Prehistory of Jute: view article

In Jute each day begins with the sun rising above the crystal clear sea, slowly waking up the small villages as well as the wildlife surrounding them with its warm rays. Here, in the tropics, it's summer every day, so often some can be seen sleeping outside, even today then.

But other things have changed since the prehistoric time of the first villages of Jute.
In the beginning, the day usually began with a short bath in the sea, followed by having some bananas and other fruit, like coconuts, for breakfast. These were collected either the previous evening or on the spot, since they exist in abundance here.
After that, Juteans usually just did things they liked to do for fun like laying in the sun, swimming, going for a walk or just talking and chatting about various things (their language was already relatively developed, including names for some abstract concepts and things such as "meaning" and "being content with your life", they had a single word for that, Saandi.) such as the meaning of life and the possibility of an afterlife, even though they hardly ever found satisfying answers to these questions.
Still they kept wondering, and soon they started making drawings in the sand to illustrate what they're talking about. This then developed into picture writing after a while.

Meanwhile, the explorers who instead liked to wander off in the wilderness (and fortunately, most of the time came back unharmed, too) had found some interesting herbs. After some time, they managed to figure out some beneficial ones and even some of their abilities in helping curing the sick and helping others to stay healthy. To give everyone not too much and not too little, they started giving names to different amounts and adding them together.

As the population grew and grew, what they could collect on a single day on their peninsula started to be insufficient to feed everyone. The swimmers proposed eating things from the sea, and while some didn't like the idea, in the end it was decided to try it out and after some time it became accepted with the majority and even liked. Soon the coastline and what each swimmer could carry on their own wasn't enough either, so they started experimenting with fallen tree chunks floating in the water. After some trial and error, they had their first boats and could go farther and carry a much bigger load.

Other villagers found out how to cultivate some of the fruits and vegetables, so more people could enjoy them, like it used to be. This was also done as to not relay too much on the seafood, since the swimmers, who now were referred to as seafood gatherers, had better and worse days when it came to bringing food on the recently invented tables.
They started to grow sweet potatoes and other tropical crops, which quickly became popular in the still rather small community, which lead to a quick expansion of the farming efforts and more people becoming farmers themselves.

Even though their day started being filled with getting enough food to feed the ever-growing population, they didn't forget about the talks and questions their ancestors had. In an effort to remember them better, they started creating short stories from what the older generations had told the younger ones. They started looking for some writing material that was more durable than the sand that had been previously used, and started using tree chunks, where they carved them in so they wouldn't have to rely entirely on memory. Since space was limited and and it was hard to draw the accurate pictures of their pictorial script, they started to make them more abstract and soon had a kind of wedge writing.

As time passed on and food distribution with the bigger population became an issue, as it was no longer as abundant as before, neither in the sea, nor the fruits, smart villagers developed new methods to fairly give everyone as much food as they would most likely need. These would today be called "subtraction, multiplication and division", and they soon had created new signs for their script to help them with that. This also helped to prevent arguments arising from misunderstandings, mix-ups and faulty memories.

After the food distribution and production problem was solved, at least for the time being, the population of Jute could go back and continue enjoying their favorite activities, discussing the world around them and more, tell each other stories or just explore the environment, after the day's work was done, of course. They also managed to create better writing material, using the long leaves of a plant they found worked well for the cause. A thick, undrinkable liquid squeezed from some inedible berries was pressed on the leaves using a short stick. Thus they could create slightly more accurate drawings and write longer texts.
One of the explorers found a thicker branch that was hollow inside, and made a sound when blown. After some tinkering with it, the first flute was made.

They also started tackling their age-old questions with a more systematic approach, and tried to find connections between different questions and their answers, developing a lot of new abstract concepts and ideas that served in their new theories. Multiple of those existed, and almost everyone in the village now had some sort of opinion as to how the world had come to be, what the purpose of existence is, and what comes after death.

Meanwhile, the flutes were used more and more often, at first randomly, but over time it became clear how to generate the different sounds it was capable of making. The first melodies were created, and someone had the idea of letting the old drums play along them, creating a rhythm to match the melody. Now the people of Jute had something to accentuate their traditional storytelling in the evening, which often also included the mysterious stones around them. No one knew where they came from or who they made, some suspected a divine cause, some claimed them to be part of nature, some a combination of both. As far as they were concerned, they were the only humans on Sahar.

Some of the Juteans preferred to expand their small numerical system, and give it some fine-tuning. They started experimenting with bigger numbers and developed some mathematical puzzles as an alternate pastime, meant to stimulate the brain and ability to reason. Some called them unnecessary, and were of the opinion, that brainpower would better be used answering philosophical questions, but other people thought they might be of help in answering the questions of life and beyond and in anyway where in no way useless, as according to their opinion, everything in the world has some purpose.

After a while, both disciplines had started to mix, and some began to philosophize if there is such a thing as the biggest and smallest number, and whether numbers had some special meaning inherent to them, and if they were all the same or had some special properties differentiating them. After some experimentation with division, a particularly devoted mathematician discovered prime numbers, and started to wonder if these extraordinary numbers could be calculated, or what other method there could to find more of them. Prime numbers were dubbed "divine numbers", as divinity was assumed to be a state of total purity, mental and otherwise, and these numbers, who seemed to be at the base of all others, seemed especially pure.
Meanwhile, after an accident while exploring, a young woman needed help with a flesh wound on her leg. After initial attempts didn't seem to improve the situation and resulted in ear-piercing screams of pain, an older mother of three children suggested using some herbs she had used when her children couldn't sleep. Thus, they had the first anesthesia and could go about the treatment. The wound was cleaned as best possible with some fresh water and the oil of a plant they used for cleaning, and then stitched them with a needle from a tree that had long spines. That needle had been washed and sharpened and then had had a string of cleaned spider web attached to it. In the end, the wound was bandaged with some thoroughly cleaned leaves and more cobweb binding them together.
The operation proved not to be a complete failure, the woman survived and could for the most part continue with her life, but she was permanently scarred and unfortunately, the pain in her leg never completely left. The local herbal advisor at least had a remedy against that, but even that couldn't make it go away completely.

The population continued to grow, and they soon needed new farms to feed all hundreds of hungry mouths. Some trees had to be raided for those, and while some protested against this "crime against nature and what is holy" at first, they soon managed to get into an agreement after some discussion, pledging to plant a new tree for every one destroyed, and to have a minute of commemoration every day twice for everything the nature is providing them, during which everyone was also supposed to think about what they could do to better society while respecting the nature, and in the evening to review their day, what they achieved today and what plans they have for tomorrow. Over time, these rituals provided one of the bases for the religion that had long been developing. Saandi na trikki u mohomo harandi - being content with your life through numbers and harmony with wildlife. A rulebook, where the elders and others wrote down the guidelines on how to achieve this state of being was soon written down. It contained moral guidelines on how to live with society and how society benefits the individual, guidelines how to respectfully use wildlife, natural resources and how to achieve the desired mental state by continued study of philosophy and science (which at that point mostly meant mathematics) ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article

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