Obviously since this whole project is an exercise in speculative fiction there's nothing stopping you or I from deciding that the land is filled with unicorns and talking polar bears. But as you can tell by now my preference is for a somewhat realistic approach (realistic enough for me to have fun). I also think that by constraining myself in this way I'll be forced to be more creative and side-step falling on old fantasy tropes and expectations too quickly. I hope the end result will feel realistic but different.
Domesticated Animals
The time period that I'm placing Sundaland in is well before most scientists believe humans started domesticating animals. Cows, goats and sheep were perhaps domesticated at the earliest 7,000 BC. It seems Sundaland will have to do without those staples and rely on wild animals.
There are at the moment only two animal that I can justify as having the potential for being domesticated in this setting. The first is the Banteng (wild cow), more details here: Wild Cattle in Sundaland
The second is Dogs, usually thought to have been domesticated 15,000 years ago but this article says there is now evidence that it happened as early as 36,000 years ago and several times with several different dog and wolf like species: The Origins of Dogs. Update: Here's an article about evidence for dog domestication in Southeast Asia 33,000 years ago: New study places origin of dogs in Southeast Asia. I imagine them being short haired, perhaps looking like the Dingo.
Fauna
Examples of animals: Wild Pigs, Wild Water Buffalo, Deer, Monkeys, Tigers, Snakes, Tapir, Crocodiles, the Javan Rhinoceros, Komodo Dragons and the only non-human primate the Orangutan. Here's a great site with an overview of the animals in Southeast Asia: Ecology Asia.
I think the elephant is a particularly interesting animal in a context where few or no animals are domesticated. Elephants can be captured and tamed, to be used as a beast of burden, for transport and for war. Elephants are a revered animal across India and South-East Asia and feature in the religions of the area and I think I'll explore that in the cultures I create for Sundaland.
The area is also known for various kinds of pygmy animals that evolved on small islands. An example is the Pygmy Elephant
In my last post we saw that there was a substantial amount of savannah and tropical grasslands so it may be the case that there were large herds of roaming herbivores and predators similar to what exists in Africa.
Megafauna
Megafauna are large animals and the term is most often associated with the animals that existed during the last ice-age. This was the time of the wooly mammoths in the Northern hemisphere but large animals existed all over the earth. The possible causes of their eventual extinction are climate change, disease and human hunting. I think this mostly happened before the Early period of the setting but I think there's room for the last remnants of these species to be living in remote jungles and mountain areas.
Some interesting species to include:
Striped Hyena
Homotherium: Scimitar-toothed cat
Smilodon: Sabre-toothed cat
Stegodon: Looks like a tusked Elephant
Gigantopithecus: This is an outlier as it went extinct 100,000 years ago, but very interesting.
It was an ape that was possibly 3m tall.
Hominids
Homo Floresiensis could have lived in the area up to 50,000 years ago. The remains of an individual that was 1.1m / 3.7ft tall were found alongside stone tools. And new research shows substantial mingling of Denisovans with Homo Sapiens Sapiens happened perhaps as recently as 15,000 years ago in what is now Papua New Guinea: We may have bred with Denisovans much more recently than we thought.
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