Atlantis: Fall Of The Gods

100-thousand years ago, the Khoisan tribes living in South Africa started gazing at the stars. Using crayons made from natural red ochre, they mapped the sky by charting the constellations and then built a circular stonehenge-like structure on a tall hill over a high canyon over-looking the rich and fertile valleys below. By doing this, the Khoisan invented the first solar and lunar calendars along with a zodiac and a calculation system using different times and measurements. They worshiped the celestial bodies in the sky including the sun, moon, constellations and various planets that they saw with the naked eye. But they worshiped the world most of all along with their ancestors and the four basic elements of wind, water, earth and fire. As primitive as they were, the Khoisan were excellent hunters and gatherers with an expert knowledge of poisonous and edible plants and wildlife.

They knew about the seasons and were able to predict weather changes based on the movement of the stars and the shift of the earth's equator in relation to the sun. Although the Khoisan primarily lived in open camps along the riverside, they also used caves and rock formations for religious ceremonies and shamanic rituals. They were a peaceful people without chieftains or war-bands who instead lived in a matriarchal commune led by the tribal elders. They took only what they needed from the earth without wasting anything and lived in a rather utopian society who experienced peace and harmony in Africa for over 30,000 years. That is, until the Toba super-volcano erupted in Sumatra, almost 5,000-miles from their African homeland.

Ash filled the air as darkness covered the skies, blackening out the sun. As the smoke began to rise, acid rain began to pour down over the earth along with soot and hot magma. There was an earthquake followed by tidal waves, tsunamis, hurricanes and roaring seas. The northern and southern hemispheres were thrown into a freezing, relentless ice age while the Khoisan's homeland near the equator became a scorching desert in the midst of an arid dry spell. The eruption of the Toba super-volcano was so vast and so great, it almost annihilated the Khoisan people along with the entire animal kingdom. All of the remaining mega-reptiles that had survived since the time of the dinosaurs had now been wiped out completely and most of the older prehistoric hominids, giant sea monsters and land roaming flightless birds also went extinct. The time of the wholly mammoth and the great Old Ice Age mammals had arrived. Out of this destruction, only about 10,000 human beings survived.

With the fertile grasslands turning into dust and sand, the Khoisan were forced to leave the Horn of Africa by crossing the Bab-el-Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to the coast of Yemen in Saudi Arabia over 25-miles of waist deep trecherous water. There on the other side, they found lush vegetation and a myriad of newer animal species. Needless to say, the nomadic hunters and gatherers spread out over the face of the earth and never returned to South Africa, where they left their stonehenge-like monuments and rock carvings behind to be discovered several millennia later after they had already been forgotten. This was the beginning of the great human migration event out of Africa, when the Khoisan began exploring their world for the very first time.

... But the Khoisan also encountered another new powerful species in Aden, the neanderthals. To the Khoisan's dismay, the neanderthals were thousands of years older and much more advanced than homo sapiens. Neanderthals had a larger skull cavity with a bigger brain mass capable of higher intelligence. The neanderthals were also much bigger than humans and as strong as chimpanzees. Their voices were deeper and more capable of being heard over longer distances as they roared like hungry cave bears and dire wolves. They were senseless giants with an extremely high pain tolerance and disconcern for all lifeforms in general. They often ate frogs and lizards or sometimes each other, for homo neanderthalensis was a man-eating cannibal. But their civilization took up the entire Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf of Aden to the Gulf of Oman and into Bahrain, where the neanderthals had built their capital.

The Khoisan were far from inferior, however. The bushmen had their own culture that had existed for thousands of years. Despite the Toba event catastrophe, human beings still managed to roam the earth. Their ability to think and adapt to changes quickly would later prove to be one of their most vital abilities as a species who still survives today. The bushmen were not as advanced as their neanderthal cousins, but as humans they were capable of adapting and even adopting neanderthal technology in order to survive. This included new hunting tactics, the formation of war-bands, man-made permanent settlements and a better arsenal of weapons. The very first encounter with the giants happened in Aden on the coast of the Red Sea, not long after the Khoisan arrived on the Arabian Peninsula, before humans had such advanced technology. It would prove to be a crucial moment in the history of all mankind.

Needless to say, the neanderthals and humans were both terrified to see each other's racial differences for the first time. In a fit of fear, the two tribes attacked one another. The humans suffered a huge loss as the neanderthals killed most of the men while also managing to kidnap some of the women and children. Others were roasted over a fire or eaten alive by the cannibalistic brutes, who showed no emotion or pity for their captives. Those who escaped were among the first to form a human war party, with the strongest male role model as their chieftain. Using guerilla warfare to sneak into a neanderthal camp at night, the bushmen were able to confiscate some of the neanderthal weapons and instruments then learn from them by replicating what they studied. Not only that, but humans now had an edge in knowing their enemy which would allow them to craft even better weapons and instruments than the neanderthal possessed. This included new throwing spears with better spearheads and musical instruments like the drum and the flute. The determined Khoisan people learned how to build tents and hunt bigger game. They learned how to evolve and fight back. After a few lost battles, which were more like neanderthal raids which ended in mass genocide, the Khoisan eventually succeeded in gaining a victory. For the first time, they showed the neanderthals that humans were not just mindless food sources or objects of sexual pleasure, but were a true species to be reckoned with.

Conflicts ensued between the neanderthal's prehistoric Arabian civilization and the invading human nomads, who were confined to the southern coast of Yemen where they hid in caves, gathering shellfish and scavenging on the sandy beach. By staying along the beach, humans were able to navigate up the coast of the Arabian peninsula into Oman, putting the entire southern half of the peninsula under human control. But the neanderthals had cities all over Saudi Arabia which blocked the human advance northward. Early humans were seen as little more than intelligent monkeys to the neanderthals, who were much more evolved with greater numbers and a larger civilization.

The capital of the neanderthal empire was located on the island of Bahrain, which was inaccessible to human beings since they did not have boats or rafts to get there. Some of the Khoisan decided to band together and fight their way north by stealing some rafts from the neanderthals during a night raid, then bringing the rafts back to Muscat where they examined them. Soon, the Khoisan figured out how to build better rafts and devised a plan to navigate across the Strait of Hormuz into southern Iran on the outskirts of Southwest Asia and into Pakistan, where they continued east through the Indus Valley and down into Kerala on the southernmost tip of India on the South Asian continent. They settled in the Tamil region of India, where they built the first human settlements.

By this time, only the dark skinned people living in Yemen still spoke the Khoisan language. The dark skinned Tamil people lived in a totally different environment and had adapted to speaking a different Dravidian language. They built the first man-made tower in Kerala around 60-thousand years ago before spreading out further east into China and south into Cambodia where they continued to adapt to newer flora and fauna which altered their whole way of life for thousands of years. It was during this prehistoric time period that the first large scale battles took place between red skinned humans and red haired neanderthals. It was a time of disorderly chaos and savagery.

Both races were very similar in that they both had a complex verbal language and thought process. Both already had the ability to make camp fires and craft advanced spears for hunting and fighting. Both races worshiped animals and painted on cave rocks. Both had learned basic medical herbs and poisonous plants and both were highly adaptable to changes in the environment. But the neanderthals were physically much bigger with more brawn and strength than humans, which often gave them the edge in battle. Thousands of humans and neanderthals died over the next 30-thousand years in raids and wars that spread across the whole land from country to country. Sometimes the humans would win and sometimes the neanderthals would win, but the course of history was changing as time continued to pass from one millennium to another. As the climate changed and the earth began to shift, many of the Khoisan returned to Africa and settled in Ethiopia while the Yemenites kept much of their same culture. Neanderthals continued to spread north through Mesopotamia and into Asia Minor where they hunted larger game animals and built great settlements. These prehistoric settlements lasted for thousands of years, but eventually disappeared over time and were forgotten to history as the wars spread despite drastic changes in the earth's climate and atmosphere.