Nebyetic peoples

The "Nebyetic peoples" is a large umbrella grouping for a wide array of ethnicities that descend from the ancient Nebyeto culture which existed in prehistoric Makutevnag.

=Origin= The earliest traces of the Nebyeto as a distinct grouping goes back into unrecorded history, with signs of a distinct population in the area reaching as far back as !4000SD (!9,000 years before present) where the very earliest Nebyeto lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the humid temperate forests of northern Makutevnag. Their native languages belonged to the Arhwi-Roquai language family and they believed in a pantheon of several gods (See Proto-Nebyetic mythology). By around !2000D (!7,ooo years before present) a number of the population became sedentary when they came into contact with the horticultural Akhopo people who had moved into the area from the south. The Nebyeto started to interact and trade heavily with the Akhopo, with the Nebyeto trading protein rich and fatty meat into return for carbohydrates. While the Akhopo lived in large towns of stone the Nebyeto lived in small villages scattered about in the forest and often times a whole village would up and move to a new area every few years when local resources were depleted. This heavy contact saw many cultural influences which mostly flowed from the Akhopo to the Nebyeto more than the other way around. The small pantheon of the Akhopo mythology had become assimilated into the larger Nebyetic pantheon and by around !1000SD (6,000 years before present) the population of Tagitwi speaking Nebyeto ditched their native language and began speaking Proto-Sumro-Letaeric, the language of the Akhopo, as their primary language.



The coastline of northern Makutevnag looked quite different than how it does today. At around 400AN (4,713 years before present) there was a rise in sea levels which submerged much of the low lying lands in northern Makutevnag. At this time much of the Nebyetic land was lost to the sea as was a deal of the Akhopo land. The image to the right shows the ancient Nebyetic population spread with both ancient and modern coastlines. Their ancient inland territory now exists as a stretch of coastline and some islands.

After some time the Proto-Sumro-Letaeric spoken by the Nebyeto had diverged into its own daughter language called Proto-Sumro-Naukl. The Proto-Sumro-Naukl speakers no longer lived in tiny villages in the forest but rather they took to living in a great cave system when foreign raiders had driven them out of the forests. With Akhopo aid they built a city of stone in a giant cave which the Nebyeto held sacred. They believed that their primary god *gelgaq of the underground lived in this cave and that he would protect them (from *keləskoq in the Proto-Nebyetic pantheon and would become Gilgak in Golden Age mythology). They named the city *gelqakav after their god. After a few generations of living in the cave city they became horticulturalists themselves with the occasional hunting and so their contact with the Akhopo decreased. This shift in lifestyle caused the first major divergence of the Nebyetic people; between the nomadic hunter-gatherer Arhwi-Roquai speakers (North Nebyeto) and the sedentary horticulturalist Proto-Sumro-Naukl speakers (South Nebyeto). The descendants of the latter would go on to spread and diversify to even greater extents in the time to come.



=South Nebyeto= In the modern day none of the South Nebyetic peoples are to be found on mainland Makutevnag. The closest any population comes to that is the Naukl people who live on what is now a large island nation (before the sea level rising it was the northernmost tip of the mainland). The rest of the South Nebyetic people are to be found all over the northern continent Malomanan where they diversified greatly into a number of different ethnicities in a wide array of different habitats, becoming a far cry of the ancient Nebyetic hunter-gatherers of the now sunken forest. Those in Malomanan even look physically different as the grey skin of Homo spargere had become a pale white for them due to such low light conditions far north.

When the South Nebyeto lived in their cave city their society became more heavily based on that of the Akhopo. Their older egalitarian ways of their small villages was replaced by the system of chieftain kings and a priestly class. Their numbers grew in their large city and they lived in relative peace until a super-pack of wolves razed through the area.