[MOD] The Dawn of Civilization - from 70,000 BC to the age of Empires

[Rags17]

Will Neandertals be able to advance beyond Mousterian? I think it'd be an interesting what-if situation if they managed to stay around past their historical extinction and develop more.

There are two problems with this.

First, Neanderthals really did not progress beyond the Chatelperronian so even if I wanted to make up new cultures I would have no idea what to call them or what they would look like. Second, all research indicates the Neanderthals really were lacking something that we didn't - they seemed to have no ability to make representational art or think in the abstract. They could make great tools all right and even make some decorative art but by all accounts they had no ability to form religion or think beyond the here and now.

In game the Neanderthals may appear to be doomed but that's not necessarily true. Humans start off hating them like crazy but as time passes this fades to the same sort of malus that all cultures have for foreigners. At the same time it is only Paleolithics that want to drive them to extinction - if you can survive to the Mesolithic then you will be just another culture on the map. Finally, once you get to the Neolithic and become Tribal all of the old restrictions on religion, tech and so on cease to apply, so your Neanderthal/Mousterian/Chatelperronian realm can actually become Tribal, then Nomadic, Feudal or whatever and conquer the map.

One of the main reasons I started this project was to see if I can take my Neanderthal band into the wilderness until the human holocaust had passed and then see if I could make a viable realm in the Bronze Age and beyond. I am looking forward to finishing the late game mechanics and reading about players who managed to do just that !

 

[Keizer Harm]

they had no ability to form religion or think beyond the here and now.

They ritually buried their dead. I agree with your point, but in a later version of this mod a (simple) Neanderthal religion would not be out of place.

 

[Rags17]

They ritually buried their dead. I agree with your point, but in a later version of this mod a (simple) Neanderthal religion would not be out of place.

Consider it on the list !

Now taking input foe the proposed Neanderthal religion - what does it look like, can Humans adopt it, what special features does it have, what makes it truly unique, what other religions are like it/have the closest affinity for it etc ?

 

[Keizer Harm]

Consider it on the list !

Now taking input foe the proposed Neanderthal religion - what does it look like, can Humans adopt it, what special features does it have, what makes it truly unique, what other religions are like it/have the closest affinity for it etc ?

Crap, I spoke too soon; looks like the flower pollen found next to a skeleton (Shanidar 4) is now considered to have been put there by animal activity. But even putting aside the flowers, the evidence for intentional burying is still strong, given that the bones were found quite undisturbed by animals: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131216-la-chapelle-neanderthal-burials-graves/

Other evidence for ritual burial was with Shanidar 2, who was buried beneath a pile of rocks carved pointy, and next to a great fire.

I would propose the following for a Neanderthal religion: a fire ritual.

Several Mousterian sites in France have yielded large numbers of small black blocs. The usual interpretation is that these ‘manganese oxides’ were collected for their colouring properties and used in body decoration, potentially for symbolic expression. Neanderthals habitually used fire and if they needed black material for decoration, soot and charcoal were readily available, whereas obtaining manganese oxides would have incurred considerably higher costs. Compositional analyses lead us to infer that late Neanderthals at Pech-de-l’Azé I were deliberately selecting manganese dioxide. Combustion experiments and thermo-gravimetric measurements demonstrate that manganese dioxide reduces wood’s auto-ignition temperature and substantially increases the rate of char combustion, leading us to conclude that the most beneficial use for manganese dioxide was in fire-making. With archaeological evidence for fire places and the conversion of the manganese dioxide to powder, we argue that Neanderthals at Pech-de-l’Azé I used manganese dioxide in fire-making and produced fire on demand.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep22159

What that would look like? Manganese dioxide is not termite; it won't produce fireworks. But you would be able to make brighter fires with it, that ignite more easily, which may well have had their place in rituals. You could have shamans that read fire, similar to scrying in the Hermetic society.

 

[Olafmikli]

There are two problems with this.

First, Neanderthals really did not progress beyond the Chatelperronian so even if I wanted to make up new cultures I would have no idea what to call them or what they would look like. Second, all research indicates the Neanderthals really were lacking something that we didn't - they seemed to have no ability to make representational art or think in the abstract. They could make great tools all right and even make some decorative art but by all accounts they had no ability to form religion or think beyond the here and now.

In game the Neanderthals may appear to be doomed but that's not necessarily true. Humans start off hating them like crazy but as time passes this fades to the same sort of malus that all cultures have for foreigners. At the same time it is only Paleolithics that want to drive them to extinction - if you can survive to the Mesolithic then you will be just another culture on the map. Finally, once you get to the Neolithic and become Tribal all of the old restrictions on religion, tech and so on cease to apply, so your Neanderthal/Mousterian/Chatelperronian realm can actually become Tribal, then Nomadic, Feudal or whatever and conquer the map.

One of the main reasons I started this project was to see if I can take my Neanderthal band into the wilderness until the human holocaust had passed and then see if I could make a viable realm in the Bronze Age and beyond. I am looking forward to finishing the late game mechanics and reading about players who managed to do just that !

Oh. I was worried they'd be unable to build buildings forever.

 

[erisolsprite]

I've played some of this (up to 50000 years BP at the moment) and I'm really enjoying it, it's a very interesting concept that's looking great so far and I'm excited to see what comes next!

 

[bookem_danno]

Hello!

This is my first post on the official Pdox forums but I'm pretty active on the CK2 subreddit. I found this mod there yesterday and I've been running an observer campaign for about 530 years of in-game time. Events seem to have mostly come to a standstill as no new cultures or religions have emerged in about 100 years or so, so I thought I'd share the "end result." I'm playing with defensive pacts and shattered retreat off for realism, and I don't own any DLCs more recent than Charlemagne (sorry - I'm cheap).

Overall political map.

True to life, most groups haven't been able to occupy more than a few counties at a time. A few duchies exist in the Middle East. At one point a Mousterian somehow managed to form the Duchy of Isfahan, but it fell apart within a few generations.

Overall cultural map.

Epigravettian is a giant, spanning most of Eurasia up to the Rhine and including most of Great Britain and Ireland. Gravettian preceded it in an eastward migration across the steppes towards Mongolia. Epigravettian basically ate up everywhere Gravettian used to be, and is now challenging Ordosian for dominance of Central Asia. Epigravettian pockets have also sprung up throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Zarzian is a rising star. The first Zarzian chracter popped up as a vassal to the previously mentioned Mousterian Duchy of Isfahan. Once it gained independence, it began to blob throughout the Middle East and could be a contender against Epigravettian. There are a couple other little interesting holdover cultures that I'll show in detail later.

Overall religion map.

Suomenusko dominates among the Eurasian cultures while West African has a strong hold over Africa and Zunism prevails from the Eastern Mediterranean to Tibet. Zunism has lost some ground in the northeast due to the incursion of the Suomenusko Epigravettian culture. Neither Suomenusko nor Zunism have managed to take root in Italy and Anatolia.

Meanwhile...

The Lion dynasty, one of the earliest playable human groups, is alive and well and ruling out of "Alexandria."

I've also noticed that the Neanderthals and Denisovans are basically untouchable on islands.

The last Neanderthal in the Canary Islands.

The other last Neanderthal in Socotra.

And the last Denisovan in the Maldives. Real beaut, ain't she? I guess primitive man had different standards. Virtually all of the "tribes" in India have huge armies for some reason, though the levies are comparatively small.

Other more primitive cultures have managed to survive in pockets throughout Asia.

Two Chatelperronian Neanderthals have survived in the Tarim basin: Krom and Zam. Thanks to intermarriage with local Homo Sapiens, very few of the surviving Neanderthals still have the actual Neanderthal portraits and seem to be Neanderthal by culture only.

Detailed culture map of the Middle East.

The Middle East is a melting pot of different cultures. The old Mousterian and Baradostian cultures are gradually being pushed out by the rising Zarzians while the Antelians hold strong in the Levant and the Halfans expand into Arabia. The Epigravettians are cautiously poking around Anatolia and the Caucasus, but not without challenge from the Zarzians. Pockets of Madrasian and and Ordosian can also be seen. A few Mousterian provinces still hold out in what would roughly be northern Iraq. A single province in Syria is also home to the most primitive surviving human leader, an Aurignacian. Pockets of the basic Human culture also still exist here and in Ethiopia, but they're ruled by more advanced chieftains.

Thanks for the work on this mod! I'm looking forward to seeing more of it in the future!

 

[kmaj]

How much are you going to railroad the latter, Neolithic part of the timeline, the one we know a little more about?
For example, modern Europeans are descended from three populations: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers that migrated through Anatolia (close to modern Sardinians, they might have spoken a language ancestral to Basque) and a third group that probably corresponds with the Indo-Europeans and the Yamnaya culture.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/01/19/triune-origins/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/massive-migration/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/origins/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/who-we-are-9-europe/ (commentary on Reich's Who We Are and How We Got There)

India was similar, with three different ancestral populations: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/who-we-are-8-india/ .

 

[moscal]

The last Neanderthal in the Canary Islands.

Do Neanderthals shouldn't have separate, non-huts portaits?

 

[bookem_danno]

Do Neanderthals shouldn't have separate, non-huts portaits?

If you mean do they get their own portraits, yes. In fact you can see that this character's mother does actually have the neanderthal female portrait. But as with vanilla, it seems to give mixed-race characters the Turkish portraits.

 

[erisolsprite]

I've been playing all weekend, both as an actual character and as an observer, and I've been having a great time- according to Steam I've played for about 20 hours since installing the mod so that should speak for itself.

I haven't run into any major game-breaking problems, but there's quite a few minor points that I thought you might want to know about. I'm trying to avoid anything you've already addressed but I might miss something here and there. I have all DLCs active, including Jade Dragon, but I disabled Chinese invasions for hopefully obvious reasons.

- The War focus has a lot of references to things such as Alexander the Great and The Art Of War, as well as frequent strategy board games.
- At the start date, there's quite a few people with anachronistic cultures and religions- I've spotted Greek Orthodox, Kurdish Zoroastrian, and Hellenic Roman characters. They generally don't have children or teach their culture/religion to anyone so it doesn't affect the game, but there they are. Time-travellers?
- Something very strange that happens with the "Summon Zealots" decision: according to the attrition tooltip, the game seems to believe that armies of a few hundred zealots are actually tens or hundreds of thousands of troops, and will suffer attrition as such.
- The Ceremonial Burial and Praise The Spirits decisions have been entirely absent for me. I'm not sure if they require something special to show up, but I've played all the way to around 450 (going from Human to Antelian to Epigravettian) and it's never been there.
- Rulers within range have the option to take the Raid China action. I've seen a few Tibetan and Mongolian realms do it.
- Several strange artefacts are floating around, including Hermetic ingredients and religious items.
- Not really a "problem" per se, but are you considering doing something in the game to reflect the much higher child mortality rate of early humanity? Maybe just something like giving children lower health, or making childhood diseases more common.

I've been playing an observer campaign just for the fun of watching cultures rise, spread, and fall, after I get to an endpoint (either the game ends or it just stops changing significantly), I might post an album of the results (taking screenshots of the culture map every 20 years).

This has quickly become one of my favourite mods, if it had been released as its own game (though with enough differences to CK2 to not be extreme copyright violation) then I would buy it. You're doing great work, whichever direction you choose to take this in the future I'll be very interested to see!

 

[pablrdriguez]

I just wanted to say that I'm LOVING this mod. I have been playing it non-stop since I discovered it and it's awesome. I started in Frisia but yesterday I moved my "tribe" all the way to India to become Zunist and stablished a new home near the Indus to wait until the Mesolithic arrives. Congrats and keep the good work!

 

[erisolsprite]

I've been letting a campaign run for a long time, all the way to 840, and this is what happened throughout the game. No new cultures appeared after Magdalenians/Halfans/Zarzians, but it's still fun to watch them grow and search for new lands. Hope it's of interest!

 

[Austregisel]

With me too erisolsprite

 

[kmaj]

Any news?

 

[NarcomancerPL]

I'm waiting for next update

 

[Rags17]

Hi All

Sorry for the extreme lack of communication lately - I have a new job so that plus family commitments have eaten all my time. I am still working on this and am hoping to get something out by the end of this week. Please bear with me !

On a related topic, I am very keen on seeing what people's maps look like after a few hundred years. I am now at the stage of adding in all the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures and I need to make sure that the culture map looks sort of like it should when these periods hit. No good having Natufians appearing if there are no precursor cultures to make them happen !

I am also still keen on hearing about any gross errors that people may have picked up - some of the big updates in this coming patch are fixes to various script modifiers not WAI, these will all be detailed in the patch notes.

Thanks again for everyone's patience.

 

[SingularityStoq]

I just want to say I love this mod and I hope it grows

 

[TeyTeyBrazilian]

Hey, does it work it off with the new version?
Great job on the mod until now

 

[TeyTeyBrazilian]

Or either with 2.8.1 or 2.8.2.1, steam only has this two options...