From the history we know, it took roughly five centuries for humans to climb out of the Dark Ages, light their first bulbs, invent trains, lift zeppelins into the sky, and start talking about “artificial intelligence.” And after that? Barely a quarter of a century before AI became omnipresent, spread across the entire planet. Historical acceleration, if you compare it to what came before.
Now here’s something to think about. Around 12,000 years ago — more or less — the last ice age ended. That ice age had lasted roughly 100,000 years. And before that? We had even more than another 100,000 years of human existence where, according to what we think we know, nothing comparable to modern progress happened. Modern science tells us that the oldest Homo sapiens skeleton discovered so far dates back about 300,000 years.
In our time, we’ve built rockets, nuclear plants, sent people to the Moon. Back then? Almost nothing — or at least, nothing we’ve found yet.
Maybe the silence of those more than 300,000 years wasn’t emptiness at all, but something we no longer remember. A first civilization that rose before the last ice age, reached its own peak, and then vanished under a hundred thousand years of ice. A small number of its people were kept alive — frozen at the height of their world — and when the ice finally releases them, nothing of that world is left. No cities, no tools, no records. Only their bodies, their memories, and a landscape that treats them like any other animal.
This story follows those people: not as chosen heroes, not as mythic founders, but as modern minds forced to survive in true wilderness, where every idea of comfort, progress, or “civilization” has to prove it can keep a human being alive one more day.
