4) Modern Man

-150K Cro-magnon man – Home Sapiens Sapiens – evolves from Homo Sapiens Neandrathalis via some Lllfari cross breeding.

-134K; The purebred Lllfari become extinct, leaving the Earth to Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Without technical amplifiers and artificial concentrations of Type II Transuranics the higher-order Lllfari psionic sciences are lost with them.

-128K; The warmest temperatures in several hundred thousand years lead to rising sea levels.

-112K; The Orb of the Archmage – an artifact left by Belerion – is discovered by a minor shaman somewhere in Africa. He, and his successors, will spend millennia unraveling it’s mysteries.

-109K; The Walker, A.K.A. Ruscumag Fireborn becomes the first Archmage of Earth.

-104K; Homo Sapiens Sapiens first civilization-the “Dreamtime” culture – is founded in Africa, in what is now the Sahara Desert. Based on low-level telepathy and magic, it’s peaceful, happy, and totally non-technical. Racial memories of the period will inspire myths and legends of “noble savages”, and of a “golden age”, for eons to come.

-98K; The “Dreamtime” civilization is destroyed by accidental psychic contact with the Elder Ones. The Firstborn Arat-Tiamat intervenes – sealing off the contact nexus, and purging the severely infected area. Much of the fertile sahara plain is reduced to desert. Thanks to the Dreamtime’s telepathic links, the trauma is transmitted worldwide, and is thus burned into the racial mind; a lingering fear of telepathy persists even today. Remnants of the Dreamtime culture survive in Australia – but elsewhere the collapse is near total. Afflicted with paranoia and a crippling fear of strangers, humanity will not progress past existence as small, wandering, tribes for tens of thousands of years to come.

-97K; The mad Ru’Kahl Death Cult unleashes a horrific magical plague against the other surviving tribes of the Americas and then turn against each other. Humans become extinct in the Americas.

-40K; Gradually falling temperatures signal the end of the interglacial epoch and the advance of the glaciers once again.

-48K; The Kragga begin expanding into space and soon encounter several primitive races. Absorbing these, they become the “Hsann Mackari Interstellar Federation”. This is reduced to “The Federation” within 30 years.

-45K; The Otal are created by the Federation.

-32K The Federation scoutship Sharkansor plants a research team on earth. The vessel never returns to pick them up – turning the team’s eighteen Otal into involuntary colonists. Fortunately for them, as an artificial species, a small gene pool suffices.

-30K; The glaciers reach their maximum advance for this glacial epoch, and the sea levels reach their lowest point in several hundred thousand years.

-27K; A limited, dispersed, civilization rises on “Atlantis”, a chain of low-lying islands in the S. Pacific, now mostly part of the ocean floor thanks to a little natural subsidence and a lot of water returned to the oceans at the end of the last ice age. In Europe, Azor, “Who Draws the Dark”, leads his followers offworld after defeating the priestly White Necromancer. The spacetime distortion accompanying such a major migration turns the instant of the trip to several millenia – although neither Azor nor his followers realize it.

-24K Earth approaches it’s second (known) entry into the Rho-Field. Warned by Belerion and by their divinatory spells, many tribes and groups embark on the Great Exodus; colonizing the more hospitable “hundred realms” of the nearby pocket dimensions or even attempting to reach other solar systems. Many succeed – but such drastic environmental change, coupled with genetic drift, takes it’s toll; the colonies which survive are usually severely altered. The Arith Vaya near Saturn and Uranus close down their higher functions for the duration.