Settings: 100,000 BC

Although An Unearthly Child is marketed as a single story, and was produced and directed as such, it involves two quite different settings and there’s a notable change in tone between the first episode and the subsequent three. Those three episodes give us our first exotic setting to explore, even if it’s one that we wouldn’t normally associate with a science fiction show. For that reason, I’ll treat it separately from the first episode here, and I’ll likely do something similar for other stories that spend significant time in more than one setting, such as The Chase. 

Where & When

Based solely on internal evidence, there is no way to date the setting of the story much more precisely than ‘the Stone Age’. This is a vast stretch of time, perhaps 99% of the whole of human history, depending on your definition. However, we know that the writer envisaged the date as 100,000 BC and that that was even the title used in some early BBC publicity in the days before the serials had onscreen titles. The geographical location is even vaguer, and, again based solely on the story as televised, we can’t even be confident it’s on Earth, since the DW universe has many alien races physically indistinguishable from humans. However, it’s clear that that’s not the intent, so “somewhere on Earth, approximately, 100,000 BC” it is.

Setting

Despite the lack of unequivocal evidence, we can, however, make some reasonable inferences. For example, the landscape is dominated by scrubby bush and stunted trees, so we’re neither in the tundra nor anywhere with thick pine forest. Significantly, the cavemen are not (at least on the visible evidence) Neanderthals or some other not-quite-human species. In 100,000 BC, the only place outside of Africa where modern humans are known to have been living was the Middle East, which does fit somewhat with what we see of the landscape. Granted, they probably weren’t white although, since they died out without leaving any known descendants, it’s difficult to say what they did look like. (The ancestors of Europeans left Africa much later, around 70,000 BC, and presumably weren’t white at first, either). 

But, of course, the geographic setting of the TV story doesn’t really matter. For the purposes of a game using similar concepts, we can be anywhere that “cavemen” might have been found, and pretty well any date before the dawn of agriculture around 10,000 BC will do. Even dates later than that will work if the location is isolated enough from early Neolithic communities, although some aspects of the original story do become a bit of a stretch at that point. But, for example, modern humans advancing into Europe around 40,000 BC would work perfectly well and is plausibly what the original writer intended. For that matter, it’s not as if there weren’t “cavemen” in eastern and southern Asia – although Stone Age times in the Americas and Australia may bring to mind a different aesthetic that doesn’t really fit. 

One could also argue that maybe they are intended to be Neanderthals, despite not looking like even the earlier conceptions of such people, with heavy brows and so on. Some of the ways that they act could be taken as implying they aren’t quite human, not grasping concepts such as “friendship”. And, as noted above, the story could even be set on an alien planet. Races such as Trions, Trakenites, and so forth must have had a Stone Age at some point in their early history and, technologically and culturally speaking, there’s no reason to suppose it would have to have been greatly different from ours.

But, for our purposes, we’re sticking with the official date and assuming that the tribe are regular, if primitive, humans. What can we say about the world 102,000 years ago? For a start, we can look at the climate. This is during the Last Ice Age, but virtually any map you’re likely to see of Ice Age Earth will show it at the height of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 25,000 BC. 100,000 BC is obviously much earlier than that; it was a time when the glaciers were extensive, but less so than they would be later. Sure, any given spot on Earth was likely colder than it is now, but even at the LGM, most of the world wasn’t covered in snow and ice. So, we have a fair bit of leeway in interpreting what the weather of the setting would be like, even before we account for the fact that we don’t know whether it’s summer or winter.

What about the wildlife? Here, we have some evidence from the story itself. We see the skull of a horse, a dead boar (or possibly warthog), and the skin of what looks to have been a leopard. All of which are plausible for the date and time. The tribespeople are wearing animal skins, that must have come from something with thick fur, but it’s hard to say what this might have been. 

Homotherium

From a gaming perspective, however, the significant animal is the unidentified predator that attacks Za. Fan opinion most often holds that this is a sabretooth cat, but we never see it, so there’s no direct evidence. If it is, it wouldn’t be Smilodon, since that was an American animal about as likely to be found in the Middle East as a wild jaguar, but the lion-sized sabretooth Homotherium is a local option. This had shorter teeth than its more famous cousin, but it was still deadly, and while we have no firm evidence that it lived in the area at the time, we can’t definitively say that it didn’t, since some certainly lived in Europe until as late as 30,000 BC. 

Not that the unnamed beast has to be a sabretooth, of course. More realistically, it could be a lion or a cave hyena, both of which were found in the area and neither of which you’d really want to get in a fight with. But, in fairness, from a gaming perspective, a sabretooth is much cooler and who would want to miss the chance of seeing one?

Culturally, the relevant date falls during the Middle Palaeolithic, tens of thousands of years earlier than, say, the Lascaux cave paintings. Tribes were likely small and widely dispersed at the time, although this was still true much later. In this case, we see around a dozen tribespeople, including a few children, but, without fire, the tribe could be in decline, so perhaps others are a little larger. So far as they know, the nearest other tribe are “beyond the mountains”, which certainly implies a low population density.

The weapons we see used are hafted hand axes, spears, and crude stone “knives” and the latter two of these certainly fit with the presumed date. We’re much too early, for example, for bows, although if people were using slings back then, it’s hard to see how we’d know. In general, this is, of course, a very primitive technology and it won’t change much for many millennia to come. 

Widespread use of fire began no later than 250,000 BC, so how likely it is that anyone would have forgotten how to make it by the date here is debatable at best. Nor is it easy to see how successful a chieftain could be at restricting the knowledge when they’re part of a small close-knit group that could surely see what they were up to. But we have what we have.

Finally, we can address the local geography. There are four locations in the story: the cave complex where the tribe lives, the smaller, isolated, “cave of skulls” nearby, the open semi-desert where the TARDIS materialises, and the “forest of fear”. The proximity of the last two is surprising, and it’s notable that the forest looks quite tropical, with palms and the like – despite Susan claiming that the weather is cold. There even appear to be monkeys in it, judging by the sounds we hear. The latter may be a stretch, but we can perhaps justify the forest in general by saying that it’s an oasis, maybe in a sheltered depression with the caves in the cliffs along one edge. At least the tribe won’t be short of water.

Scenario

Much of the original story focuses on the interactions between the cavemen as they struggle to decide who should lead them and how they are going to rediscover the art of making fire. From the protagonist/PCs’ perspective, it’s a capture/escape/recapture story, with a moral question thrown in about whether to help the injured Za.

One can easily imagine different, and perhaps broader, stories using the same basic setting in other science fiction genres. In such games, the PCs are likely to be better prepared and equipped for dealing with the situation than the Doctor and companions are in the original unless they are constrained in some other way. 

Nonetheless, the idea works even without time travel. Most alien races that have any resemblance to humans are likely to go through some sort of Stone Age period. Indeed, if one encounters a sentient tool-using race at a random point in its development then, logically, it’s far more likely to be Stone Age than anything else. In practice, that would probably make for an uninteresting (or perhaps just very unusual) game setting so such worlds are going to be rare in most games – as they are in, say, Traveller.

In Star Trek, one can imagine beaming down to a planet inhabited by a Stone Age race, and perhaps being trapped there by an ion storm or something. If they encountered a tribe that had lost the art of fire, it could lead to a debate about the Prime Directive – does it count as affecting their development if they once had the technology, but forgot it? They’re going to die eventually without it, but perhaps if we can confirm there’s another tribe out there who still have fire, giving it to this one won’t be such an issue. And so on.

In a different time travel game, the story could involve the characters being there for some other reason entirely, and having to avoid affecting the development of the cavemen. That needn’t necessarily involve fire, but one could imagine a story where the tribe died out due to lack of fire in the original timeline, and the PCs have to wrestle with their conscience to let that play out to its grim conclusion.

There are also the wild animals, of course, and the perils of a setting where even the most basic assistance from civilised society simply doesn’t exist yet. What party of PCs doesn’t have at least one member who’d relish pitting themselves against a sabretooth cat?

Rules

In any game system that has tech levels, the Stone Age is almost always the lowest one, usually rated at 0, as if it represents a society that doesn’t have technology yet. From a detailed archaeological/palaeontological point of view that’s not really true, as the division of the Stone Age into (at a minimum) Early Palaeolithic, Middle Palaeolithic, Late Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic shows. But in many game respects, the Stone Age is defined primarily by what it doesn’t have. That’s metalwork generally, of course, but in the case of the Middle Palaeolithic, we can (probably) add such things as arrows, boats, pottery, and buildings to the list.

From a rules perspective, the things this is most likely to affect are weapons and armour. In the setting we have here, the closest thing we get to armour is heavy furs, which would count as minimal armour in some systems but might not be worth even that much in others. As for weapons, the question is whether a stone-tipped spear is different enough from a regular one to require different stats (probably not, unless the system is particularly detailed) and how effective a sharp stone is going to be. 

Which is likely “not very” or we’d never have invented daggers. In 5E, for instance, maybe it’s d3 slashing damage, and a light weapon without the advantage of finesse (not being easy to hold compared with a knife). On the other hand, in a system like Savage Worlds, that doesn’t care about the difference between sharp and blunt and where nothing can do less than d4 damage, it may be equivalent to a small club.

Otherwise, we need stats for a sabretooth cat, or equivalent creature if the world isn’t actually Earth. This is the sort of thing that exists in many generic systems anyway – and, in most, the difference between Smilodon and Homotherium isn’t worth worrying about. For what it’s worth, there’s even less difference between the extinct cave hyena and the modern spotted hyena and when I say that lions lived in the Middle East at this time, I mean the same sort that we have today. Of course, a story set further north would almost certainly want an encounter with a mammoth or a woolly rhino as well which, again, many generic systems already provide.

[Homotherium illustration by Sergiodlarosa, from Wikimedia Commons.]