Remagica Lore @clarisetg - Tumblr Blog

Feb 16, 2025

@lexiapalace thanks for your interest!

you like the Stone Punk concept and want more details, hunh? dope, but i gotta warn you, when i said i had 5 heavily researched universes, i meant HEAVILY researched and this is about to be quite a long read

okay let's see, my Stone Punk universe is pre-historical fiction, and is basically "what if I filled in the blanks in our knowledge of early humanity with interpretations of various mythical histories, so as to make our actual, real pre-history look like a tolkienesque fantasy?"

if anyone else has found this post and wants to keep reading I hope you find it interesting! it's going to be a lot of early human development stuff

I call it stone punk because of the way steam punk sort of goes "as long as you can do it with steam, any technology is part of the vibe, like, you can have laser guns as long as you are using steam and victorian era materials and designs"

In a similar way, i say anything is possible as long as the people were doing it with the tools and materials of the time, not only stone (which stays around) but also things like rope and twine and mud and wood and leather (which leaves much less evidence after tens of thousands of years). So like, in the same way Steam Punk does modern stuff with victorian tech, I envision Stone Punk as the same thing with stone age tech, a sort of Flinstones situation. Plus it's a nice callback to the original punk of Rock.

Anyway

Start with: early humans existed about 1 million years ago. In my opinion.

okay, so about 5 million years ago there were little humanoid beings that were like, a very developed ape, bigger brain, more bipedal, maybe using some rocks as hammers or whatever, not quite human.

By about 2 million years ago there was Homo Erectus, who had the full human layout, fully upright, brain size in a range that overlaps modern brain size ranges, basically a whole human being in a physical sense.

Now as you move from 2 million to 1 million years ago and closer, their brains increase a bit, and they start to spread all over Africa and into Eurasia. As they do, they get a little more modern and a little more diverse, and various scientists have convinced large portions of the scientific community to take what we used to consider to all be Homo Erectus, and split them into such delineations as Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Ergaster, Peking Man, Homo Turkana, and many more.

Based on the place and time period the fossil is from, and small differences in skeletal structure, they say these are all separate species from Homo Erectus. Which sure, probably valid, but could be changed to just Early Erectus and Late Erectus at some point, who knows, it's not an easy morphology question and has a pretty small sample of specimens to compare, almost none of which are even close to complete skeletons, so it's all a bit of a grey area.

In any case, by about 1 million years ago, whatever versions of Homo Erectus existed were spreading from Africa to Europe, Russia, China, all over. And they had stone tools and control of fire, and they had brains our same size, with a developed Broca's area and Wernicke's area (which are the parts of the brain that deal with articulating ideas as spoken language). These brain areas that deal with speech are evident in Homo Erectus because brains leave, like, a sort of shape imprint on the inside of the skull.

And as far as i'm concerned, if an ancestor of modern humans has spoken language, tools, and fire?

okay so we have about a million years of human species we can look at.

by about 500k years ago, we really start to have some very human but still diverse species of humanity like Neanderthal and Denisovan, Peking Man, Solo Man (Ngandong) and so on.

These are human species, our sister species. They have brains our size, they are making tools and possibly clothes, they control fire, they are likely doing art and making music, these are people.

okay some of this is my own inference. let me explain

For example, Neanderthals evolved by 500k years ago. We have a flute that was made by Neanderthals about 60k years ago.

Personally, i go ahead and assume that if Neanderthals were making musical instruments 60k years ago they were probably making some kind of music from their very beginnings.

We don't have any physical evidence of music hundreds of thousands of years ago, but the same species of people who were making flutes 60k years ago were around 400k years ago, and i would bet everything they were probably trying to make music back then too.

Right? Same with things like clothing, you find a needle from 50k years ago you can bet somebody didn't just think up clothing that very year -- people have been trying to figure out the best way to do clothes for a long long time by the time crafted needles are common enough for some to still be around 50k years later. Like, you are probably doing some kind of cloak and other things for quite a while before you get determined enough to invent a needle in the first place, and there's no way the very first needles invented are the same ones we found.

So that's the kind of liberty i take with my setting. If somebody with spoken language, fire, and finely crafted tools was collecting different colored pigments in separate abalone shells 100k years ago, i'm wiling to say that same species of human was probably trying to do art the whole time they've existed

i do a similar thing with animals. Because when you find a fossil, odds are it's not the first or last of it's kind. For example, Elasmotherium, the Siberian Unicorn, a rhinoceros the size of a modern elephant, was given the dates of about 2.5 million years ago to about 200k years ago. Because we had an elasmotherium fossil from 200 kya but we had no fossil evidence of them after that.

Now, if they all died out 200 kya, then there's a very good chance that modern humans never saw them. But then! we found a fossil from about 50 kya, and then some elasmotherium fossils from about 37 kya, And that changes all kinds of things - for example it means they probably went extinct around the same time as the Neanderthal and the rest of the ice-age mega-fauna, possibly because of us.

So if I see a perfect species to be a troll or a unicorn or a dragon, but the fossil record doesn't show them in that time period, i'm okay with moving them to either side of the fossil record by a few hundred thousand years, because there are plenty of instances where that's how the actual discovery of information has played out.

Anyway, sometime between 200 and 300 kya we finally step on the scene, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Tho in the way of these things my guess is that those dates get pushed back to between 300 and 400 kya by some new discovery before long

But whatever, if you look at the last couple hundred thousand years, you've really got a lot of opportunity for fantasy race match ups. Let's look at Neanderthal as Dwarves.

Now first of all, the human mythos that has the dwarves that most of us think of in a fantasy setting, those specific dwarves are loosely based on stories that are based on stories that were based on legends from Scandinavia, mostly. And in the very earliest of these scandinavian legends, it is unclear what size the dwarves are -- they are described as both pretty small, and also very large

But compared to us, Neanderthal were both short and huge. This is roughly the height difference between an average Neanderthal man and an average Sapiens man from 200k years ago

but! neanderthal were THICC. look at these skulls

look at that! The eyes are bigger, the jaw is both bigger and thicker, the teeth are bigger, the brain is bigger, the nose is bigger everything about this skull says it was LORGE. Neanderthal were much larger than Sapiens, they were just shorter.

hold on, it's easier to see if you remove the shadows and background

Their whole skeleton is like that compared to ours. That's a BIGGER creature on the right. Just shorter.

This would explain the early dwarf legends that go back and forth between calling them smaller than people and larger than people.

Now. Neanderthal lived in caves. They made large exceptionally well crafted axes (tho stone not metal). They had leather working tools and they hunted mammoth, so they could well have been dressed in protective leather, thick enough to act like armor (elephant skin is a full inch thick, and mammoth hide was thicker). Neanderthal were short, and bearded, and sometimes had red hair.

Short, strong, bearded, master crafters known for large axes, some of the best armor of the time, lived in holes in the ground... If you want to find fantasy Dwarves in our real past, look no further.

Other match ups are harder, because evidence is slim. Denisovans for example were only discovered in 2010, and the only two Denisovan bones we know of are a pinkie finger bone (smallest bone, from the tip of the finger) and an incomplete jaw bone with a couple teeth in it. That's it, the only two Denisovan bones that we know exist (we suspect a few bones we previously classified as Neanderthal and other hominins are actually Denisovan bones but we aren't sure).

The miraculous thing is we were able to sequence the DNA from the pinkie bone. So we do have a whole DNA sequence from a single Denisovan. That's how we know we interbred with them as well as the Neanderthal.

Which shows just how much there is we don't know. Like, These were a whole sister-species of people, contemporary to both us and Neanderthal, so relevant to our existence that we interbred with them, and we had ZERO idea they existed until 2010, and our current total physical evidence of them existing at all is two small bones, and some archaic DNA.

That's so wild to me.

Anyway, it seems likely Denisovans were larger than the Neanderthal, and there is no reason to think they couldn't have been taller too, so i'm kind of leaning toward a sort of mountain giant vibe. Like I basically think they are to modern humans what mammoths are to modern elephants. Bigger with a lot more hair, a kind of woolly giant

Like, if they are very large of bone and build, even a foot taller than an average person is going to feel like a lot. Which i guess brings me to giants.

Listen, even without the super thickness of their bone and muscle, it doesn't take much height to be described as a race of giants when you tell the story of seeing them. People think of fantasy "giants" as like 20 feet tall or whatever but i promise you if you even make them 7 feet tall on average, that's a race of giants to any human of the time

like, here's a guy (Olivier Richters) who's 7 feet 2 inches tall

Now imagine his bones are all twice as thick.

so it's not going to take much height to have people coming back home talking about the giant people they met, like no, you don't understand, they were SO big, it was like standing next to a mountain of bone and muscle.

In fact, six feet tall is not an unusual size for a modern man, and this man at seven foot two is literally nicknamed The Dutch Giant, and Andre the Giant was seven foot four... like, we literally call people of this size "giants" to this day

Kevin Hart is 5'5", which is Neanderthal height, so here's Kevin Hart next to Lebron James who is not even seven feet tall, he is 6'9" which is a totally believable height for a sister-species of large people

okay, and then right in between them but waaaaay more slender than Neanderthal or Denisovan, would be us, homo sapiens sapiens

I lowkey think we must have been the elves, actually. Pointy ears weren't associated with elves until 19th century victorian literature. The key components of the Alfar of supposed Norse mythos (but as recorded by anglo-germanic peoples in the ninth century i believe) was they were beautiful or graceful, had a lot of magic (this is when science and magic were often the same thing) and made people sick, which is historically what happens when new groups of humans move into an area already inhabited by humans.

So you've got a not too tall not too short, slender and graceful people who are more reliant on fire and crafting to survive than other races in the northlands, who bring mysterious knowledge and illnesses with them wherever they go. I think maybe those elves were Sapiens.

If the Denisovans and Neanderthal had their own stories and legends (and they had fire and spoken language, so i assume they were sitting around the fire telling stories, like, surely you don't have both hanging around a fire and spoken language without campfire story-telling happening - and personally, i think memorizing stories and chants that contained information to be passed across the generations was probably one of the major reasons a full language developed in the first place, and i think these learning stories and information chants and teaching songs were such a huge human innovation that i believe it could basically be considered the first internet. One of the very oldest human technologies from the time of Erectus.)

ANYway, if they had their own stories, and homo sapiens sapiens invaded their lands, there is a thing that happens where the stories of the region get taken and told by the invaders as their own. We see it over and over in history, even as recent as in the US, folklore about such figures as Johnny Appleseed were actually based on the folklore of the indigenous people, whose own stories were often adapted from the stories of their neighbors, be it through alliance or conquest.

My point is, homo sapiens sapiens may have wound up telling stories about "elves" and "people" when in the original culture the "elves" were the Sapiens, and the "people" were, for example, Denisovan.

speaking of Denisovans and Neanderthal, they took a smart computer program, and they showed it a bunch of people's DNA and said this is the pattern you should recognize as modern human, and then they said here is a neanderthal's DNA and the computer said "i see some neanderthal DNA is in the human DNA" and they showed it Denisovan DNA and the computer program said "i see some denisovan DNA in the human DNA"

But Then! the programmers said "because you have more than one ancient genome to compare with each other, can you recognize instances of other ancient human DNA interbreeding?

and the computer program said "yes i see DNA from several interbreeding events with multiple unknown archaic human species and also Homo Heidelbergensis (which if you remember up until relatively recently was considered to be the same as Homo Erectus)

So we've got a couple freebies to match up to the fantasy races. All we know is we have little pieces of DNA from like three total unknown human species, at least one of which was probably from north africa and might well have been the origins of the "dark elves" of scandinavian mythology

I've landed on a sort of "first people" or "elder race" for homo erectus, both more primitive and more capable (more able to survive wilderness, and in some ways smarter) than the other human species, and somewhat rare to find.

a note about goblins. There are whole cities on modern earth that are absolutely TORMENTED by baboons or macaques - they form literal gangs and rove the streets stealing everything they want and attacking anyone who gets in their way. Imagine the hellish reality of a species halfway between ape and human, not smart enough to make many of their own tools, but for sure smart enough to steal and use anything you make, retaining the long fangs most apes have, as strong and vicious as a chimpanzee but able to run upright and much more clever, perhaps with a rudimentary language...

So whether you want goblins or giants or elves or dragons or whatever, if you relax the dates a little there are plenty of very real possibilities to use.

Next we'll look at Magic

First of all, magic is essentially just science we haven't been able to explain yet. Right?

So for example, we know this valley is cursed, you can walk through it during the day and probably survive, but go into that valley at night and we'll find you dead with no marks, just like the unmarked dead animals we find, and nothing ever eats the dead bodies in the valley, but sometimes dead scavengers will be seen next to a body like they wanted to eat it but died before they could. Cursed.

Also real. This valley exists. It happens to be above a subterranean pocket of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is colorless, odorless, and heavier than air, so it lays in a blanket along the ground. During the day. At night the temperature change allows the carbon monoxide to drift upward a few feet. The deeper into the valley you go, the more pooled carbon monoxide there is, because heavier-than-air gas acts a lot like water.

So you can literally stand on the hillside under a full moon and watch a person walk into the valley, stop in confusion, start gasping weirdly and then fall down dead. If you don't have the ability to detect carbon monoxide, "cursed" or "haunted" is actually about as accurate as you can get.

Let's look at a wooden sword or wooden arrow/spear head. Several cultures are known to have used wooden swords and spear tips (wooden swords are all about the weight - if it's heavy enough you can chop someone's arm off with it even if it's only kind of sharp) for example this Ikul from the Kuba tribe

or this wooden sword from probably the Baoule

spear- and arrow-heads have been made from all available material throughout time, from shell and bone and antler to stone and sharks teeth and, yes, wood.

So lets say you find the grave of someone who died a couple thousand years before, buried with a wooden sword and some wooden spear heads. They are in a bog or near a volcano, which can seem like haunted landscapes, but importantly this increases the chance of changing the wood into something magic: wood that doesn't burn in the fire and is hard as stone.

I'm talking about petrified wood, of course. The organic wood has been used as a scaffolding for the organic material to be replaced by a mineral composition, usually silica and any heavy metals available in the area. And if the tree was high in an organic compound called lignin, which is a commonly found in many trees, then one of the heavy metals most likely involved in petrifying the wood and replacing the organic matter is... uranium. Because being buried in ground rich with volcanic ash is one of the situations that creates petrified wood, and uranium is more commonly found in and around volcanoes, this is a thing.

So you might find a magic piece of wood that was very cursed indeed. Uranium itself does not glow, but uranium in glass does glow a bit (which is where the popular concept of radioactive things glowing comes from) and silica (the most common mineral in petrified wood) is basically just naturally occurring glass, often formed as quartz or other crystal but silica is literally also what we use to make industrial glass too. And petrified wood is full of it.

if you look close at this chunk of petrified wood, you can see it is sprinkled with quartz almost like it's been salted

the whole thing is infused with silica crystals, which is why you can polish petrified wood like a crystal too

and since uranium in glass is what made these famous dishes glow

... if you found a strange wooden weapon buried in volcanic ash for a few thousand years, then you miiiight wind up with a magic weapon that is somehow very clearly wood but also very clearly stone, super hard (7 on the MOHS) that causes an early death to any who carry it daily in their life, and which in the darkest dark, glows a faint and ghostly green

And lastly, along with my view of magic being science is my firm personal belief that the first magic/science was cooking.

Many chemical processes are evident in early cooking, from processing poisonous cassava roots into a staple food source, to fermentation of alcohol, to chemical transformations of sugars and proteins. Like, what happens if i stir an egg into this? And then heat it up a bunch? Things happen, that's what. You ever try to dial in a cookie recipe? Where you do the same exact recipe over and over changing only one small variable each time? and the cookies turn out very different depending on which thing you change? As far as i'm concerned as soon as we started using fire to cook, we started using the scientific method to be able to replicate delicious experimental outcomes

Not only that, but many non-food technical advances happened by mixing things over a fire. For example, some tools were stone blades affixed to wooden handles using a sort of tar-putty glue ... made by mixing things into tree sap over a fire. If i recall, modern humans have still not been able to recreate it exactly as the recipe is long lost.

Combine this with the fact that even monkeys and weasels are known to use medicinal plants, and preparing medicinal plants has always seemed to use the same tools as cooking plants? Clearly (as far as i'm concerned) cooking is the magic that became science quite early.

Lastly, back in the day, anything wondrous or amazing could be considered magic. Like, oh? you can tell there's going to be the worst winter in ten years because of the star patterns? You made friends with a bear? You created a drink that makes you feel like you're a whole different person? Magic, magic, and more magic.

The reason I like to say a "tolkienesque" fantasy for this universe, is not only for the middle earth vibes, but because in LOTR the magic is not the more common high fantasy super magic with a wizard's school in every city -- no, it is special ancient knowledge and a few secret skills and one or two inexplicable abilities. It's the kind of thing that is just common enough to be acknowledged or known of, but most people only come into contact with it extremely rarely, if at all. It's definitely not a setting where somebody is casting cantrips on a street corner for money.

Speaking of street corners

Now we look at societies

So my supposition is there were empires or kingdoms and various advancements like agriculture and mud bricks or whatever long before there is any evidence of that. But i think possible, because maybe the ocean ate all the evidence. Look at this

the sort of salmon-y colored areas are the continental shelves, and during ice ages, at the times the glaciers are at their maximum, a huge amount of these areas are above sea level. We have recently realized how important these lands may have been, and some of those areas have been named, areas like Sundaland, in between China and Australia, which are islands now but would have been a mountain-bordered "savanna corridor" exposed like this

or Doggerland between England and Europe

We KNOW humans love to live near the ocean. I believe these low lying, sea-bordering grasslands all around the world are where homo sapiens sapiens truly comes from.

And just as coastal cities and port cities tend to be the biggest most popular cities, almost all of the earliest city-states we do know of favored deltas, where large rivers meet the sea. I bet there were earlier civilizations on river deltas where some of those same rivers met the sea during the time the continental shelves were open, down on the coastal plains. But tens of thousands of years of mineralized salt water tides scrubbing away at the land does a lot more erasing than sitting in a mountain cave system or being buried in some desert sand does. And it's waaay harder to excavate underwater sites.

what you get with the earliest kingdoms is several city-states in a major river delta, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf, where the Nile meets the Mediterranean, the Indus River, the Ganges, the Yantze, the Huang Ho, these are all sites of some of the earliest city-states and kingdoms ever known

So i hypothesize that during the coldest parts of the ice ages there have been civilizations located on the deltas of these same rivers along the coastal plains of the exposed continental shelves. Which then flooded and were abandoned for a few thousand years at a time during inter-glacial periods.

I believe most of these flooded times humans were prevented from developing and operating large civilizations by the strong presence of our sister-species who would have controlled most of the inland resources and strongholds, forcing flooded Sapiens to survive on the fringes during inter-glacials, until the last climate cycle did a stutter step and broke a functional pattern, which left Sapiens and our sister species in a position where most of us were snuffed out.

Now as far as how these societies were structured, i don't pretend to know, but for the sake of a setting and story, here's what i like to surmise:

The earliest city states had a sort of format where the large ziggurats or stepped pyramids and towers were often the seats of power along with being either terraced garden agriculture or terraced systems of food storage and libraries. Then there was like, a winding main road with a bazaar or street market, and then some housing and zoned quarters, maybe an industry section, a trade and port area, warehouses, cemetery...

So i say, what if the format of mountain connected to port by winding road was a micro-re-creation of a larger earlier system? What if humans in our early inland city-states, were trying to recreate an older system where the Mountain People had star-knowledge of weather patterns and good timber, and the Hill Folk had vegetables and mushrooms and the best stone for tools, and the Plains People had meat and grain and rope (rope is a major tool, at least as important as stone tools, but it often gets missed in favor of more long lasting tool remains) and the River Folk traveled down the river from the mountains in summer, and caravanned back up in the winter, connecting all the human species and their resources. And when the violent take over subsided and the civilized development picked back up, a micro version of that system was the natural choice to attempt.

And of course if these early cities were on the coast, it would have been relatively easy to travel between them on any kind of raft up and down the coast... and even moving overland from major city to major city would have had known routes : follow this river up to the mountain origin point. Where you will meet the Mountain People. They can point you in the direction of the next major river leading down the other side of the mountain range, and that's how you can get from the Delta Kingdom on the coast of India to the Delta Kingdom on the north coast of China without traveling the ocean. It may have taken 18 months, not a lot of people would have done it, but it could have been a known route - and maps of this global network it might look like, idk, a sacred tree, or a nest of snakes. We might have even seen these maps and not know it, because the landscape is different now, and rivers change their courses.

So that's the basic premise and setting. And then i have a sort of plot hook that consists of "Travel around through encounters with all the different major Peoples, the Hill Dwarves and Mountain Giants of the northern lands, the Wood Elves, River Elves, and the Elves of the Plains; the elusive and elder First People, the Sea People, and the loosely interconnected network of Delta Kingdoms that brought them all together. During these travels, we learn more about the People of Before, because there is some evidence that there were once civilizations where the "current" civilizations are now built. What caused their downfall? Spoiler, it was climate change, and if the travelers look in the right places, they will find evidence that it all happened several times before... and it's about to happen again.

And then possibly the prophecy of world ending calamity could be tied to the Toba supervolcano erruptions in Sundaland. It would have happened twice, right at the beginning of the time i look at, nearly a million years ago, during what for my story would function as the First Age (or maybe the Second Age, if you count the time before there were any people as the First Age)

and then again about 75kya -- but the problem is the first one coincided with warming and flooding, and the second one coincided with cooling and re-opening of the continental shelves, so it's not a consistent type of danger, though in an immediate sense a super-volcano would surely be world changing for the people alive at that time.

Anyway, that's my Stone Punk prehistorical fiction universe.

I could keep going, talking about my theories on early wolf domestication and human/herd animal interactions, and the "caretaker" nomad agriculture i hypothesize about using examples from real cultures.

I could talk about the way if you cook with salt and honey and know how to make cheese and yogurt and how to bake, then the whole "if you eat fey food you're trapped and can never leave" because like, if you find people who can make like, a banana bread with honey, or a custard, or salty garlic bread with butter, how the hell do you go back to eating charred unseasoned food? And my other fey folk suppositions, like changelings between sister-species

I could talk about my theories on the ancient origins of the bear and lion and snake and eagle. How the bear mostly got pushed out, and sometimes the eagle combines with the lion into a winged lion, but ever since the eagle and snake became the rainbow winged serpent that moved off through the east to the Americas, in the earliest true empires we have evidence of the remaining eagle of the north west invaders always being against the snake of the south east peoples.. to the extent that when the US was a rebel colony it was symbolized by a snake, but as soon as the US became the oppressing empire state, the symbol changed to an eagle. I think the origins of that human psyche entrenched animal totem interaction began when the Denisovans were the Bear and other of our sister species were the Eagle, the Lion, and the Serpent, and that some of the weird cave bear skull ritual evidence we've found has it's origins in this.

But ANYWAY. That's my Stone Punk Universe, a WIP of legendary proportions :P and not a single bit of actual character or story to go in it T-T

#ive gotten to the part about the societies #gonna finish it in the morning #this is so fantastic i wanna write a vignette RIGHT NOW #if i dont collapse from it being 2 am rn ill send u whatever i write when i get it written LOL