Prehistory of Great Kirav

According to all known laws of anthropology, there is no way that Great Kirav should ever have been settled. The odds of modern man a) reaching and b) surviving in Great Kirav during the time periods currently deemed reasonable by the scholarly community, much less prospering there to the degree now believed, are beyond astronomical and require a suspension of disbelief too great for most Occidental scientists to even approach the topic. Kiravia, of course, exists anyway, because Kiravians don't care what Menquoi think is impossible.

The distant past of Great Kirav is steeped in mythology and remains obscure. Archæological evidence suggest that the region may have been inhabited by modern man as early as 22,000 years ago, and subsequently beset with multiple waves of migration that have left enduring genetic, archæological, and cultural imprints on the island continent. The bulk of the genetic heritage of Kiravian peoples is attributable to an Ice Age migration from Levantia made possible by lower sea levels and dense floes of, with later contributions from the Ʒ-Q transoceanic migration and the still-unaccounted for progenitors of Haplogroup Ȼ.

Unravelling the truth of Kiravian prehistory and dark history is complicated by Coscivian culture's schizo-sacramentalist conception of reality (which does not clearly distinguish between what Occidental cultures would regard as the symbolic and the real) and its unique approach to time (which is often reflected in non-linear narratives and the confounding expression of temporal processes in spatial or virtual terms). This article will present the best current scientific understandings of Kiravian prehistory, contextualised by Kiravian traditional narratives and the research of dark philologists.

Palaeozoic Era
Much of Great Kirav's plant biodiversity dates from clades attested from the Carboniferous through Permian periods.

Mesozoic Era
The Mesozoic Era of Great Kiravia, defined as an era as encompassing the, and   on the continent of Great Kiravia, lasted from about 252 to 66 million years ago. Often referred to as the "Age of Reptiles", it is characterized by the dominance of reptiles such as the, an abundance of gymnosperms (such as ginkgoales, bennettitales) and ferns, a hot greenhouse climate and the tectonic break-up of Pangaea. The period is defined geologically as beginning with the first appearance of the Conodont Hindeodus parvus and ending with an enriched layer associated with a major meteorite impact in modern-day Daxia and subsequent. It is also sometimes referred to as the "Age of Conifers" in Great Kiravia due to the abundance of fossilized material from coniferous trees.

Great Kiravia is unique in the Mesozoic for being an island continent with only very little outside contact following the Pangaea-Kiravia split at the end of the Triassic period. With basal clades of, , and  already inhabiting Great Kiravia at the time of the split however, these were able to evolve and diversify independently of archosauromorphs elsewhere, resulting in numerous examples of  with otherwise very distantly related genera but also many examples of ,  and notably of Bergmann's rule. Evolution on the continent of Great Kiravia was heavily influenced by its three distinct biomes; a volcanic nearly arctic climate in the far north, a temperate highly arboreal climate in the south and a major riparian border zone in-between the two characterized by rolling plains and river deltas.

Despite a relatively limited number of clades of synapsids, dinosauromorphs and pterosauromorphs occupying Great Kiravia following the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event, the paleobiological diversity of Great Kiravia appears to be only slightly weaker than that of Sarpolevantia in the advent of the Cretaceous, suggesting a rapid and diverse evolutionary process had taken place during the Jurassic to fill all the niches left open by the T-J event. At least one clade of small Kiravian theropods appear to have evolved powered flight independently of their Sarpolevantine counterparts during the late Jurassic period; there is also physical paleontological evidence of feathers in many theropods of various sizes in Great Kiravia, lending further evidence to the theory that feathers are ancestral to reptiles. Like the rest of the world, the Cretaceous period ended when the occured following a major meteor striking central Daxia, causing the mass extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs and most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kilograms (55 pounds).

Cenozoic Era
Rattusfukus

Earliest Homonids
During the late 20th century AD, palæontologists unearthed skeletal remains of present in Great Kirav during the middle Pleistocene, which were eventually concluded to represent two distinct species. The more anatomically archæic of the two, Homo vetus montanus, appear to have been sluggish, shuffling creatures; dull but hardy tundra-dwellers with a robust physique and limited cognitive and linguistic capabilities compared to the more anatomically "modern" H. darudensis. Although direct evidence is lacking, most palæontologists find it probable that both species were more hirsute than modern man, with ample body hair aiding their survival in the glaciated conditions of Pleistocene Kirav.

First Humans - Ice Bridges from Demomap
The present accepted consensus regarding the colonisation of Great Kirav by  maintains that the island continent was first peopled by a founder population of originating from the north-central Levantine mainland who migrated across  in pursuit of prey until eventually reaching pockets of unglaciated land (now likely submerged) along the ancient southern and southwestern shores of Great Kirav. This theory is colloquially known as the "iceberg-hopping thesis" (Coscivian: xistoīoribakursa). This migration is believed to have occurred sometime between 19,500 BC and 18,500 BC, though the lower bound of this window is not definite and the upper bound could be as late as the first abrupt rise in global sea levels around 18,000-17,500 BC.

Dark historians generally identify the homeland of the Ice Age Levantine migrants with the mythological concept of Demomap. Although variously interpretable from the oral traditions of Coscivian and Urom communities as a place, time, or abstract state of being, Kapuśitic and Cuomo-Passaic-speaking peoples present Demomap as the intermediate location of their ancestors between their emergence from the Shadow Realm and their arrival in Kam, interpretable either as the physical world at large or Great Kirav specifically. As such, the hypothesised pre-migration prehistory of the proto-Kiravians is known as the 'Demomappic Period'. The proto-Kiravians of the Demomappic Period are associated with a particular lithic technique (examples of which are portrayed here) with examples known from both Ilánova and finds in Kubagne, Yonderre and [LOCATION], Caergwynn, cited as the strongest archæological evidence of the iceberg-hopping hypothesis. During the Demomappic Period, the proto-Kiravians are currently believed to have interacted economically and reproductively with the Packer Culture of the Vandarch Basin but remained culturally distinct therefrom.

Primitive Period - Cold and also Dark
The era of human habitation of Great Kirav from initial migration to the the commencement of the last glacial retreat around the middle of the 12th millennium BC, a range of roughly seven thousand years, is known as the Primitive Period, and is largely synonymous with the Kiravian Palæolithic. The human population of Great Kirav during this era is presumed to have been extremely sparse. Some studies from the 1980s-90s AD suggested that the Archæo-Cronan and Archæo-Levantine founder populations may have numbered as few as 70 and 100 people respectively. More recent works accept figures higher up in the hundreds or even low thousands as plausible, with the caveat that the vast majority of migrants' genetic lineages became extinct during the Primitive Period and are not ancestral to modern Kiravians. Whatever its size, almost the entirety of this population would have lived on lands that are now submerged, severely limiting what can be gleaned about this earliest phase of Kiravian prehistory from archæological remains. As such, almost nothing is known about this period from modern science, and almost all that is comes from a handful of excavations in Ilánova and South Kirav.

Environmental conditions during the Primitive Period are believed to have been exceedingly harsh. The island continent was almost entirely glaciated during this time, and prehistoric Kiravian populations would have clung to its habitable coastal fringes, eking out a marginal living from hunting, gathering, and fishing.



Convoīon Culture
The next archæological culture to develop out of the Demomappic, appearing by 17,600 BC, was the Convoīon Culture, known from a handful of sites in Ilánova. Convoīon exhibits a much more diversified toolmaking repertoire, utilising a wider range of materials than the stone-prone Demomappic to include, worked animal , and other naturally-occuring substances. The dramatically more sophisticated tool inventories found at so few dig sites suggests a society much more advanced in its economy and comfortable in its surroundings than its Demomappic predecessors, migrating less frequently and availing themselves of more thitherto untapped food sources. The Convoīon Culture appears to have employed more specialized hunting, fishing, and collecting techniques, in contrast to the post-migration Demomappic generalist hunters. It is also the Convoīon culture that left the first unambiguous examples of in Kiravia.

Society I (ca. 12,500 BC - ca. 9600 BC) - We Live in This
Come the Late Ice Age, glacial retreat and gradual warming of the climate allowed Kiravians to break out from their highly constrained High Ice Age mode of production, enabling population growth and the formation of societies beyond the scale of primitive bands.

This is a time of dramatic (but mostly good) change for Kiravians, whose material culture advanced considerably into what is known as the Lower Kiravian Epipalæolithic or the Society I Culture in response to major environmental shifts, beginning with a second abrupt rise in sea levels around 12,475 BC. This rise in sea levels effected the submersal of what were presumably the most heavily populated coastal areas of Kirav, but the glacial retreat responsible for it also opened up more inland areas to and subsequent human habitation.

During the Late Ice Age, the that had previously covered most of the continent contracted to the island continent's central basin, flanked by the Aterandic, Ximantav, and West Highlands ranges.

The people of the Society I culture formed somewhat larger social groups than their predecessors, and many communities lived as (at least seasonally-)sedentary food collectors, using markedly more sophisticated social organisation and lithic tools to extract sustenance from a wide variety of sources. Evidence of semi-permanent settlements and specialised tools disappears around the time of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, suggesting that the Society I culture collapsed under pressure from major environmental changes, reverting to a smaller-scale hunter-gatherer lifestyle for several centuries.

[The Glacier and its lasting psychic effects]

Pleistocene-Holocene Collapse
The Kiravian Epipalæolithic or Gameritic Upheaval was a time of dramatic (and mostly bad) change for Kiravians.

Natural cataclysms and their secondary environmental effects, namely disease and the disruption of essential food sources, caused the collapse of Society I and the abandonment of its characteristic permanent settlements. Most dark historians are of the opinion that the psychological and cultural impact of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition was incredibly traumatic, leaving a lasting impact on the Kiravian worldview.



Society II (ca. 9300 BC - ca. 8000 BC)
A second period of technological progress began during the late 9th millennium BC, giving rise to the Society II culture, another pre-agricultural culture of sedentary food collectors. Society II communities were larger and more permanently settled than those of Society I, exhibiter better adaptations for survival in more inland areas, and may have practised primitive forms of horticulture at later stages. Society II appears to have collapsed abruptly around 8300 BC, for reasons still unknown. The period during which Society II emerged is known as the First Kiravian Mesolithic.

Some dark historians believe that the first incarnation of the Coscivian Empire, a tribal confederation referred to in modern texts as the Lawful Commonwealth, arose during the latter half of Society II. Others believe it arose during Society I, whereas Occidental scholars and Coscivians of a more scientific bent hold that the Lawful Commonwealth (if historical at all) could not have formed before the Neolithic consolidation of simple farming societies.

Using their arcane ability to divine fully-fledged visions of lost civilisations from examination of pottery shards, archæologists have theorised that Society II settlements exhibited a remarkably high degree of social stratification for a pre-agricultural society, perhaps even practising.

Akai Collapse (ca. 8000 BC)
See also: Kiravo-Akhai Origins Conspiracy Theory

The Akai Collapse, by convention, marks the beginning of the end of Deep Prehistory and the beginning of the beginning of Near Prehistory. This distinction is mainly of significance to dark philologists who place certain foundational events in Coscivian history, such as the formation of the Lawful Commonwealth at a much greater time depth than Occidental archæology permits, toward contemporaneity with Society I and/or Society II. For archæologists, it marks the boundary between two superiodisations of the Kiravian Mesolithic: the comparatively rapid growth and development period of Society II prior to the Akai Collapse, and the slower, more gradual period of material redevelopment thereafter, which is dubbed the Second Kiravian Mesolithic and lasts until the inception of true agriculture.

Near Prehistory (ca. 7000 BC - 3200 BC)
[Things get more real from here on.]

Neolithic
As the massive ice sheets that had covered the interior and northern coast of the island continent diminished and finally disappeared, prehistoric Kiravian tribes fanned out across the full breadth of Great Kiravia and gradually began to embrace sedentism a third time. This time, however, the exit from hunting and gathering would be made permanent by the discovery of agriculture in the form of the nutritious and delicious potato. The starchy tuber was first cultivated on the lower slopes of the south-western highlands between 7000 and 6000 BC. A separate farming culture centred on buckwheat cultivation and beekeeping emerged on the eastern coastal plain toward the end of that timespan.

At the dawn of agriculture, certain patterns of social organisation had already settled into prevailing norms across the island continent. Tribes, in the strict sense of the word, had replaced lower-level band societies in all but the most marginal and inhospitable locales. Kiravian tribes were structured according to s, most of which were already strictly and  as all Coscivian peoples are today, though a minority (now conserved only in a few urom tribes) were matrilineal and/or matrilocal. At this stage it is presumed that all or most tribes permitted, though the extent to which it may have been preferred (as in later stages of both Coscivian and urom societies) is not yet known. Due to the segmentary lineage reckoning of kinship, the demographic size of a typical Kiravian tribe during the early agricultural age is somewhat imprecise, but it can be estimated that the largest tribal orders of stable political (that is, military) significance claimed common descent no further back than five generations (to a single great-great-great-great-grandfather) and probably included between 1,000 and 3,000 people. However, the everyday lives of early agrarian Kiravians would have been lived largely within the confines of autonomous village communities within a larger tribe, with such villages comprising between 50 and 400 people. By this point, prehistoric Kiravians were actively cultivating potato and crisp-potato, and keeping swine, yet there is little evidence of major forest clearance for agriculture. suggests mostly small-scale clearance to enlarge natural clearings in the primæval Kiravian forests. The short-term nature of the settlements suggested by a paucity of archæological remains of permanent structures comports with the lack of evidence for large-scale clearance, suggesting that during this period of Kiravian prehistory there were no communities large enough to require a large area of cleared cropland to satisfy their subsistence needs. It has been argued that the overall lack of houses points to a quite mobile society dominated by. Later, Prehistoric Kiravians developed of agriculture, using  in controlled burns to fertilise the mediocre soil covering most of the continent with the rich nutrients accumulated in its thick forest cover. As such, villages would periodically migrate within a localised ambit in search of virgin land as the cinder-enriched soils of one area were depleted. Stress on the land and the contraction of these ambits due to growing populations and the generational fission of villages is believed to have contributed to the period of heightened violence known as the Age of Blood.

Ʒ-Q Invasion
The Y-DNA haplogroups Ʒ and Q appear in the Kiravian gene pool around 7000 BC. Modern frequency distribution of these haplogroups correlates with two main variables: Proximity of subjects' ancestral home to the West Coast, and belonging to a traditionally Itaho-Atrassic-speaking ethnic group (such as Qihuxians, Ūtrans, West Coast Marine Coscivians). As such, the Ʒ-Q influx is most commonly attributed to a trans-oceanic migration from Crona or alternatively Vallos-Polynesia (a minority theory) as part of the wide-reaching dispersal of chiefly Audonian-origin peoples through the aforementioned regions beginning circa 8000 BC. Archæological and dark philological evidence points to this migration accelerating into a violent invasion of Kiravia by more advanced wandering Audonians that spread up and down the West Coast and inland therefrom until running up against early adoptors of potato-based agriculture, who were a closer match to the invaders militarily and enjoyed the advantage of highland geography in defending their homes.

Age of Blood
Early agricultural Kiravians became embroiled in a state of endemic warfare, not unlike that which has been documented among other relatively high-density simple farming societies elsewhere. Oral literary sources speak little about the causes of this phenomenon, but comparative studies of tribal societies with high rates of endemic warfare at similar stages of development and with economies similar in scale and mode of production to those which have been reconstructed for early agricultural Kiravia suggest that swine raids and swine theft were major drivers of conflict, was well as the abduction of women and the imperative to exact revenge for such transgressions.

Lawful Commonwealth
The geographic location of the nucleus of the Lawful Commonwealth is unknown and controversial. Virtually every macro-region of Great Kirav, along with Koskenkorva, has laid claim to the distinction.

Using the traditional narratives as a source, it would appear that the key military advantage ensuring the security of the Lawful Commonwealth was its primitive form of : Lawful tribes were safe from attack than Lawless tribes because they could rely upon neighbouring Lawful tribes for assistance in a simple threat environment wherein numerical superiority was sufficient to guarantee victory. The deterrent effect of collective security allowed the Lawful tribes to become more populous as they were spared the extremely high death rates from warfare that afflicted the Lawless tribes, providing additional fighting-age men that galvanised the deterrent effect. It follows that the Lawful Commonwealth could only be defeated  by an adversary if a countervailing tribal alliance was able to assemble more fighters, which is what the sources say happened. The Great Law chant includes the narrative of the Lawful Commonwealth's demise as an apologetic for its model of governance, essentially saying that its only flaw was that it worked too well, allowing the Lawful tribes to raid and displace the Lawless tribes further and further until the retreating Lawless tribes formed a grand alliance to counterattack and overwhelm the outer villages of the Commonwealth, after which the inner villages, being unprepared for war, fell swiftly. The Commonwealth was dissolved and Emperor Akˣɛ died a glorious and noble death in battle, but, the Chant says the scattered survivors of the Lawful tribes "carried the Law with them to the three corners of the Land."

Back-Migration to Levantia
The maritime technology introduced to western and southern Kiravia by the Itaho-Atrassic invasion spread around and up the coasts to the eastern seaboard, where it enabled a back-migration of Kiravians to northern Levantia, mainly to what is now western Faneria, Covina, Suderavia, and (controversially) Wintergen. At least some of these back-migrations must post-date the establishment of the Lawful Commonwealth, because they carried the Four Laws and Four Precepts and the rudiments of the metaëthnic Coscivian identity with them, beginning the history of the Mainland Coscivians. Back-migration is estimated to have begun around 6750 BC and continued to trickle on thereafter, transferring important agricultural breakthroughs such as potato and buckwheat cultivation to the mainland, as well as advanced apicultural techniques adapted to Boreal bee species. Many of the back-migrants may have left to flee the constant violence of the Age of Blood. With the arrival of the technologically sophisticated Fenni in the Vandarch 6000-5000 BC, regular trade was established between Great Kirav and the Mainland, and would later accelerate as the Fenni became well-established in the region and as the Age of Blood wound down in Great Kirav.

High Neolithic
The Age of Blood drew down as rates of endemic violence declined. Orthodox historians attribute this to the that had proven advantageous to the Lawful Commonwealth outward beyond its direct sphere of influence, even continuing after its demise, as the Great Law Chant states (see above), enabling the formation of other higher-order proto-states and the pacification of larger pockets of territory, as well as the gradual abandonment of ultraviolent practices by tribes outside of these proto-states. More critical historians question whether the Lawful Commonwealth was truly the originator of the Four Rites and Four Precepts, or merely one of many adoptor societies of constructive innovations that arose elsewhere. What is certain is that multiple [prefix]lithic polities would claim the legacy of the Lawful Commonwealth, adopting its foundational narratives to legitimise their own rule and absorbing its laws as part of their own culture and custom.

The end of the Age of Blood allowed for the formation of more permanent settlements and larger-scale (though still thoroughly tribal) social organisation. Permanent settlements featuring stone structures reappeared in large numbers for the first time since Society II.

Megalithic Societies
Sedentarism and proto-urbanisation allowed for burial practices and the understanding and practice of religion to become more developed. Earlier Kiravian burials were often marked with small stone cairns, but more permanent and sophisticated burial monuments than this would appear only in the latter half of the Kiravian neolithic in the form of standing stones and steles - some of these steles show traces of moon runes and other examples of. Monumental works would truly come into their own with the emergence of the cross-Kilikas megalithic culture, during which time more sophisticated societies - hypothesised to chiefly be chiefdoms in terms of political development rather than mere tribes or true states - were able to organise the labour- and time-intensive construction of massive stone monuments in service to their increasingly complex economic and religious needs. These centres of megalithic construction appeared in relatively qucik succession in the Baylands and adjacent portions of the South, and pockets further up the eastern and western seaboards, from which their approach to social organisation and construction would spread over successive centuries, leaving behind a widely distributed body of s, s, s, s, , and statues, as well as the remains of settlements.

Megalithic farming societies continued to depend upon potato and other root vegetables, buckwheat, honey, and swine (Nearctic boar) for the agricultural foundation of their diets, engaging also in extensive fishing, hunting, and foraging activities. True cereal crops would not be introduced from Levantia until much later, though Megalithic Kiravians did gather varieties of "wildrye" () as a minor contribution to their food supply and used it as feed for boars and tinav.

Rock-Emperors
The figure of the Emperor remained important in prehistoric Kiravian cultures, diffusing beyond the tribal and geographic bounds of the former Commonwealth. During the more mature Megalithic, the early Coscivians built giant stone sculptures representing the eternal Emperor as a religious figure from whom chieftains derived legitimacy and to whom they appealed for favour. The mythologies of most Coscivian groups today feature descent from one or more of the original Emperors, and it is believed that such myths date back to this period in the past when Emperor-worship became combined with preëxisting traditions of ancestor worship. Through this synthesis and the consummate sacralisation of the Emperor, the Four Laws and Four Precepts were cemented as religious laws and precepts (if they had not already been such for centuries), and a proper Coscivian macro-ethnic identity took shape as the legacy and laws of the Lawful Commonwealth became the patrimony of the Ancestors, embodied in the Emperor as the greatest among the Ancestors.

Back-migration to Levantia continued during this process, carrying this nascent Coscivian identity to the Kiravian-descended communities of continental Levantia.

Other societies
The ancestors of the Demarești and the Adrates also developed parallel civilisations during this time.

A separate megalithic society, the Adratic, emerged around the same time as the proto-Coscivian megalith builders. The old Adratic tongue constituted an independent branch of the Transkiravian family, and there is an abundance of archæological evidence demonstrating that they were proto-Sarostivist devotees of the Divine Moon, like most other Kiravian peoples of this time, including the Megalithic Coscivians. Unlike the Coscivians, however, the Adrates did not observe the Rites and Precepts and had not restructured their ancestor worship around the Emperor. It is known from later Classical Adratic writings that the Adrates believed that they were creations of the Divine Moon and had previously lived on the Moon, and descended directly from the Moon to Kam (either Earth or specifically Great Kirav).

Demarest did not construct megalithic edifices, preferring instead to employ in their construction efforts, but did achieve a comparable level of social complexity and stratification to the Megalithic Coscivians and the Adrates.

Transition to Ancient History
The transition to from prehistory to ancient history is marked by the emergence of the First Dynasties and their consolidation of the first true states, and culminates with the conquest of the Adratic civilisation by Emperor Xoagus I, beginning the First Empire. Methodological and academic justifications for this convention include the nature of predynastic proto-writing and writing: Although writing was known to the Coscivian and Celtic druids during the Megalithic, its use was ritual and monumental, and no long-form written texts suitable for use as historical rather than archæological source material.