Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
Two Krynoid pods landed in Antarctica in the Late Pleistocene Period, twenty to thirty thousand years ago. They remained dormant in the Antarctic permafrost until the twentieth century.
[279]
The older religions on the planet Vortis claimed that “the light” made the universe and the sky, but a being named Pwodarauk made time and the ground so that things might wither but also grow. The first Menoptera, Hruskin, went to Pwodarauk and described the world she envisioned for her offspring. They agreed that slaves would build the temples for the light and raise harvests while the Menoptera enjoyed themselves, and so Pwodarauk made the Zarbi.
[280]
Humans hunted centaurs (an “extremely unpleasant lot”) to extinction.
[281]
Around 16,000 BC, Sancreda, a scout of the Tregannon - an alien race with great mental powers - was marooned on Neolithic Earth.
[282]
Around 15,000 BC, the Urbankans returned to Earth. They kidnapped the princess Villagra.
[283]
Circa 13,000 BC, the Canavitchi of the Pleiades begin conquering neighbouring star systems, building an empire that would eventually stretch over seven galaxies.
[284]
The being named Martin was born on Frantige Two, a dull planet and home to a species with an extraordinarily long lifespan. He would live fourteen thousand years into the twenty-first century.
[285]
Circa 9000 BC, Traken outgrew its dependency on robots.
[286]
Around 8000 BC, the Euterpian civilisation died out.
[287]
Around the same time, the Jex from Cassiopeia started their conquests. They would eventually dominate several galaxies, including a planet in the Rifta system where the Doctor encountered them.
[288]
The wolf-like Valethske had worshipped the insectile Khorlthochloi as gods, but the Khorlthochloi believed the Valethske were becoming too dominant. They destroyed the Valethske warfleets, and released a plague that devastated the race. The Khorlthochloi later abandoned their physical bodies for a higher plane of existence. A threat to their new forms made the Khorlthochloi try to reunite with their bodies, but this proved impossible, as the bodies had become too independent. The threat killed the Khorlthochloi’s minds, but their bodies lived on as sedate herds of giant beetles.
[289]
About ten thousand years ago, the inhabitants of a dying planet encoded everything about their world - including genetic information on its plant life, animal life and inhabitants - onto a crystal. This was dispatched via a slow-travelling spaceship to another solar system, where the crystal would rebuild their civilisation. Half the races in the universe coveted the crystal, and its transport was obliterated. The Doctor acquired the crystal, but its magnetic fields prevented it from undergoing time travel. He deposited it for safekeeping in Earth’s past; various royalty would guard it for millennia.
[290]
Around ten thousand years ago, humanity developed the wheel - with a helping hand from Scaroth.
[291]
The leaders of the Silence claimed to have ruled the Earth “since the wheel and fire”.
[292]
Legends spoke of how the Ice Warriors built an empire on Mars out of snow. The Doctor suspected that they found something - a malevolent entity that lived in water and
created
water - and used their might and wisdom to freeze it in the underground glacier in Gusev Crater on Mars.
[293]
The Ice Warrior Civilisation Collapses
Flowers last grew on Mars around ten thousand years ago.
[294]
The tenth Doctor and Martha visited the Frozen Castles of the Ice Warriors.
[295]
The Ice Warrior language had the dialect Ancient North Martian.
[296]
Some Ice Warriors were herbivorous, others ate glacier fish from the polar regions.
[297]
(=) Martians were superstitious about Pandas, owing to a legend from the dawn of their history, which said that a Panda deity visited them in a scarlet chariot from the stars.
[298]
c 8000 BC - The Judgement of Isskar
[299]
Mars had prospered as a world of builders, craftsmen and farmers for twelve thousand years. The whole of the planet was criss-crossed with waterways, and while the Martians had learned to hunt, they didn’t fight one another and had yet to experience warfare. The Martians thought themselves protected by their gods, and had a gift economy in which water and other goods were offered for free; a strict code of honour demanded that something be given in return. Alien visitors were rare, but not unknown. A town on the Martian equator was home to a pyramid that had taken nineteen thousand masons, six hundred carpenters and forty-six overseers to complete.
The fifth Doctor and the living Key-tracer Amy visited Mars during the second quest for the Key to Time. The segment was undergoing decay and formed a gravity well through the middle of Mars, generating earthquakes and boiling away the canals. The Doctor and Amy left with the segment, preventing it from forming a black hole. The warped gravity eventually corrected itself, but the Martian environment was left permanently altered. Millions died as earthquakes and hurricanes persisted for thirty years. Some Martians left their world during this time.
As Mars’ ecology went into decline, some Ice Warriors entered hibernation in caverns on the Martian moon of Deimos. Another group went to sleep in the asteroid belt.
[300]
The Martians who remained on Mars wanted to rebuild their world, but Lord Izdal concluded that the cause was lost, and that the Martian atmosphere could no longer filter out deadly radiation. To prove this, Izdal gave himself to the Red Dawn - the time of day when the atmosphere was the most toxic. Izdal’s sacrifice, as witnessed by the magistrate Isskar, convinced the Martians to abandon their homeworld. Isskar himself entered cryogenic suspension, hoping to exact revenge upon the Doctor for his role in Mars’ decline.
[301]
The Doctor visited the tombs on Mars.
[302]
In the Prion system, the Zolfa-Thurans developed a powerful weapon. When the Dodecahedron, a power-source, was aligned with the giant Screens of Zolfa-Thura, an energy beam - “a power many magnitudes greater than any intelligence has ever controlled” - was formed. The beam was capable of obliterating any point in the galaxy.
Zolfa-Thura fell into bloody civil war, and everything on the planet’s surface except the Screens was devastated. The Dodecahedron was taken to Zolfa-Thura’s sister-planet, Tigella, where the Deons worshipped it.
[303]
A crystal sculpture was made of Arincias, one of the lost gods of Atlantis.
[304]
Two factions of evolved spiders lived on the planet Jaiwan: the Alpha spiders were a federation of cultures, but the Omega spiders - calling themselves the Laughing People, a.k.a. The Way of Life that Works - sought to eradicate the Alphas. The Omega spiders diverted an asteroid toward Jaiwan, then sabotaged the Alphans’ efforts to deflect it. The Omegas went into hibernation, intending to ride out the devastation and awaken to claim the planet, but some Alphans survived in cryo-sleep.
[305]
Jack Harkness suggested that Norwegians, the Scottish, the Irish, the Danish and the Icelandic all had a bit of alien inheritance, owing to a spaceship that crashed in Iceland. The ship had been looking for volcanoes, and originated from somewhere near Pyrovillia.
[306]
Around 6000 BC, the humanoid Thains, arch-enemies of the Kleptons, died out.
[307]
Circa 5900 BC, the inhabitants of Proxima 2 created the Centraliser, which linked them telepathically.
[308]
Around 5500 BC, the Urbankans visited Earth for the third time. The Urbankans kidnapped the mandarin Lin Futu, along with a number of dancers.
[309]
A new “framily” formed inside a space-faring Ghaleen that the sixth Doctor and Peri would encounter.
[310]
The Mogor, a warlike race, lived on Mekrom.
[311]
The “hammies”, inhabitants of Tollip’s World, developed a symbiotic relationship with a type of indigenous flora: the Trees of Life. The Trees engineered a virus to wipe out some ape-like predators, but this killed all animal life on the planet. The hammies merged their bodies with Trees, waiting for the virus to burn itself out, but the slow-thinking Trees forgot to revive their charges.
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Pre-History Section Sidebars
When Did the Silurians Rule the Earth?
There are a number of contradictory accounts in the TV episodes and the tie-in series of when the Silurian civilisation existed, and it’s impossible to reconcile them with each other, let alone against scientific fact.
A lot of the dating references are vague:
Doctor Who and the Silurians
says the Silurians “ruled the planet millions of years ago”.
The Scales of Injustice
states the Silurians existed “millions of years” and “a few million years” ago, but also uses the term “millennia”.
Bloodtide
says it was “many hundreds of thousands of years ago” and “over a million years ago”.
Eternity Weeps
shows the arrival of the moon in Earth orbit. However, it’s inconsistent with its dating, stating that this happened both “twenty million” (p127) and “200 million” (p117) years ago. In
The Hungry Earth
, the Doctor says that a Silurian is “300 million years out of [her] comfort zone”.
Ironically, the one thing we can safely rule out is that the Silurians are from the actual Silurian Era, around 438 to 408 million years ago. Life on Earth’s surface was limited to the first plants, and the dominant species were coral reefs. The first jawed fishes evolved during this era. If nothing else, in terms of
Doctor Who
continuity (according to
City of Death
), this is before life on Earth starts. It’s Dr. Quinn who coins the name “Silurian” in
Doctor Who and the Silurians
. Despite the name being scientifically inaccurate, everyone at Wenley Moor - including the Doctor - uses it. We don’t learn what the reptile people call themselves, but the Doctor calls them “Silurians” to their face and they don’t correct him. The on-screen credits also use the term.
In
The Sea Devils
, when Jo calls the reptile people “Silurians”, the Doctor replies, “That’s a complete misnomer. The chap that discovered them must have got the period wrong. Properly speaking, they should have been called the Eocenes”. Yet the Doctor never uses the “correct” term. The novelisation of
Doctor Who and the Silurians
(called
The Cave Monsters
) called them “reptile people”, and the word “Silurian” only appears as a UNIT password. The description “sea devil” is coined by Clark, the terrified sea fort worker in
The Sea Devils
, and the term appears in the on-screen credits for all six episodes. Captain Hart refers to them as “Sea Devils” as though that’s their name. For the rest of the story, the humans tend to call them “creatures” while the Doctor and Master refer to them as “the people”.
By
Warriors of the Deep
and
Blood Heat
, however, the reptiles have adopted the inaccurate human terms for their people.
Bloodtide
starts with a flashback where Silurians refer to themselves by that name in their own era. In
Love and War
, we learn that the Silurians of the future “liked to be called Earth Reptiles now”, and that term is also used in a number of other novels. The designation “homo reptilia” that crops up in a number of places is scientifically illiterate. In
Blood Heat,
the Doctor uses the term “psionsauropodomorpha”.
In
Doctor Who and the Silurians
, Quinn has a globe of the Earth showing the continents forming one huge land mass, the implication being that it’s the world the Silurians would have known.
The Scales of Injustice
follows this cue. Scientists call this supercontinent Pangaea, and date it to 250 to 200 million years ago. Again, this seems too early, as it predates the time of the dinosaurs.
That said, while most fans have assumed - and the tie-in media stories have often stated - that the Silurians come from the same time as the dinosaurs (around 165 to 65 million years ago, according to science,
Benny: The Adolescence of Time
and the Doctor in
Earthshock
), there is no evidence on screen that the Silurians were contemporaries of any known dinosaur species. In
Doctor Who and the Silurians
, the Silurians have a “guard dog” that’s a mutant, five-fingered species of tyrannosaur that the Doctor can’t identify, and in
Warriors of the Deep,
we see the lumbering Myrka. Likewise, while it seems obvious to cite the extinction of the dinosaurs and the fall of Silurian civilisation as owing to the same events, it’s not a connection that’s ever made on screen. Indeed, we know from
Earthshock
that the dinosaurs were wiped out in completely different circumstances than the catastrophe that made the Silurians enter hibernation.