their more primitive brethren. These missionaries will found various sects which remain on Earth, maintaining ties with the Lost Civilization and often using its technology, but for the most part living among the wilds.
10,800 years ago (8800 BCE) A second wave of off-world colonization via the ArcWays is begun by the Lost Civilization, this time at a much more independent level than the previous efforts. Many of these colonies will survive to become the modern era's Lost Colonies. A Lost Civilization colony arrives at the Xi Scorpii system via the ArcWay. Possessing a technology highly derived from the Sivata, these people swiftly spread through the multiple star system, which they have named the Massif Cluster, and establish many secondary colonies. This newly established polity, quickly made independent from the Sivata and the Lost Civilization proper, is named the Cordillera Ascendancy. However, it will eventually slip into decadence over the next few centuries and finally arrive at a pre-industrial level, while many of the secondary colonies fall even further. These cultures will rise and fall intermittently over the next several centuries.
10,600 years ago (8600 BCE): A third and final wave of Lost Civilization colonization via the ArcWay. These colonies begin and remain almost entirely independent, reflecting the advancement of the Lost Civilization itself, and they have almost no contact with either their homeworld or the Sivata.
10,550 years ago (8550 BCE): Many Sivata colonies begin to be abandoned as much of the Sivata population, now under the control of the Enemy, concentrate their efforts on their goals.
10,500 years ago (8500 BCE): The Sivata, or rather those who remain free of the Enemy, conspire to completely shut down the ArcWay network. The result is the breaking of the connections that hold the Enemy together, and bringing about the extinction of the Sivata species. Human colonies on other worlds are completely cut-off from any form of support, and so technologically and socially regress. In some cases they go extinct. On Earth, the remaining members of the Lost Civilization are likewise stranded, having no way to support the technology that they had come to rely on, and so they will congregate at the old Sivata colony site, which surrounds the ArcWay.
10,000 years ago (8000 BCE) The Wisconsin Glaciation ends as the continental ice sheets rapidly retreat. World sea levels rise correspondingly swiftly, and in some cases may have inspired the many flood myths of future cultures. At the same time the world climate warms, with many forested regions giving way to scrub or grasslands. These various environmental pressures contribute to a mass extinction of many large terrestrial forms of life. The earliest known agricultural societies begin to appear. They develop independently of the Lost Civilization's remains, and instead are societies taking advantage of a climate more geared towards stable crop husbandry.