Mirroring its Arctic counterpartt's name of Hyperborea, the Antarctic continent of this world can be thought of as 'Hyperaustralis', and its native inhabitants are correspondingly termed 'Hyperaustralians'. Hyperaustralis was the original homeland of Homo sapiens sapiens, and so the descendants of those early humans who stayed there when most of their kin migrated to populate the rest of the planet are of the 'purest' human stock in terms of genetics. Their origins near the South Pole and the long, scorching summers of Hyperaustralis before the Great Cooling of 10,000 AA have left the Hyperaustralic peoples with the darkest possible human skin tones. The tendency for life in the searingly hot-yet-humid and densely forested continent, with its own share of deadly fauna and flora, further forced these dark-skinned peoples to embrace the darker and more ruthless elements of their human nature as ways of life to survive their earliest days when men had yet to become the apex predators in their own homeland, a brutality which was reflected to some extent in their language: 'Proto-Hyperaustralic', theorized by some modern anthropologists and linguists to have been the original, common human tongue.
Modern speech | Proto-Hyperaustralic | Man, men | Gach, gach'e | Woman, women | S'gach, s'gachei | King | Gai | Murder | Gi'bax | Food | Vibi |
Artist's depiction of an ancient Hyperaustralic man, c. 25,000 BA | |
The first Hyperaustralians lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers like any other human on the planet, constantly roaming in search of fruits/herbs and animals to hunt with arrows or spears of bone & flint under the shadow of the land's massive trees. When agriculture was invented independently about 3,000 years after its advent elsewhere, it failed to get much traction outside of river basins. Those Hyperaustralians living around rivers settled down to chop down trees & use them to build villages (which they quickly started walling for reasons that will be made apparent shortly); grow wheat, the cabbage-esque 'kadvish' and snake beans; herd pigs and cattle; and organize into kingdoms where kingship appears to have been exclusively held by mages (hence why Hyperaustralic monarchs are referred to as 'witch-kings' by outsiders) and decided in feats of strength: any free man of magical ability in the kingdom could challenge their overlord to a duel to the death at any time, with the winner taking or keeping the throne, and only when nobody stepped up to challenge a prince would he be allowed to succeed his predecessor peacefully. Besides leading men into battle and overseeing the distribution of resources, witch-kings were thought to be able to commune with spirits of nature and the dead. These kingdoms did appear to be quite flexible socially, beyond even the notion of any random schmuck being able to become king if he's strong or ruthless or lucky enough - any man, no matter how poor, who sufficiently impressed their king could be made into a professional warrior, and warriors were the de facto aristocracy of these ancient Hyperaustralic kingdoms - unless, of course, you were a woman, slave, or worst of all a slave woman, for all three categories were to be seen and not heard. Deformed infants were abandoned to die, for not even the comparatively civilized Hyperaustralians of the riverlands gladly suffered weakness. The settled Hyperaustralic peoples developed unique tattoos with which to distinguish themselves from other kingdoms' citizens, and were marked with their kingdom's tattoo when they reached adulthood.
Settled Hyperaustralic laborers farming under the searing polar sun, c. 6,500 AA | |
The Hyperaustralians who remained nomadic scarcely altered their lifestyle, even as the Bronze Age wore on and - much like the similarly copper-and-tin-strapped Hyperboreans on the other side of the planet - they and their settled neighbors increasingly adopted iron weapons and armor. They congregated into clans and then tribes, bound together by matrilineal blood ties. These tribes' chiefs won their positions the same way the settled witch-kings won theirs: the mightiest and bravest warriors of each clan would fight each other upon a chief's death for the right to succeed him, for it seemed all Hyperaustralians in general considered strength to be the greatest of all virtues, whether they are farmers or hunter-gatherers. One thing they did have in common with the settled Hyperaustralians was that they considered women to be domestic workers and baby-makers; however, if their tree-carvings and cave-paintings are any indication, they had no problem with engaging in homosexual intercourse, for apparently few things were manlier than two manly men bumping uglies to the Hyperaustralians. Unlike the settled Hyperaustralians, nomads marked themselves with far more than just one tattoo - warriors used red ink, non-warrior men used blue, women used yellow and slaves were tattooed with black ink - and their warriors wore jewelry fashioned from the bones & teeth of their kills. Also unlike their more civilized cousins, when the going got especially tough, the Hyperaustralic nomads had no compunctions about eating their slaves or the dead, though they at least refrained from eating living fellow members of the tribe.
Hyperaustralic nomads sheltering in a cave and carving up their lunch, c. 4,000 AA | |
As can be gleaned from the above information, the Hyperaustralians' concept of morality did not extend beyond ruthless utilitarianism and 'might makes right'. Anything that facilitates survival is good, anything that doesn't contains its own judgment, and if you have the power to take something - well, that's all the justification you need. It was considered shameful to trade for anything from crops, to pottery, to slaves with anyone who wasn't a member of your own kingdom or tribe; taking what you wanted by force, though, was always appropriate. The victors of wars could do anything they wished to the vanquished, whether it is 'simply' dragging them off in chains or raping, murdering and eating them all (usually in that order). Legal issues were usually not dealt with by juries or the arbitration of the ruler, but by a duel between the accuser and accused; to the death unless the witch-king or tribal chief of their people believes one or both parties are indispensable to the kingdom/tribe, in which case they would mandate a duel to first blood instead. Bride kidnapping was noted to occur with some frequency among even the settled peoples, though of course the unwilling bride could be taken back by her family as long as they tore her abductor to shreds first. Some tribes and kingdoms proudly told tales of how they were once slaves, but revolted and thrashed their masters so soundly that said masters determined they deserved to be free. A modern scholar summed up the morality, or lack thereof, of the early Hyperaustralians thusly: "They are, for better or worse, the manifestation of humanity's ancient collective id, distilled to its purest and most barbaric essence and set loose in mankind's original - perhaps even natural - habitat."
One curious development in Hyperaustralic history was their encounter with, and subsequent enslavement of, the Dzlieri. After the invasions of Dzlieri colonies that marked first contact, more enterprising Hyperaustralians resolved to make something more than short-term food supplies and decorative skulls out of these diminutive distant cousins of modern humanity. Thus these short, primitive hominids were (after being beaten into submission, as was the Hyperaustralic way) typically used to supplement human slave labor out in the fields and forests. When iron mining and smithing became popular, the smaller Dzlieri were sent to mine narrower shafts that their taller masters couldn't fit into. Some could even be taught to help Hyperaustralic smiths in forging tools and weapons out of the stuff their peers mined. Prettier, less hirsute females warmed the beds of their masters. Even more resourceful slave-masters would designate special 'observatory zones' where the Dzlieri were given the illusion of freedom, so that they might breed and till the land in peace until 'harvesting season' where the 'observers' mounted fresh slave raids on the 'observed'. Should a Dzlieri colony try to break their chains and fail, they were dealt with the same way rebellious human slaves were dealt with: extermination, followed by more raids to find replacement Dzlieri.
Recreated bust of a less hairy Dzlieri female, probably a Hyperaustralic warlord's bedwarmer | |
Like the Hyperboreans, come the Bronze Age the Hyperaustralians suffered from having significantly smaller reserves of copper and tin on their continent relative to Muataria and Altania. This forced them to engage in iron-mining and working on a large scale well ahead of those peoples who did have greater access to bronze, and it shows in the proliferation of iron weapons, iron-framed shields covered in cowhide and iron armor found to date back to 6-10,000 AA. As their ironworking techniques were still rather primitive, most of the weapon artifacts appear to have been of poor quality in their time - bent blades that had been hastily re-straightened in mid-combat, repaired spearheads that show signs of having chipped or broken in the past, boomerangs with cracked and dulled iron tips, and so on - but they seem to have served their wielders well enough, and in any case, it wasn't like there were any alternatives nearby. Kingdoms waged wars with one another over resources, territory and matters of honor as they did the world over, but their wars were typically settled with set-piece battles fought on grounds chosen ahead of time by both sides, not a series of raids and smaller pitched engagements; this was done to preserve as many resources and slaves for the prospective winner as possible. The nomadic tribes, unlike their settled cousins who preferred to fight pitched battles, routinely engaged in raids on both their own kind and the settled peoples to supplement their supplies and gather slaves.
A Hyperaustralic witch-king's iron armor, dated to 9,500 AA | |
In both cases, witch-kings and chieftains were expected to lead their men from the front, clad in iron helms and armor made of large iron plates linked to one another with hemp cords; the personal retainers of a witch-king may go about in iron chest-pieces and combat skirts in addition to helmets, while elite nomadic warriors were less well-equipped, and the bulk of every army was composed of totally unarmored or merely helmeted warriors who otherwise wore only a loincloth or their birthday suits in summer, to deal with the sweltering heat of pre-Great Cooling Hyperaustralis, or coats of coarse fur in winter. After both sides had sent forth a champion to fight each other in a ceremonial duel, Hyperaustralic armies overwhelmingly fought on foot in simple formations, with skirmishers exchanging javelins, iron-tipped boomerangs and sling or bow fire before retiring so that the infantry may advance in shield walls and smash at one another until one side broke ranks and fled. Sometimes, skirmishers would re-enter the fight to outflank and further pressure the opposing infantry, which typically led to either their side's victory or their own encirclement by the opposition's skirmishers in turn. The chariot entered Hyperaustralic warfare much later than in most other civilizations, around 9,000 AA, which seems to have been due to the predictable difficulties of chariot warfare in the rugged and heavily forested terrain of Hyperaustralis; still, at least one Hyperaustralic witch-king was found to have been buried with his chariot and horses under a cairn dated to 9,200 AA, indicating that they did consider chariots and steeds to be valuable despite their rarity and impracticality in Hyperaustralic terrain.
Common Hyperaustralian warrior, c. 8000 AA | |
The civilization of the Hyperaustralians, brutish and bloody as it might have been, came to an unexpected halt when the Great Cooling of 10,000 AA struck. Temperatures had been slowly but surely dropping over the last millennium, but 10,000 AA was when conditions became unbearable for the overwhelming majority of Hyperaustralians. Coal mining spiked, but even the securing of vaster quantities of the black rock than the Hyperaustralians had ever gathered before wasn't enough to warm their homes and light their paths in the darkest winter nights. Devastating winters, much colder and lasting far longer than anyone (save the peoples living closest to the intimidating glaciers of the South Pole) was used to, blanketed towns in choking snow and killed many tens of thousands by causing crop failure. Kingdoms desperately battered each other over shrinking tracts of farmland and grazing turf, while nomads were turning to cannibalism and raiding on a scale unheard of in their history. From 10,000 AA onward, Hyperaustralians began to pack their things and head to the coasts, where witch-kings and nomad chiefs buried their hatchets and formed confederations with one another (even bitter old rivals) with one mission: get off their dying homeland and search for greener pastures. Fishing boats were commandeered while trees living & dead alike were chopped down for shipbuilding, and scarcely a century later the first great Hyperaustralic fleets had begun to sail north in search of a new, less frigid homeland. Only a few Hyperaustralian communities remained behind, those who lived closest to the South Pole and thus had at least some idea how to deal with the vicious cold, while the majority of their people were now sailing straight for the great island north of them and beyond that, the subcontinent known as Midija - taking with them their iron equipment, strange diminutive slaves, and barbarous traditions...
A Hyperaustralic witch-king at the time of the Great Cooling and his people's migration to Midija, post-10,000 AA | |
Extent of the settled Hyperaustralic kingdoms by 10,000 AA, on the eve of the Great Cooling |
Note: The Hyperaustralic nomads are not shown on this map, but their migratory paths crisscrossed the entirety of the continent outside (and sometimes trespassing into) the settled kingdoms' lands - some even came close to the great glaciers surrounding the South Pole at the continent's very heart. |
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