When the Vikings who went to Greenland decided to go further south following the North American coast, they named the lands there (eastern Canada and into the New England states) Vinland.

Likewise, you can do some research on the native (pre-Columbian) North American/South American tribes for their regional names.

I have been doing research, but some f it is like tailing a ghost. There was a whole civilization around the Mississippi River that collapsed once Europeans came around - to the point that the descendants didn't remember their ancestors building it within just a few generations! It's maddening to know there were many complex cultures and societies but because they didn't leave written records all knowledge was destroyed when they were. I'm really not sure even where to start.

Also, Australia was discovered only recently in historical terms. Use a name from their local culture instead.

Dominus tecum

There are also multiple tribes in Australia. Much as in the Americas, greed and feelings of Manifest Destiny ended with the natives broken and scattered, their cultures and languages nearly destroyed or completely destroyed. I'm not sure they had a name for the whole of Australia itself.

Call it Terra Australis, real hypothetical continent and since the people who named the continent were the ones with the guns, then the people who found it would believe they found the mythical south land

Then split into sections as you have everywhere else. After all, greed and power drove native peoples just as much; they merely lacked the technological and military science to build empires as vast.

Dominus tecum

*sigh* I know. People do not tend to change much. It just would be nice to have something more to work from. As it is I'll likely need to make nearly everything up, which is very daunting.

If the canine anthros evolve in North America and then spread out from there (via the Bering Straits to Asia, down from Asia to Australia, from Asia across to Europe and Africa, while simultaneously spreading from North America across to Greenland, to Iceland and to either Scandinavia or the British Isles, and only then to the Continent) wouldn’t it be somewhat like ‘fish swimming against the migratory current‘ for anthros in Europe to be ‘invading the Americas from Europe’?

Or are you supposing the simultaneous existence of humans in Europe and perhaps there being a millenia-long global war for survival between them and the anthros or perhaps some form of species detente by this time?

Oh and BTW, “empires” have almost always been formed by war and conquest.

On the time scales of tend of thousands of years, this is not necessarily a problem. People forget where they came from, develop a culture they consider superior to every other culture out there, and then go about destroying everyone else. Sciences, musics, art, literature are not how culture is considered superior but instead by force of arms and ability to destroy and subjugate others. Only later, sometimes, do they stop and wonder at the remains left behind.

Is the wolf “superior” to the deer it pulls down to feed itself and it’s cubs? Being a predator and “conquering” its prey is the wolf’s natural “culture”. Does the wolf ever stop and wonder over the bloody remains of the prey it destroys in order to survive if the deer had a worthwhile culture and perhaps one day might have written a poem?

In all instances, simple survival (and continued growth) is the mark of a "superior" culture in the face of the forces of change (both positive and negative) around it.

“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
--Shelley--

All the possibilities of what a culture might have accomplished, or once did accomplish are as meaningful to Today as all the inscriptions on all the tombstones of all the cemeteries in the world.

The wolf doesn't have the capacity to imagine itself as a deer. Humans are quite able to imagine themselves in one another's shoes.

No, because we can learn from the past, if we don't disregard it. Things like the Antikythera mechanism, the constant attempts at indoor plumbing, the invention of the wheel, of fire, of vaccines - there are many, many things that are meaningful to our lives that started in a culture that is no longer around. We can ignore such things and go forward because it suits us to ignore things, but I think it ends up just forcing someone to relearn something that should already be known if that person had bothered learning history.

Perhaps the wolf does not have the capacity to put itself into another being’s place because he is much too busy with his and his family’s day-to-day job of survival. On the other hand, in carrying out the task of a predator, he does have to put himself into another being’s place in order to successfully hunt that being.

Every culture of the past was not worthy of modern day emulation. Human sacrifice, torture, barbaric rituals, organized superstition, ignorance were all common cultural traits globally. Over the centuries however they were eventually discarded because of their lack of overall success.

Yes, there have been reoccurrences of actions by someone or other trying to relearn them -- dictators, charlatans, madmen, fanatics that, as you say, ‘should already know’ that those actions were “evil” [a quaint old-time out of fashion concept] and perhaps more importantly, unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, each human being is not born with a memory of everything that has transpired over the centuries before their birth. In the day-to-day necessary struggle for simple survival, knowledge of what happened to people in a far away land centuries ago that resulted in the construction of an Antikythera mechanism serves merely as a distraction to the successful completion of the life-struggle.

From Ancient Times, History like Fantasy, has always been the pursuit of the idle, the comfortable and secure since neither has any practical food-on-the-table usage in the Present.

I had a similar idea!! Alternative names to today's countries!

E.g.

Greece -> Geese
Romania -> Roarmania
Bulgaria -> Bullgaria
United States -> United Snakes
Argentina -> Armadina
Panama -> Pawnama
Germany -> Gerbily
Turkey -> (no change)
Macedonia -> Mousedonia
Poland -> Pawland

etc. etc.

Very punny, cuz! :-P

I'm glad you're okay *hugs*

*wag* Yap, still OK thankfully, and finally with a bit of work too! In Gerbily, 'cause Geese is only a debt maker these days...

I'm glad to hear that! I hope you have a great Christmas cuz, and that the Geese doesn't get your gander up! :-P

I had to translate "gander" but it was worth it!