The Gravedigger Goes Out to Sea

above: a social gravedigger catches a sharkbird, a fish-like aquatic metamorph bird, with a plant fiber line and a fishbone hook, demonstrating the continued evolution of the trap-building behaviors that defined their earlier ancestors. So returned to the ancient vertebrate condition are the various aquatic metamorph birds in form and function that they are not generally distinguished from true fishes by the gravedigger people.

265 Million + 15,000 Years

Just five thousand years after the last woodcrafter, the social gravedigger has become a skilled, sea-fairing civilization. They hunt fishes and seabirds large and small, which they expertly catch via new age traps - nets and hooks and fishing lines, and by active hunting with spears and harpoons. Tool use is varied and versatile, primarily utilizing plant fibers, animal skin and sinew, bone, wood, flaked or chipped stone, and the cultivation of fire has allowed them to begin creating pottery and form other fire-hardened clay objects used for food storage and even to create tablets used to record information via symbols - a written language, extending from the woodcrafters who originally adapted it from the scratch-drawings of the southern gravediggers’ boundary trees.

Metallurgy, however, is difficult in such an environment and has never been discovered. In truth, it would provide few immediate advantages when a comfortable existence can be maintained upon primarily living resources, which are incredibly numerous. These gravediggers utilize carved bones and the hooked teeth of fish to craft hooks to catch additional fish; tendons and ligaments can be strung into fishing lines. The highly pliable, cord-like stalks of sea bamboo that now covers vast tracts of the sea’s surface, once dried over fire, tighten into durable, weavable fibers for the construction of nets and most importantly their boats. Tree trunks are no longer available as a building resource, and so these vessels are now primarily built from tightly woven plant fibers. Being functionally similar to the tule canoes utilized by Native American human cultures, they are lightweight, highly buoyant, and both easily repaired and eventually replaced with resources that are procured right off the water’s surface. Occasional alternative designs are utilized which rely on a matrix of bone wrapped up in the tanned skin of large sea animals, but this material is much more frequently used to produce sails to carry their vessels along with the wind. Smaller boats are more frequently propelled with oars carved from bone or increasingly rare wood debris found at sea or along shorelines.

Using all of these tools is easy enough, but making them to begin with can be more difficult. Gravediggers have plenty of cognitive power to design tools, but are a bit more clumsy when it comes to making things more complicated than simple spears, sharp rocks and knots. While they have two-clawed forearms, and they have beaks and even tongues which all have some capability for handling objects, they have considerably less dexterity alone than humans or woodcrafters. Weaving reeds into boats and sewing fabric from hides and sinew are most easily accomplished with at least two people’s help, with the beaks and movements of the tongue being more useful for fine detailing than the claws and so two or more people’s beaks, working together as a team, are able to do most of what one set of hands could do. This is another strong selective pressure for the social gravedigger to be cooperative, in order to build and shape their environment.

Over the past few thousands of years, the social gravedigger demonstrated its noteworthy adaptability to new adversity, and adjusted to thrive in an environment very unlike that which their kind originated to inhabit. They are coastal, living in partially underground mound-houses along the wind-beaten coast of Serinaustra along the icebox seaway that can be heated and remain very comfortable and insulated in the cold nights. Yet virtually all of their food comes from the seaway, which has become shallower and pock-marked with calm thickets of dense sea vegetation as a result of falling sea levels and increased polar glaciation. The land, harsh and hostile, is still the territory of the wild-type southern gravedigger, which now favors the coastal grassland, and tundra gravedigger, which is still more adept at eking out a living on the remaining wild game to be found in the harshest northern wastes, though these two subspecies have begun to admix more strongly due to the breakdown of formerly separated habitat choices.

While several millennia have now passed, the social gravediggers haven’t forgotten the last woodcrafter’s message. Though a story passed down through the generations both verbally and through scratch-written tablets inevitably evolved, becoming a larger and more exciting tale, their people still remember the woodcrafters and continue to honor them as a sort of spiritual ancestor, central to the formation of a developing religion. They are described as having been parent-like figures which encouraged philanthropy as the basis of a successful life - promoting welfare for one another and other living things, both gravediggers and other living creatures, with an emphasis on empathizing even with those very different from you.

This last point is really driven home by surviving artwork of woodcrafters, drawn from life, that remain engraved upon old stone faces in highly religiously significant, sheltered places like caves which show that the woodcrafters looked nothing like the gravedigger - there was no creation in its image going on here, no way to spin these stories in such a direction that only those who look like you are important. Woodcrafters, a people with very little in common superficially with the gravedigger, nonetheless learned to work together with them as one in their final years together on this world. The social gravediggers take from this the idea that they, too, should be aware of what they can find in common with every creature no matter how dissimilar from themselves it may seem. This overarching philosophy lends them toward being highly empathetic and curious, traits that gravediggers have already been familiar with since time immemorial but which now define their lives. Social gravediggers are not as tribal as humans and are less inclined to divide themselves into “us” and “them” categories. They view other animals respectfully as more than just resources for the taking, and are attentive to the environment in which they live and conscious of the inner-connected nature of the ecosystem, where each species plays a role and the loss of even one can harm the rest. Social gravediggers are generally fascinated by nature, the intricacies of the food web and the part every component plays to ensure the survival of the whole, in which they draw many parallels to their own society.

All of this lends to a civilization that is broadly peaceful, tightly-linked with social bonds, and ecologically sustainable even in the long-term. On the shores of the cold, rich ocean, they have forged a more stable and cohesive society than anyone managed before them, built upon their predecessors’ metaphorical shoulders.

And their world-view would soon be further validated when they learned that theirs was not the only people left to seek an understanding of their world. For far out there, past the horizon, others too sought to forge new connections with like-minds. The last woodcrafter’s plea would be granted soon enough, when the gravediggers were discovered by the daydreamers - a mysterious, ancient people in some ways just like them, yet living a literal world apart.