Cosmopolitan Age

The Cosmopolitan Age on planet Teppala was a period of time characterized by poor living standards for human beings and a return to a subsistence based way o f life, and increased interaction with animals.

Background

In the centuries leading up to the Cosmopolitan Age, military and political power had been streamlined in the empire of Anzan, which controlled more than half of the human-habitable land in the world, and nearly all of its major cities. When Anzan was torn apart by civil war around 4200 AD, there was no foreign power waiting on the sidelines to take over its role in world affairs. Instead, humans simply no longer had a major military power.

With the collapse of Anzan, human civilization and cooperation fdewll apart. The mountain tribes such as Gala, Ihhai, Litila, and others, reverted to tribal rule instead of cooperating with the lowland powers around them. This meant that the tropics was now cut off from the northern civilization in what had been Repilia.

The period immediately preceding the collapse had seen the center of power shift markedly northward. From the tropics to the NW corner of the continent, as the climate warmed. The climate was still warming, but it was now mostly during winter instead of summer. This meant that the climate was also becoming more habitable fo other animals, including predators of humans.

Humans in the Cosmopolitan Age

Since human society fell apart early in this era, the resulting human societies had little in common. Nevertheless, they all shared some characteristics in common:

1. War was very uncommon, as humans had little to gain for their efforts.
2. Agriculture was mostly confined to the tropics, even though the climate of the north was warming.
3. Human population declined due to massive predation by wild animals. This was nothing new: it was just that the humans living in the areas where they were being eaten the fastest had been living in safe, walled-off cities when the food supply had been sufficient. Now almost all humans were rural and were easy prey for various animals, especially the firebird.
4. Humans began to participate in animals' wars whenever the animals' territory overlapped the humans'.

Humans were not at the top of the food chain. Indeed, they never had been, but as above, during the peaks of human civilization they had been able to hide out from predators in compact cities where even though the firebirds roaming the sky above would have no trouble finding a meal among the thousands of people in the city center, the humans were capable of fending off an attack when they were able to fight back as a team.