Template:First Civilization Era/doc

First Civilization Foundation
The First Civilization, more informally known as Those Who Came Before, rose from the ashes of those Humans banished to Erde-Tyrene and their Forerunner caretakers. Just prior to the fall of the Forerunners in the Forerunner-Reaper War, the Librarian had evacuated the planet in the face of an impending Reaper invasion of the planet. Fearing for her charges, she removed several thousand Humans from the planet, in direct violation of the Forerunner's exile of the Humanity, and fled with a few hundred of her Forerunner researchers in the Indovid Shoals, a vast, uncharted and dangerous region of space that none had ever dared to settle.

The Reapers exterminated the few dozen Forerunners that remained on Erde-Tyrene and moved on, leaving the primitive Humans alone.

The Librarian used a sub-luminal vessel that took over 10-thousand years to cross into the deepest areas of the Indovid Shoals, then kept her crew in stasis for another 15-thousand years, in order to avoid the Reapers detecting their activity and attacking. Until she was sure, the crew remained in suspended animation for over 27-thousand years.

Around almost 75,500 B.C.E., once the Libranian confirmed the Reapers were gone, she settled her people onto the surface of the nearest habitable world, ancient Earth, and then flew her ship into the local primary to avoid Reaper detection of its FTL drive. Those Forerunners that settled on Earth established the First Civilization.

The First Civilization, small in number but advanced technologically, life on in the Forerunner colony was hard and while the established Human breeds did very successful, disease and disaster plagued the Forerunners, keeping their population small and on the edge of collapse.

To finally develope some, the First Civilization began to use Humans as a sizable workforce to support greater expansions. However fears of ancient Humans penchant for violence caused the Forerunner to seek out ways to control Humanity and keep them from rebelling or seizing any power. Initially, each and every member of Humanity was born with a chemical neuro-transmitter deep inside their brain, which made them susceptible to the illusions and mind controlling powers of the Pieces of Eden. With this, a single Forerunner could keep more than a hundred Humans working round the clock, without complaint or rebellion.

As a result, the First Civilization began to expand, with Forerunners designing and researching advance techological inventions, while thousands of Humans built and maintained them.

Human-First Civilization War
The Human-First Civilization War was a catastrophic conflict that occurred between the First Civilization and the Humans, with the latter being aided by those who had developed an immunity to the controlling effects of the Pieces of Eden. Little is known about the details of the war, however the distraction it bestowed prevented both parties from noticing the impending danger that faced them from outside; by the time they did, however, it was too late.

The Seeds of War

Due to the chemical neuro-transmitter deep inside their brain, which made them susceptible to the illusions and mind controlling powers of the Pieces of Eden, Humanity was controlled for many centuries to do the bidding of the First Civilization. However, over time, interbreeding between Humanity and their Forerunner "gods" caused some individuals to be born without the neuro-transmitter active, or indeed present at all.

At some point during this time, in 75,010 B.C.E., two humans – named Adam and Eve – escaped from their masters with a Piece of Eden known as the Apple, and thus began a series of events that led to war between the two species.

The War and Catastrophe
Though technologically superior to their creations, the First Civilization were heavily out-numbered by Humans, as they had produced many to work for them.

The Human contingent was led by those who had been born immune to the hypnotic effects of the First Civilization's Piece of Eden technologies, as they were the children of both humans and the First Civilization, hybrids in effect.

Using their immunity to get close to First Civilization beings and kill them. As the First Civilization had slow rates of reproduction, it meant that any loss of life on their part was a heavy blow to them, and the skill to execute single assassinations was a perfect tactic.

The war was an even battlefield, with the Pieces of Eden and additional sense of knowledge the First Civilization wielded being balanced out by the massive number of humans and slow reproduction of the First Civilization.

Eventually however, disaster struck.

Around 69,000 B.C.E., the Reapers, noting the technological levels and discovering they were identical to the Forerunners, dispatched a single Reaper to raze the planet. The Reaper, noting the heavy orbital defenses the Forerunners had setup via their Human slaves, triggered a coronal mass ejection in Sol.

The ejection hit the Earth which such force it flipped the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field and exposing the planet to Sol's deadly radiation. The entire planet burned for weeks afterward, and earthquakes and catastrophic blazes ravaged what remained of the Earth.

Until the modern era Humanity believed this disaster was caused by the eruption of the supervolcano Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia and as such named it the Toba Event. Unknown to them, the Toba Event was merely caused by the Reaper induced coronal mass ejection and was the only notable evidence left following the Earth's recovery.

Recovery and Fading
The surface of the Earth was rendered barren, and less than ten thousand Humans and far fewer Forerunners survived the catastrophe. In order to recover from the event, the remaining members of the First Civilization and Human brought their war to an end and begun to work together to restore life to the planet.

Because their numbers were too few, the Forerunners failed to survive long as an independent species. Humans on the other hand, who had been built by the First Civilization 'to survive', successfully managed to reconstruct their society and flourished. The fading Forerunner population soon began to inter-breed and eventually absorbed, resulting in one in 10-million modern Humans having at least one Forerunner ancestor. Over time, the reshaping of the Earth's landscape and geography would eliminate nearly all physical evidence of the First Civilization.