Rise of the Degeneracy

INDEX

Introduction: A Tale of Three Epochs

Six thousand years ago, the ancient wildwood of Britain was not a pristine wilderness untouched by human hands, but a carefully managed paradise. The indigenous hunter-gatherers, the Savages, lived as "one leaf on the Oak of Life," taking only what they needed and managing the forest ecosystem through fire and flint. Yet on the horizon of this stable world, the first ripples of a profound shift were beginning to emerge—the dawn of human degeneracy, where progress began to sever mankind from the natural order.

Rise of the Degeneracy weaves an expansive, multi-perspective prehistoric narrative tracking the subtle, irreversible steps toward civilization across three distinct human cultures:

• The Savages: In the post-glacial rainforests of South-East Britain, Ur’salla the Huntress and her companion Tashkilla navigate the intimate spiritual rhythms of the Goshawk clan. Their world is upended when a bitter exile named Géza betrays his people to possess a strange new tool of power: a polished stone axe.
• The Barbarians: On the coastal margins, the pioneering Leva commune introduces agriculture, religion, and structured human labour to the British landscape. Through the eyes of young Amaia, the fractures of this early Neolithic lifestyle begin to show, bringing forth social hierarchy, domestic subjugation, and the terrifying shadow of pestilence.
• The Citizens: Far away in South-West Asia, the world’s first true civilization crystallises in the city of Engur. Here, the transition to the Bronze Age is underway. Arrapu, an aging marshland priest, finds himself caught in a dangerous political trap sprung by a bureaucratic accountant, demonstrating the ultimate shift from communal sharing to tyrannical rule.

Separated by vast geography but united in time, these stories intersect across millennia to a modern-day archaeological excavation, where a student named Freya unearths a simple flint waste core—and opens a time-traveller's heart to the voices of the deep past.

The Author

Paul Brooker is an East Anglian writer and researcher with a lifelong connection to the landscapes and hidden histories of the British wildwood. His work on Rise of the Degeneracy, and the Idyllea series is deeply informed by decades of engagement with landscape archaeology, surface-collection lithic studies, and the deep genetic threads that bind us to our ancestors. Fascinated by the profound psychological and ecological fractures that occurred when humanity transitioned from being an intrinsic part of Nature to attempting to master it, Paul uses fiction to explore the visceral, unwritten realities of our shared past. He documents his ongoing research and deep-time writing projects on his blog, Journals of a Time Traveller.