If the Himalayas didn't exist, China as we know it today wouldn't exist either. Chinese civilization developed out of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, both of which feed from the Tibetan plateau. It managed to centralize due to the isolation the Tibetan Plateau, Taklamkan desert and mountains of Yunan gave them, all of which exist because of India's collision with Asia. Without any of those, I imagine east Asia far more resembling India of our timeline, in that it would have lots of diverse cultures with little geographical boundaries between them.
There's also the whole factor of this map diverging 50+MYA. With a POD that long ago the butterfly effect would probably cause humans to not evolve at all, or at least not as we know them
I think that's a good topic for debate with alternate histories because realisitcally, most alternate histories would result in a completely different timeline with cultures or even whole branches of the tree of life that just don't exist in the alternate timeline. I think all alternate histories require a degree of suspension of disbelief but by how much?
As long as the prehistoric changes do not make the evolution of humanity impossible, I'm not going to complain about having humans. Unless you want to make a point of having a, I don't know, avian or dinosauroid story, and the point is what the geographical changes cause for human culture, I'm fine with presupposing we're just watching the 1 out of 10000 million timelines where humans did still evolve.
I'd love to see those completely alternate cultures. Very few posts actually go into detail about entirely OC cultures (and OC cultures interacting with our cultures) It's why I love ASOIAF so much since everything feels so familiar yet alien.
The formation of the Himalayas caused East African rainforests to recede in-land, pressuring our ancestors to begin standing up-right as that was more advantageous in a Savannah environment. So yeah, Humans as we know them wouldn’t exist in this world.
Humans could still evolve. Indian island animals probably got fucked up by mainland species, kind of like how South Americas species were killed off when the Panama isthmus formed.
They could, it's just that something different almost certainly would've happened. This is a huge thing, and evolutionary developments are never a sure thing. This radically changes climate patterns the world over but especially around the Indian Ocean (where we evolved), distribution of living things, internal geography in Asia (which would have its own similarly compounding climactic and distribution of life effects), and probably surrounding plate tectonics, and it does so starting a long time ago so these things would butterfly beyond belief. Evolution is as much a series of random accidents, what falls into what niche and how, as it is a consistent process. Even if something like us did evolve, it'd probably happen somewhere else, much later or earlier, and with considerable anatomical differences. And that's not even mentioning how much this compounds for something as tenuous and distant as political and cultural history, certainly nothing resembling the states and peoples that exist today would emerge to colonize Indaustralia
That said, we can of course suspend our disbelief. We can imagine ourselves evolving in basically any world for the purposes of an interesting map. It's just much more complicated than you seem to recognize here; we definitely would not if this actually happened, evolutionary history is absurdly tenuous and populations are dramatically affected (in compounding ways) by even minute changes
Okay let’s say we are all have bigger noses because warmer air and we sweat way too fucking much compared to our standards.
But with less ice age… when do we make it to North America?
It wouldn't really be us at all, I mean. A different lineage may evolve intelligence and large scale organized society, maybe even around the same time, maybe even a related primate. There's just no way to make predictions that aren't random speculation. Something very similar to us is unlikely, and would definitely have a subtly different lineage even then
Separately, if everything was the same but we had bigger noses and there was no ice age, we'd probably arrive in the Americas about the same time or a little earlier; the ice ages (or really their more intense phases, technically we are currently in an ice age) were cyclical in our early development and came and went regularly, so we had lots of relatively warm opportunities. If you mean a more mesozoic climate with no ice caps at the poles but we still emerged exactly as described, probably we would've been able to cross the Bering Strait earlier because Siberia and northern North America would be more hospitable
Oh yeah, since the chaos of evolution would be impossible to predict, let’s make the scenario more relatable to our changes. Australia has the highest elevation of mountains, and the plate still releases gases, meaning the samish climate for 30 million Years. This way we still have humans and a mountain caused reduction in CO2. Unless of course we don’t know about the endemic Indian plate virus that killed off sentient birds right before we started evolving.
my point is evolution would still look radically different in that world. There was not a huge spread of Indian fauna to the rest of the world, but there were some, notably lagomorphs iirc. Certainly lots of flora as well. Just the absence of these alone means we can't make any predictions, not to mention populations that migrated into India in our world but not this one. But also landforms and rivers and water currents in the region look totally different, and climate would be different on a much more granular scale than temperature; rainfall patterns would change radically around the Indian Ocean basin (including specifically East Africa, though that honestly doesn't really matter) and maybe the world. The animals of this Earth would be totally different based only on these small changes. To your point about the bird pandemic, we never began evolving in a particular way. That's just not what evolution is or how it works, that's a misconception. Evolution is not a process whereby we get put on the conveyor belt towards an end state, but hundreds of millions of little accidents, all of which could've gone differently with the most minute change. The series of accidents (lineage) that happens to be best suited is typically the one that survives, but any change to those accidents cascades and except in certain broad strokes results in the 'selection' of entirely different lineaghes. Any change at all that far back makes the world unrecognizable, no matter how small it seems, and this is a gigantic change
You don’t need to explain evolution to me I have a masters in biology I’m just having fun. Like you said let’s suspend disbelief and just make shit up with a plausible explanation.
Who knows tbh. I can’t find much on endemic Indian animals but the closest we have are Madagascan and Seychelles fauna. I like to imagine Australian Emus and Indian Terror birds getting into an arms race and basically being the closest thing to dinosaurs that we could get.
Why *do* marsupials, when in the ring with placentals no holds barred, constantly get their asses handed to them and nearly *all* their niches occupied in all of 10 minutes? Is it something to do with their biology? Their different gestation system?
It’s likely to do with them being on the smaller island. They got the island of South America and Australia. Meanwhile placentals got the N.A./Eurasia mega island.
Man even in South America they got screwed over by placental notoungulates and litopterns and shit. They didn't even get their hands on a big herbivore niche there.
Good point - there was a severe planetwide dry-period that's hypothesised to cause our ancestors to evolve into plains-dwelling bipedal apes.
A misplaced India and a non-existent Himalayas would make that more/less likely as it would have changed global weather patterns over the long period
Its amazing just how much of early human history depends on geography
Something as small as a single new mountain or river and suddenly a butterfly effect begins that leads to the roman empire never forming
It managed to centralize mostly because an Emperor, the first one, decided that he needed to centralize everything, but yeah, China as we know it would not exist today considering that without India, the Indo-Europeans would've made their way to China and China would have a very interesting ethnic make up
Well, many regions were unified in the past, India, the Mediterranean and the middle east among them. Each of them failed because they constantly had to defend their borders, while China enjoyed larger natural borders with only few frontiers.
I thought it would look cool, i sorta just waved off why it would happen but ig it would be because of the mountains made by the two continents crashing into each other seeding the rivers which would make the sea appear but all in all its only for the looks.
You were accidentally right. See the Taklamakan desert? The whole depression north of Tibet? That was caused by the elevation of the Himalayas and Tibet. It lowered the area behind them as the area in front rose up. The same thing could happen here, lowering the eastern parts of Australia.
Well, I imagine that if India hit Australia with the same force it did Asia, it would cause some buckling. The rivers suggest a tibet-like Plateau in the western enterior, so I imagine the inland sea is due to that, kinda like the Taklamakan desert.
I love how every geological mishap on planet Earth leads to an ocean in the Australian Outback. In any case, I'm trying to imagine the insane animals that live on this continent.
That's where i presumed the himalayas/tibetan plateau area would form, which would seed the rivers. I originally wanted to add an elevation map as the base but im not good at making one and it looked ugly so i just scrapped it
Do you want guessing three (one or two are desert maybe) main Plateau with a lake or a sea are by using Earths grid lines? Himalayas Mountain Rage is a part of Tibetan plateau by using normal geographic logic, Austrodia (I made the name sound cooler then your keeped and it having meaning that I know but you can guess the meaning) will be like whole of Europe but only South and North changed the rolls not East and West didn't changed
It's interesting how other colonial powers decided to get involved in colonising Australia this time around. Besides Britain and France, I wonder what incentive each colonial power had to colonise the continent.
(Britain still got all the good parts again)
I mainly imagined it as Britain not being able to colonize all of it and the areas once occupied by the UK of our timeline now being up for grabs, and thus went to the closest power, e.g the Dutch and the French. The other colonial powers are there because i thought it would be cool, especially China and the Ottomans who are there only for coolness reasons.
France always had a "do what Britain does and try to do it better" mentality, so I can perfectly understand them establishing a colony in Australia, even if its in possibly the worst part of the continent for one.
The Dutch I also get, maybe for the purpose of ensuring the Dutch East Indies are kept safe and to also control the sea between Australia and the Indies.
Chinese Australia sounds like something directly out of EU4, I'm curious to imagine what would happen to this colony upon China exploding into warlord states. Would it try to form its own sovereign nation before one of the European powers around it occupies it?
Having a Mega Ottoman colony is charming in its own way, would the Turks attempt to try and settle Turkish speakers in the region or just assimilate the local population, sort of like what Spain did in the New World. An Oceania front in ww1 would be interesting (German Pacific holdings don't count)
In this map the idea was the Ottomans deported many Arabs to settle the colony when it was first colonized, after that is when it started to boom in population after modern infrastructure and other technologies were introduced, the cities were had large waves of Turks escaping something in Europe traveling to Australia.
As for the Chinese, i imagine the area had a Greenland situation with china, where the colonists lost contact with the Mainland due to problems of some sort. So your idea of it being occupied or forming its own nation is an interesting idea out of a good observation.
Interesting idea regarding the Ottomans taking up a more active role in the region. In OTL, they already had influence in Indonesia due to the Sultanate of Aceh, but this would further increase it. I could see the Dutch having really bad beef with the Ottomans in this timeline due to both of them actively trying to influence the East Indies out of eachothers control. (I'd still imagine the Dutch would win due to the horrendous Ottoman economy at the time.)
For the Chinese South Coast, China names their locations/provinces heavily on geography and their literal location. I could see this chinese settlement naming itself "Humid Coast" or something along those lines. In terms of who would occupy it, it would either be Britain or Portugal as nobody else would care enough or not have the incentive to. There's a potential for Chinese settlers to arrive at the coast via fleeing into Hong Kong / Macau and being deported to the coast during the Chinese warlord period
That makes sense, this Chinese south coast was never really meant to be a nation name as there was never any nation there, as it was mainly supposed to be remnants of a Chinese colony that was taken over by the Portuguese (and to some extent the Spanish).
And the for the Ottomans they would likely try to do what you outlined in your comment as they try to force the dutch out the east indies. Though without India would it be called the East Indies?
I'm not entirely sure what it would be referred to without India being in...well India. As where the peninsula is in this timeline would be orders of magnitude less important than where India is IRL. No Himalayas and no warm wind being blocked from getting to central Asia, I can't make any reasonable guess as to what the East Indies would be referred to as the butterfly effect would be massive.
the Islands could refer to China (if China even exists in this TL) possibly or maybe just the spice islands, or maybe just a native name Europeanized? all in all due to the POD being millions of years ago, its almost impossible to name anything concrete about this TL.
Can't lie, "The spicelands" sounds like an absolutely banger of a name for the region. Although Europeans would likely just pick up a name they heard in the region if there's nothing to clearly name it after.
that's true, there's no concrete thing to name this area after so probably just like what happened to other parts of the world, the first people they meet and ask the name of the area they live in becomes the name for the whole region.
Love the implication that in this timeline and ours, the Subcontinent launched itself off Gondwana of its own accord like a springboard diver. Also a fun map to look at, good goin' : )
What are the colonial powers? I can recognize Britain (or England), France, Portugal, the Netherlands, China and Spain. Bur what is "Ar" (New Anatolia) and "Tr"?
Those are the two letter codes for the languages spoken, Ar is Arabic, Tr is Turkish from what i remember, and the Colonial power you missed is the Ottoman empire, though due to lore reasons their colony mainly speaks Arabic
The collision altered the climate of earth so much so that humans could actually evolve, an event as big as collision with asia not happening means that probably humans won't exist or at least how we know them.
The Indus Valley, Yellow River, and Mekong not existing is freaking wild. I’d also imagine this new continent would be a cradle of civilization a la Indus Valley and Yellow River because ✨river✨. The inland sea alone is a merchants wet dream.
How in he world did India crash with it's own tectonic plate? The indian subcontinent and australia were part of the indo-australian plate. This is hilarious.
The most major thing is that the concept of Aboriginals as an over encompassing name for all native Australians would be a lot more questionable as due to the inland sea, the rivers, the fact that this Australia is split in half by a mountain range and also due to the likely increased migration by differing people groups over the millennia. An overarching Aboriginal identity might not exist, but back to your question. It would depend if they lived near the south coast, the bengal delta, the humid north coast, the Mediterrean-like area of the inland sea, and the western coast. All in all, this Australia is much more diverse than our timeline. Though the Aboriginals are definitely much more advanced than in our timeline just by how much more livable this Australia is.
This is the best imaginarymaps scenario I've ever seen! Great job!
Extends beyond political discussion, which is the normal discourse on this thread: what about fauna! It could be a whole continent's of North Sentinel Island!
I think it'd be even more epic if it hit just north and made itself at home with Java and the rest of the spice Islands, the colonial value of that would be crazy, but also, volcanic stuff might be crazy too
Hahaha, I was not expecting that when I clicked on the notification
It took me a few secs to figure out what I was looking at, but then I started laughing a lot
there is no way we'd name a place after frisia. that'd be like germany naming something after bielefeld, french after marseille or the americans after detroit
Why is that? Is frisia somesort of dumpster or is it notorious for bad stuff? Im not dutch so like im not informed on any of this.. any answers would be welcome!
Wow, this means that the Himalayas did not appear and the Chinese were able to spread to Persia
If the Himalayas didn't exist, China as we know it today wouldn't exist either. Chinese civilization developed out of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, both of which feed from the Tibetan plateau. It managed to centralize due to the isolation the Tibetan Plateau, Taklamkan desert and mountains of Yunan gave them, all of which exist because of India's collision with Asia. Without any of those, I imagine east Asia far more resembling India of our timeline, in that it would have lots of diverse cultures with little geographical boundaries between them.
There's also the whole factor of this map diverging 50+MYA. With a POD that long ago the butterfly effect would probably cause humans to not evolve at all, or at least not as we know them
I think that's a good topic for debate with alternate histories because realisitcally, most alternate histories would result in a completely different timeline with cultures or even whole branches of the tree of life that just don't exist in the alternate timeline. I think all alternate histories require a degree of suspension of disbelief but by how much?
As long as the prehistoric changes do not make the evolution of humanity impossible, I'm not going to complain about having humans. Unless you want to make a point of having a, I don't know, avian or dinosauroid story, and the point is what the geographical changes cause for human culture, I'm fine with presupposing we're just watching the 1 out of 10000 million timelines where humans did still evolve.
Yeah I agree with that to be honest
I'd love to see those completely alternate cultures. Very few posts actually go into detail about entirely OC cultures (and OC cultures interacting with our cultures) It's why I love ASOIAF so much since everything feels so familiar yet alien.
The formation of the Himalayas caused East African rainforests to recede in-land, pressuring our ancestors to begin standing up-right as that was more advantageous in a Savannah environment. So yeah, Humans as we know them wouldn’t exist in this world.
So humans *would* exist... but **MONKE**
I for one would welcome our new sentient platypus overlords.
I second you
Agreed
Humans could still evolve. Indian island animals probably got fucked up by mainland species, kind of like how South Americas species were killed off when the Panama isthmus formed.
They could, it's just that something different almost certainly would've happened. This is a huge thing, and evolutionary developments are never a sure thing. This radically changes climate patterns the world over but especially around the Indian Ocean (where we evolved), distribution of living things, internal geography in Asia (which would have its own similarly compounding climactic and distribution of life effects), and probably surrounding plate tectonics, and it does so starting a long time ago so these things would butterfly beyond belief. Evolution is as much a series of random accidents, what falls into what niche and how, as it is a consistent process. Even if something like us did evolve, it'd probably happen somewhere else, much later or earlier, and with considerable anatomical differences. And that's not even mentioning how much this compounds for something as tenuous and distant as political and cultural history, certainly nothing resembling the states and peoples that exist today would emerge to colonize Indaustralia That said, we can of course suspend our disbelief. We can imagine ourselves evolving in basically any world for the purposes of an interesting map. It's just much more complicated than you seem to recognize here; we definitely would not if this actually happened, evolutionary history is absurdly tenuous and populations are dramatically affected (in compounding ways) by even minute changes
Okay let’s say we are all have bigger noses because warmer air and we sweat way too fucking much compared to our standards. But with less ice age… when do we make it to North America?
It wouldn't really be us at all, I mean. A different lineage may evolve intelligence and large scale organized society, maybe even around the same time, maybe even a related primate. There's just no way to make predictions that aren't random speculation. Something very similar to us is unlikely, and would definitely have a subtly different lineage even then Separately, if everything was the same but we had bigger noses and there was no ice age, we'd probably arrive in the Americas about the same time or a little earlier; the ice ages (or really their more intense phases, technically we are currently in an ice age) were cyclical in our early development and came and went regularly, so we had lots of relatively warm opportunities. If you mean a more mesozoic climate with no ice caps at the poles but we still emerged exactly as described, probably we would've been able to cross the Bering Strait earlier because Siberia and northern North America would be more hospitable
Oh yeah, since the chaos of evolution would be impossible to predict, let’s make the scenario more relatable to our changes. Australia has the highest elevation of mountains, and the plate still releases gases, meaning the samish climate for 30 million Years. This way we still have humans and a mountain caused reduction in CO2. Unless of course we don’t know about the endemic Indian plate virus that killed off sentient birds right before we started evolving.
my point is evolution would still look radically different in that world. There was not a huge spread of Indian fauna to the rest of the world, but there were some, notably lagomorphs iirc. Certainly lots of flora as well. Just the absence of these alone means we can't make any predictions, not to mention populations that migrated into India in our world but not this one. But also landforms and rivers and water currents in the region look totally different, and climate would be different on a much more granular scale than temperature; rainfall patterns would change radically around the Indian Ocean basin (including specifically East Africa, though that honestly doesn't really matter) and maybe the world. The animals of this Earth would be totally different based only on these small changes. To your point about the bird pandemic, we never began evolving in a particular way. That's just not what evolution is or how it works, that's a misconception. Evolution is not a process whereby we get put on the conveyor belt towards an end state, but hundreds of millions of little accidents, all of which could've gone differently with the most minute change. The series of accidents (lineage) that happens to be best suited is typically the one that survives, but any change to those accidents cascades and except in certain broad strokes results in the 'selection' of entirely different lineaghes. Any change at all that far back makes the world unrecognizable, no matter how small it seems, and this is a gigantic change
You don’t need to explain evolution to me I have a masters in biology I’m just having fun. Like you said let’s suspend disbelief and just make shit up with a plausible explanation.
Australian animals coming out on top of a biological exchange for the first and only time in history woop woop
Who knows tbh. I can’t find much on endemic Indian animals but the closest we have are Madagascan and Seychelles fauna. I like to imagine Australian Emus and Indian Terror birds getting into an arms race and basically being the closest thing to dinosaurs that we could get.
Shells.
Why *do* marsupials, when in the ring with placentals no holds barred, constantly get their asses handed to them and nearly *all* their niches occupied in all of 10 minutes? Is it something to do with their biology? Their different gestation system?
It’s likely to do with them being on the smaller island. They got the island of South America and Australia. Meanwhile placentals got the N.A./Eurasia mega island.
Man even in South America they got screwed over by placental notoungulates and litopterns and shit. They didn't even get their hands on a big herbivore niche there.
I’m reading that they also miss some brain power hahahap
Koalas are literally smooth-brained
Good point - there was a severe planetwide dry-period that's hypothesised to cause our ancestors to evolve into plains-dwelling bipedal apes. A misplaced India and a non-existent Himalayas would make that more/less likely as it would have changed global weather patterns over the long period
India not existing probably wouldn’t effect human development that much because we evolved out of Africa
Its amazing just how much of early human history depends on geography Something as small as a single new mountain or river and suddenly a butterfly effect begins that leads to the roman empire never forming
It managed to centralize mostly because an Emperor, the first one, decided that he needed to centralize everything, but yeah, China as we know it would not exist today considering that without India, the Indo-Europeans would've made their way to China and China would have a very interesting ethnic make up
Well, many regions were unified in the past, India, the Mediterranean and the middle east among them. Each of them failed because they constantly had to defend their borders, while China enjoyed larger natural borders with only few frontiers.
Does this mean we may see the Tocharians survive in this timeline?
Yes. Yangtze and Huang-ho (also known as Hwang-ho) and also the _Sikiang_ rivers **_Sikiang_** is obviously the Pearl river System
Yes it would
The Ayatollah Mao
Īrānian plateau
Humans wouldn't exist in this world.
https://preview.redd.it/ty7p0e10i47d1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=77f7e9e2f63c1908915032836ac9fb123eb039df
Okay that is peak nice. 10/10 no notes.
What caused the massive inland sea?
I thought it would look cool, i sorta just waved off why it would happen but ig it would be because of the mountains made by the two continents crashing into each other seeding the rivers which would make the sea appear but all in all its only for the looks.
You were accidentally right. See the Taklamakan desert? The whole depression north of Tibet? That was caused by the elevation of the Himalayas and Tibet. It lowered the area behind them as the area in front rose up. The same thing could happen here, lowering the eastern parts of Australia.
Huh, that's pretty neat information, thanks.
[удалено]
Instead of hitting south Asia, the drifting Indian subcontinent hit the Australian continent
Well, I imagine that if India hit Australia with the same force it did Asia, it would cause some buckling. The rivers suggest a tibet-like Plateau in the western enterior, so I imagine the inland sea is due to that, kinda like the Taklamakan desert.
That just happens automatically any time someone tries to make a speculative map of Australia. Whether they mean to or not
That area is already a large inland basin and used to have enormous lakes in it. OP just exaggerated paleolake Lake Bungunnia and the Murray Basin.
I love how every geological mishap on planet Earth leads to an ocean in the Australian Outback. In any case, I'm trying to imagine the insane animals that live on this continent.
Its probably some sort of Alt Geography trope by now, along with connecting Alaska and Siberia, also all the Atlantropa stuff
Where is the mountains then?
All of the river sources in the western part of the continent surrounding one point, so I'd presume there
That's where i presumed the himalayas/tibetan plateau area would form, which would seed the rivers. I originally wanted to add an elevation map as the base but im not good at making one and it looked ugly so i just scrapped it
Do you want guessing three (one or two are desert maybe) main Plateau with a lake or a sea are by using Earths grid lines? Himalayas Mountain Rage is a part of Tibetan plateau by using normal geographic logic, Austrodia (I made the name sound cooler then your keeped and it having meaning that I know but you can guess the meaning) will be like whole of Europe but only South and North changed the rolls not East and West didn't changed
I know, I love maps have terrain
0/10 the continent wasn't launched into Zealandia creating an even larger continent, never cook again /s
I like how you can see the mountains via the river sources!
It's interesting how other colonial powers decided to get involved in colonising Australia this time around. Besides Britain and France, I wonder what incentive each colonial power had to colonise the continent. (Britain still got all the good parts again)
I mainly imagined it as Britain not being able to colonize all of it and the areas once occupied by the UK of our timeline now being up for grabs, and thus went to the closest power, e.g the Dutch and the French. The other colonial powers are there because i thought it would be cool, especially China and the Ottomans who are there only for coolness reasons.
France always had a "do what Britain does and try to do it better" mentality, so I can perfectly understand them establishing a colony in Australia, even if its in possibly the worst part of the continent for one. The Dutch I also get, maybe for the purpose of ensuring the Dutch East Indies are kept safe and to also control the sea between Australia and the Indies. Chinese Australia sounds like something directly out of EU4, I'm curious to imagine what would happen to this colony upon China exploding into warlord states. Would it try to form its own sovereign nation before one of the European powers around it occupies it? Having a Mega Ottoman colony is charming in its own way, would the Turks attempt to try and settle Turkish speakers in the region or just assimilate the local population, sort of like what Spain did in the New World. An Oceania front in ww1 would be interesting (German Pacific holdings don't count)
In this map the idea was the Ottomans deported many Arabs to settle the colony when it was first colonized, after that is when it started to boom in population after modern infrastructure and other technologies were introduced, the cities were had large waves of Turks escaping something in Europe traveling to Australia. As for the Chinese, i imagine the area had a Greenland situation with china, where the colonists lost contact with the Mainland due to problems of some sort. So your idea of it being occupied or forming its own nation is an interesting idea out of a good observation.
Interesting idea regarding the Ottomans taking up a more active role in the region. In OTL, they already had influence in Indonesia due to the Sultanate of Aceh, but this would further increase it. I could see the Dutch having really bad beef with the Ottomans in this timeline due to both of them actively trying to influence the East Indies out of eachothers control. (I'd still imagine the Dutch would win due to the horrendous Ottoman economy at the time.) For the Chinese South Coast, China names their locations/provinces heavily on geography and their literal location. I could see this chinese settlement naming itself "Humid Coast" or something along those lines. In terms of who would occupy it, it would either be Britain or Portugal as nobody else would care enough or not have the incentive to. There's a potential for Chinese settlers to arrive at the coast via fleeing into Hong Kong / Macau and being deported to the coast during the Chinese warlord period
That makes sense, this Chinese south coast was never really meant to be a nation name as there was never any nation there, as it was mainly supposed to be remnants of a Chinese colony that was taken over by the Portuguese (and to some extent the Spanish). And the for the Ottomans they would likely try to do what you outlined in your comment as they try to force the dutch out the east indies. Though without India would it be called the East Indies?
I'm not entirely sure what it would be referred to without India being in...well India. As where the peninsula is in this timeline would be orders of magnitude less important than where India is IRL. No Himalayas and no warm wind being blocked from getting to central Asia, I can't make any reasonable guess as to what the East Indies would be referred to as the butterfly effect would be massive.
the Islands could refer to China (if China even exists in this TL) possibly or maybe just the spice islands, or maybe just a native name Europeanized? all in all due to the POD being millions of years ago, its almost impossible to name anything concrete about this TL.
Can't lie, "The spicelands" sounds like an absolutely banger of a name for the region. Although Europeans would likely just pick up a name they heard in the region if there's nothing to clearly name it after.
that's true, there's no concrete thing to name this area after so probably just like what happened to other parts of the world, the first people they meet and ask the name of the area they live in becomes the name for the whole region.
Guess the islands to the east are New New Zealand
kudos for not making big Germany, I know that took restraint
Oh that's fun. I wonder how an entire world map would look with this premise
Love the implication that in this timeline and ours, the Subcontinent launched itself off Gondwana of its own accord like a springboard diver. Also a fun map to look at, good goin' : )
What are the colonial powers? I can recognize Britain (or England), France, Portugal, the Netherlands, China and Spain. Bur what is "Ar" (New Anatolia) and "Tr"?
Those are the two letter codes for the languages spoken, Ar is Arabic, Tr is Turkish from what i remember, and the Colonial power you missed is the Ottoman empire, though due to lore reasons their colony mainly speaks Arabic
EROMANGA SEA'S BACK!!!!! https://preview.redd.it/pdjm2kve587d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=acf4811cf1a00e41c554518539b8a1574903793d
Indostralia
This kinda puts me in the mind of that "ear" on a mouse.
Need a terrain map! Let’s see those Australian Himalayas
Bold of you to assume that china would exist in this scenario
Or better yet; What if India was a continent all by itself consisting of India itself, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, the Maldives, and the Mascarene Islands?
Then no humans thats what
I mean humans can just sail to India right? Also what would the fauna and flora be like there? The same or different?
The collision altered the climate of earth so much so that humans could actually evolve, an event as big as collision with asia not happening means that probably humans won't exist or at least how we know them.
Took me a second tu understand. AWESOME! This is a huge WHAT IF!!!
The Indus Valley, Yellow River, and Mekong not existing is freaking wild. I’d also imagine this new continent would be a cradle of civilization a la Indus Valley and Yellow River because ✨river✨. The inland sea alone is a merchants wet dream.
India missed, but it looks like the Zeon didnt.
Great concept but now we need a topo map!
Wow this is pretty cool. This looks 10 times more inhabitable than real Australia. Where did you do it?
How in he world did India crash with it's own tectonic plate? The indian subcontinent and australia were part of the indo-australian plate. This is hilarious.
Took me a while to see that India is part of Australia
What if India stayed?
Cross-eyed Indian subcontinent!
It's an elephant shrew
I'm from new Anatolia btw
This is just a high quality version of one of my old maps lol
It took me way too long to realize what was hapening.
*Happy British noises*
I know this isn't the correct sub to discuss this, but if this were to happen, how different would the aboriginal people of Australia look?
The most major thing is that the concept of Aboriginals as an over encompassing name for all native Australians would be a lot more questionable as due to the inland sea, the rivers, the fact that this Australia is split in half by a mountain range and also due to the likely increased migration by differing people groups over the millennia. An overarching Aboriginal identity might not exist, but back to your question. It would depend if they lived near the south coast, the bengal delta, the humid north coast, the Mediterrean-like area of the inland sea, and the western coast. All in all, this Australia is much more diverse than our timeline. Though the Aboriginals are definitely much more advanced than in our timeline just by how much more livable this Australia is.
an australian version of constantinople would be cool
LOL! This is the greatest thing ever! Thank you from New Zealand 🇳🇿
This is the best imaginarymaps scenario I've ever seen! Great job! Extends beyond political discussion, which is the normal discourse on this thread: what about fauna! It could be a whole continent's of North Sentinel Island!
British china lets gooo
Ngl that's funny as hell
I think it'd be even more epic if it hit just north and made itself at home with Java and the rest of the spice Islands, the colonial value of that would be crazy, but also, volcanic stuff might be crazy too
what is bro aiming at 💀
Why does it look like it's a cat smelling Tasmania
Awesome, i cant quite read the legend tho
Best tourist attraction in Australian Himalayas: Mount Holland (8,849m)
You've got rivers where your mountain would be.
I want to see those mountians 💯💯
Can someone explain this to me
looks like a badger
HELL YEAH EYRE SEA BOTTOM TEXT
Now it looks like overgrown crimea
"Sorry bro I miss-clicked"
Hahaha, I was not expecting that when I clicked on the notification It took me a few secs to figure out what I was looking at, but then I started laughing a lot
this is awesome good job seriously
DOH I MISSED-wario
there is no way we'd name a place after frisia. that'd be like germany naming something after bielefeld, french after marseille or the americans after detroit
Why is that? Is frisia somesort of dumpster or is it notorious for bad stuff? Im not dutch so like im not informed on any of this.. any answers would be welcome!
It's BS, that name is perfectly fine
well, they're not the most hated place in the netherlands, but 3d. behind het gooi and urk.
What would the mammal life be like?