#cw bleak description of Human extinction

[corvidist]

Earth, 400,000 PA

The bombs fell 400,000 years ago, a product of wars between long-dead nations over dwindling water and farmland. Thunderous explosions, raging fires, then utter, terrible silence. Humans, a mammalian species that by this point would be considered megafauna, did not immediately go extinct, even as nuclear cooldown and radiation led to the mass death of plant and animal life globally. They clung to life in bunkers and isolated corners of the world, and eventually, the radiation and the cold wore off, only to be replaced by a decimated ozone layer, worsened greenhouse effect, and skyrocketing global temperatures.

This would prove the final nail in Humanity's coffin, as over the course of hundreds of years, the few remaining survivors struggled to hold on in patches of the far north and south, nomadic, unable to recover past technological advancements, and left with few significant, reliable sources of food. As the calamity reached its first crescendo, an ancient disease, risen from the melted permafrost, burned through much of the remaining Human population, leaving only small bands and individual wanderers, who, one by one, slowly died out, the last around 1000 PA.

This would not be the end of Humanity's impact on the Earth, however. The catastrophic rise in temperatures led to the melting of much of Earth's remaining ice caps, and combined with the nuclear cooldown before it, led to the annihilation of a not insignificant portion of the Earth's plant life, and while it made a lopsided recovery towards the poles as temperatures warmed and the sky cleared, the planet's equatorial region would see no such recovery, with some regions seeing temperatures as high as 70 degrees Celsius by 400,000 PA and much of the planet between 40 degrees north and 30 degrees south becoming varying kinds of desert, the equator uninhabitable and for a time nearly impassable.

By 400,000 PA, the time of early Corvid development, the planet had reached somewhat of a new status quo. Little animal life larger than medium-sized dogs remains on land, though this will eventually change. Plant life is slowly evolving to better withstand higher temperatures, though oxygen levels remain lower than they did during the Anthropocene. No visible traces of Human society remain on Earth's surface, though their legacy is felt in the conspicuous lack of fossil fuels and certain rare substances. In the end, their legacy will have reverberating effects throughout the history of Earth and its second complex sophont society, even if the first was not around to see it.

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