Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Down By the Bay

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we return to The Hill.  For those who haven't been memorizing these posts:

The Hill, a Visualization Practice

It can be difficult to imagine everything about our world at a high level and then translate that to a more personal perspective.  For that reason, we have occasionally paused and visualized the changes we've made as though we were watching them occur from a specific hillside.  From previous visualizations, we know that The Hill we're talking about overlooks the main strait connecting the inland sea of our main continent to the outer ocean, and we've implied that it sits on the western side of the strait.  We'll go ahead and explicitly confirm that:  The Hill is on the western peninsula, close enough that the foot of the hill ends at the beach.  Taking the idea that local geography, aside from the sea, has a strong resemblance to Western Australia (but ten times taller and stretched out over an area 100 times wider), our hill is about 300 meters tall at its peak, which is 4 to 5 km from the water's edge.  To the west, the land gradually grows steeper, hitting a local maximum of 1000 meters about 30 km away.  To the north, The Hill slopes down to a beach a few hundred meters wide.  To the south, another line of hills completes the peninsulas, their peaks just a little higher than our hill's and separated by 20 to 30 km.  To the east, the hill gradually steps down to the edge of the peninsula and the start of the strait.

The area is, by the standards of this world, lightly wooded.  Rollstone trees predominate, and our particular hill is home to a singular, large specimen, with a canopy 600 meters wide and a crown reaching to 300 meters.  Rollstone trees tend to grow more densely in the lee between hills, thanks to their method of dispersal.  Due to the actions of the rollstone trees, smaller underbrush isn't terribly common, leaving the area beneath the trees open, save for the buttressed roots of the trees themselves.  A small number of trees have also grown near the beach, where rollstones hit sandy soil and came to a stop instead of rolling into the water.

Now, knowing that we have three species- one a typical human that prefers open spaces in which to utilize their rangy motion and ability to throw things from a distance, one an arboreal furry that likes living in the middle to upper reaches of large trees, and one an amphibious breed of scalie that likes to live in raised root structures- you might be thinking to yourself, "Wait, The Hill has something that each of the three species would like!  How far out were they planning this?!"  And the answer is, not nearly as far as you would think.  One of the nicest things about painting with the broad strokes we've been using is that there was always bound to be some overlap.  That the said overlap happens to look intentional is definitely a feature and not an accident, but planning is not really what we're about.  We tend to investigate, not plot.

Being Neighborly

Our hill is in a spot that will see a lot of travel, so the idea that each of the three species will eventually make their way here is not at all far-fetched.  Let's say that each species shows up at roughly the same time.  What happens?

Initially, not much.  The furries will spread from tree to tree, each large enough to serve as a single group's territory.  The humans will range around the hillsides, with no real need to climb the trees and no desire to wander the beach, which is far more dangerous for them than the beaches of our world.  The scalies will initially occupy the roots along the edge of the beach; though they have the smallest preferred territory, they have the largest social groups, so it's likely all the scalies in the area will belong to a single colony.

It's hard to tell when the three species will begin to interact with each other.  The scalies will spread beyond their normal territory first, but the branches where the furries live in the wooded lees will be (at certain points) mostly level with the hills that the humans prefer.  For our purposes, we'll say the humans, looking out over the area from the hilltops, will notice the others first.  They may even try to hunt a few before discovering that a) the other two species don't like that, and b) they're also intelligent tool users with languages.

Given our history, you might think the humans would try to wipe out the other two species.  After all, that's what humans on Earth did with all the other species that were close to us.  We wiped out Neanderthals, for example!

...About that.  It turns out that, outside of Africa, almost every human has traces of Neanderthal DNA.  For that to be the case, we would have had to, ah, "interact" pretty regularly with them.  While we aren't discounting the tendency to outcompete anything that comes close to us, it turns out humans are equally capable of not engaging in genocide.  We'll go ahead and assume the other two species are the same way.

With that in mind, once the three species learn how to communicate, we can expect that a detente of sorts will be reached.  The furries have the trees, the scalies have the roots and the beach, and the humans have everywhere else.  Each species is most active when the other two species aren't, so the occasions when two different groups accidentally trip over each other won't be often.  All three species will tend to congregate at the base of the rollstone trees, where they're equally at home.  Trade will be pretty regular: furries have access to rollstone fruits and the trees themselves, scalies have a variety of seafood and aquaculture, and humans have quite a bit of animal meat.

"Hey," you may ask, "why would the furries have access to the trees, but not the other two?  They could just cut down the trees, couldn't they?"  Leaving aside how difficult it would be to cut down a tree that was actively defended by scalies living in the roots and furries in the branches, there's the simple fact that, at the pre-civilization level, rollstone trees would be too massive to cut down.  A single tree would be dozens of feet thick at the base.  Given that, before modern technology, our methods of felling trees involved cutting wedges and trying to use gravity to do most of the work, and gravity on this world is ten times lazier than Earth's, it would take weeks to months for a team of people to down even one tree.  It would be far, far easier to simply trade for the relatively smaller branches, which would still easily align with what we think of as logs on Earth, and which the furries live among.

In point of fact, this trade may well kickstart civilization.

Civilized Forest Management

Civilization on Earth predates the written word, so we aren't 100% on how humans gradually moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of an agrarian civilization.  The prevailing theory is that, over time, the gatherers figured out how to grow the things they were gathering, but doing so required remaining in one place.  The hunters continued following prey and became intentionally nomadic peoples, only really settling down when they domesticated the animals they hunted.  We only really started progressing when the gatherers/farmers and the hunters/herders started producing enough food that people could have jobs that weren't primarily focused on food.

That may or may not be true, but the thought is reasonable, and we can see something similar happening due to those branches that the furries start trading.

Consider:  scalies are trappers.  Basic traps can be made with basic tools, but more effective traps can be made with such things as ropes, clay, stone, and lumber.  Scalies can procure three of those things by themselves, but lumber is more or less literally out of their reach.

Our nu humans are nomadic, and at this stage mostly use their tools to hunt or to store food.  These can be made on a small scale with randomly procured items, such as windfall branches.  If they want to stay in one place for a long period, they will have to have some form of shelter... and just like scalies, nu humans don't have ready access to lumber.

Furries have limited access to the ground, thanks to the presence of the other two.  However, they have lots of lumber.  LOTS of lumber.  How long would it take before they start trading wood for ground-based foods?  Odds are that trade would begin shortly after furries learned to communicate with the others.

How long would it be before groups of furries focused exclusively on cutting lumber for trade, knowing they could get more food than by hunting?  And an important, related question: how long before the furries noticed that, by thinning out the trees they lived in, travel and hunting became easier?

In this possible sequence of events, the first real technological advance of our world's civilization will be forest management.

Conclusion

Our Hill is now a bustling little place.  Groups of all three species live in the area, working together by informal agreement and semi-accidentally stumbling into the start of a civilization.  This particular location is ideal for a civilization, since eventually water-based trade is going to flow right past it.  As the three species cooperate, we can expect them to develop a unique, blended culture.  But before we can determine what that culture will look like, we first need to decide what each species' culture in isolation would look like.

That's right; it's time to look at each species individually again.  We'll start with the humans next week!