Rise of the Sapiens - Old world migrations By Ohawhewhe Watch

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My version of Earth isn't just divergent in geography; even the Humans themselves are fundamentally different from our own when it comes to their ethnology and the earliest stages of their history. Additionally, they aren't alone as the sole sentient sophont species in the modern era.



Sentient apes roamed far and wide for millions of years before the Anthropocene, first the Yeti, towering bipedal relatives of orangutans, and then various lineages of the genus Homo, the early humans. However, no single species would spread to cover the earth so rapidly and change it so radically as Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Their rise to dominance over the globe set the stage for the first agriculture and civilizations to emerge near the end of the Pleistocene. While most of that progress would be undone by the cataclysm at the end of the Ice age, its still important to track the development of peoples up to that point, for it is from the fragments of these ancient ancestral peoples that would reform into the modern races of the post-cataclysm world. The cutoff date for this map is 20,000 BCE, which is a few thousand years before the Pleistocene civilizations actually arise, but at this point all the major racial divisions had already been formed, and aside from the colonization of a few islands, Sapiens' territorial ranges would remain the same.



The faded green and white represent the maximum extent of glaciers and coastlines, which oscillated with a series of glaciation events over the latter 100,000 years.



As you can see, a good number of these humans display hair and eye colors that they shouldn't be capable of with the limitations of mammalian anatomy. This discrepancy can be chocked up to the supernatural mechanics present in my world, as sentient species have a much stronger essence (spiritual identity) which inevitably reflects in their appearance. Think of the colors not as a result of molecular composition of their hair and skin, but as the light itself being warped by spiritual energy.



Expect the same kind of map for the new world as well, and more showing how the different races of man develop post-cataclysm. Perhaps not anytime soon though, since this one took so long to make. I'd like to focus on posting less complex pieces that I can produce on a regular basis. I hope you enjoy what I have on the way! Thank you for reading!

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