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Calling all History Buffs
15 years ago
General
Working on a story concent but could use some help.
The idea is a sort of mirror world, exaclty like ours but genders are reversed. Everyone here born a man is born a woman and vice versa, but the personality/spirit is the same only color by the experience of growing up the other way. And this has always been so so the problem becomes trying to figure out things like "if george washionton was born a girl, raised as a girl would he still be the founding mother? Would someone else do it? What about girl hitler? etc. How would history change with this one small fact altered?"
The idea is a sort of mirror world, exaclty like ours but genders are reversed. Everyone here born a man is born a woman and vice versa, but the personality/spirit is the same only color by the experience of growing up the other way. And this has always been so so the problem becomes trying to figure out things like "if george washionton was born a girl, raised as a girl would he still be the founding mother? Would someone else do it? What about girl hitler? etc. How would history change with this one small fact altered?"
To do something set in the modern era, you have three choices: Apply the conceits that society went matriarchal and still managed to parallel ours, apply the conceit that things just happened to follow a near identical track or start from scratch with limited parallelism.
The first has massive suspension of disbelief issues.
The second isn't quite as bad, but boils down to doing "now, but with all fictional characters."
The third is a massive amount of work.
Remember that you are talking about a POD that changes how things develop in the Neolithic. If you want you can start by assuming things like the Sumerian city-states and the Peiligang/Pengtoushan cultures and then gaming out the history of the world. Or you could simply create the nations you want and work backwards.
The main thing to remember is that the natural resources are the same, so you are likely to get states developing in the same places as did historically. So you will still see expansion from places like the Fertile Crescent, the lower Nile, the Indus and the Yangtze/Yellow river basin. Beyond that, anything could happen as you have upset the development of the proto-empires.
Keeping the POD in the prehistorical past means that you can't expect that there is a nation anything like the USA to even have an American history. (Heck, you'd be pushing it to assume the Babylonian Empire.)
You're not grokking just how massive of a change you proposed, you haven't just taken Washington and Jefferson out of positions of power: You've butterflied away Sargon and Ramses.
This is one of the two problems that alt-histories with early PODs pretty much all have: They either damp out and become irrelevant to anyone but historians and archaeologists or they cause a cascade of changes that starts butterflying away entire nations and empires, (e.g. neutralize Phillip of Macedon and his son never gets to become Alexander the Great, which means no Alexandrian Empire, which means no Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt, etc.).
Since you have butterflied away almost every significant person in history, you will see major changes to the bronze age empires and by the iron age the world will be almost unrecognizable. In broad strokes, you can expect cities to develop in the same places and for Europe to most likely end up the dominant power region when the age of sail opens up the world, beyond that... there are some natural borders that would likely divide nations but we can't really say anything about those nations.
(BTW: The Ptolemaic Dynasty came about because one of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy, took over one of the fragments when the empire fell apart. No Alexandrian Empire, no Ptolemy I.)