Villages

"It takes a village to raise a child."

— Unknown Ancient Politician

An oral and written tradition that is strongly supported by various pieces of archeological evidence acquired by scroungers presents us with a historical picture of ancient Eryia that is wildly at odds with today's social fabric. It certainly seems true that humans used to live much longer than today's typical life expectancy of 30 years. The tales of chaos, riots, and government disintegration from the time of the Great Poisoning would make no sense without these supporting stories of human longevity. What is fascinating is the social contract that that human longevity seems to support.

Ancient Social Structures

The basic structure of the society of early humans was the construct of the family. In it, a set of parents one male, one female, had the primary responsibility for raising a child to functioning adulthood - a process that takes twenty years. The family was inherently stable because parents - the mother who birthed the child, and the father who inseminated the mother - would live long enough to raise the child to adulthood before dying. This is a logical structure as the immediate biological ancestors have the most to gain in seeing their bloodline in the form of their children continue as a form of physical and even spiritual "eternal life". Even today, the care, attention, and willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of the child's best interests is most often greater in birth parents than in any other humans, and such a structure supports the optimization of the continued existence of humankind into the future.

Ancient humans took this concept of the family to the extreme of a single female and male committing to each other as life partners (which traditionally was often as long as 80 years, though most scholars doubt that number) raising multiple children to adulthood and supporting and caring for each other throughout their lives into what was surely a decrepit old age. There are frequent tales of parents knowing their children's children well into middle age, and even (reputedly) some knowing their children's children children in young childhood.

Today's social base unit of the village was considered a secondary or even tertiary supporting structure to the core familiy unit. The most close analogy for the ancients to the village we know today would be what they termed the "extended family".

The Evolution of the Modern Village

The Impacts of Magichem Poisoning on Human Fertility

When the Jordbani occurred and humans began living shorter and shorter lifespans due to Magichem Poisoning , these ancient familly forms were placed under immense pressure. Life expectancy, even if one were to assume a typical original lifespan of 50 years, was shortening, and the birth parents were barely able to raise a child to adulthood. It is well documented by historical medical records on the effects of chronic Magichem Poisoning that the onset of puberty occurred much earlier in life, beginning at a mean age of thirteen with a standard distribution of nine months, far different from today's mean of nineteen with a standard distribution of one year. This effect happened much faster than the shortening of lifespan. In addition, Magichem poisoning decreases the fertility of humans, causing early aging of reproductive systems and higher rates of infertility and birth defects due to higher abnormal egg and sperm formation, and failures in implantation and ability of the female to carry a child to term. The effects were more profound for females than males. The number of years that females were fertile for shortened dramatically, with ancient medical records showing a decrease in fertile years from a mean of twenty years to ten.

Thus, birth parents saw their children become fertile and able to reproduce much later in life than previously, and those children were less capable of procreating. As a result, the traditional family unit shrunk in size as females had fewer fertile years in which to become pregnant and bear children to term. This was not initially perceived as a problem as other social norms had kept the average family size of the average family small (2.3 children per family unit), but with this lag in the onset of fertility, a shortened fertile period, and reduced fertility rate, the birth rate dropped well below population replacement (0.9 children per family unit), a huge problem for social stability and economic health.

Shortened Life Expectancy and the Collapse of the Family

Had decreased fertility been the only impact of Magichem Poisoning, we would probably all still be living in these single couple family units. However, Magichem Poisoning is far more devastating to human beings than that. At the same time that fertility was decreasing, lifespan was also decreasing. It took approximately 500 years for lifespan to collapse to forty years, and at that point it became fairly common for children to lose their parents in their late teenage years. This created a huge problem. Teenagers have not fully developed their cognitive capabilities and social skills. There is some evidence that Magichem Poisoning delays not just the maturing of fertility systems in the human body, but also cognitive development. Parents struggled to equip their children for life before they died, but the family unit stayed intact. Extended families did become much more important in the raising of children as the birth parents died earlier leaving children to fend for themselves. Relatives, particularly younger siblings of the parents would take up the child rearing responsibilities until the children were able to provide for themselves and became adults. Adoption and an ancient tradition of selecting Godparents who would inherit responsibility for their child if the parent should die while the child was under the age of adulthood.

The importance of these two ancient but largely unused traditions escalated as financial and decision making responsibility of orphaned children became a common problem, and one that responsible parents were attempting to grapple with before they died.

The traditional family completely collapsed when life expectancy fell to 35 years, though there are some shreds of it left in early childhood today. This is particularly true amongst females in whom the biological drive to nurture infants is a critical component to human reproduction and survival given the complete defenselessness and helplessness of infants.

Children who had no caregivers when their parents died ended up on the street or holed up in ancient apartment buildings where they frequently starved to death, being unable to effectively find or prepare food. Cannibalism of dead children by their siblings became common practice among these child run communities. Child run families and larger bands of these orphaned children did what they could to replace missing parents, but as the problem of orphaned children became more widespread, the collapse of the family was recognized as the crisis it was. Middles and Elders realized that even if they were able to prepare for their own death and the impact on their children, the masses of uncivilized and almost feral communities of children that had developed would make the future for their own offspring grim.

The movement to restructure the family was led by Elisapeth Fortune and Tabia Haleydoter who met and worked among their local community to establish better care for these orphaned children. They convinced their local community Middles and Elders to participate in a new structure they termed "the Village" based loosely on the traditional family/extended family structure but expanding the concept to encompass a community wide care net for all orphaned children in a territory in their paper A Structural Proposal for the Care and Civilization of Children. This paper laid out definitions of "child" (prepubescent individuals) and "adult" (individuals who are over the age of 20 or fertile), and broke human maturity levels into "child" (individuals up to the age of twelve), "middles" (individuals between the ages of 12 and 24), and "elders" (individuals over the age of 24). It established relationships and responsibilities of each group and suggested traditions and practices to be adopted into local communities. Their proposal was generally accepted and forms the foundation of modern societies.