Age of the Ancients

The **Age of the Ancients** was the time period where the Forerunners, Protheans, Chozo, and other highly advanced races dominated the galaxy.

## Timeline

**C. 15 million BC**

Forerunners are created by the Precursors, and seeded on Ghibalb.

**C. 12 million BC**

Quintessons colonize Cybertron and enslave its people. Eventually, the Cybertronians revolt.

**C. 10 million BC**

Forerunners nearly wipe out the Precursors when they apparently failed the Precursors’s test to hold the Mantle of Responsibility. The Precursors did not fight back, due to their philosophy of the Mantle.

**C. 9 million BC**

Cybertronian Golden Age, followed by the Age of Rust, followed by the Great Cybertronian War. Autobots and Decepticons continue to wage war for five million years.

**C. 4 million BC**

The Fall of Cybertron. With Cybertron’s energon resources drastically drained, a desperate few last battles are fought, and the Great Exodus begins. With the leadership of both factions in stasis on Earth, the war mostly grinds to a halt for several million years, though skirmishes still occur throughout the galaxy.

**3.8 million BC**

Protheans achieve spaceflight and discover mass effect technology from the ruins of the extinct inusannon. They go on to establish a galaxy-wide civilization linked by the mass relay network with the Citadel as their capital.

**C. 2.8 million BC**

Genus *Homo*, humanity, evolves on Earth.

The majority of extant sapient species’ genera evolve on their respective homeworlds

**C. 1.1 million BC**

Ancient humans achieve spaceflight, and colonize numerous worlds, but suffer several dark ages resulting in the loss of most of their historical records and knowledge before eventually encountering the Forerunners. Note that the ancient humans did not belong to one species, but actually several genera, including *Homo* and *Gigantopithecus*.

**C. 250,000 BC**

*Homo* *sapiens* evolves.

**C. 190,000 BC**

Maximals and Predacons arrive on Earth from the future via Transwarp. The Beast Wars are waged.

**C. 160,000 BC**

The Protheans encounter a race of Cybertronian-based lifeforms that endanger their existence. To combat this threat, the Protheans begin to assimilate many other spacefaring races into their empire. The Prothean Empire is able to fend off the machines in a conflict known as the "Metacon War".

The Protheans extensively observed primitive species. They cultivated species they deemed to have potential and made numerous outposts placed on or near the primitives' homeworlds, with Prothean interference and activities kept beyond their subjects' comprehension.

**C. 150,000 BC**

The Forerunners are believed to have risen as the dominant species in the Milky Way Galaxy by advancing technological discoveries gathered from the remnants left by prior ancient races. Believing themselves responsible for the lives of all those less advanced than they, the Forerunners adopt the ideology of the Mantle of Responsibility. They managed to become equal if not greater than the Prothean Empire which sparked a great feeling of rivalry between the two powers.

To compete against the Forerunners, the Protheans discovered the rachni and bred them as weapons of war, selecting for the most cunning and warlike queens and unleashing rachni swarms on their enemies. Eventually, the rachni became too difficult to control and turned on their Prothean masters. The Protheans attempted to eradicate the rachni, and destroyed as many as 200 worlds before they were satisfied the extinction of the rachni, but enough survived on Suen to replenish their population.

**134,445 BC**

Tensions between the Forerunners and Protheans escalated at some point and caused a galaxy wide war, it entailed many alliances with numerous factions taking sides including the Isu, the Mala'kak ( or Engineers), the Ancient Humans, San'Shyuum, Chozo and Martians.

**107,445 BC**

The Flood appears and begins infesting Ancient Human space, causing humanity to invade a sector of Forerunner space to escape. This would spark the Human-Forerunner Wars.

**106,498 BC**

End of the Human-Forerunner Wars. Nearly all traces of humanity’s interstellar civilization is erased, and they revert back into hunter-gatherer societies . The Protheans, being curious on what fate would be in store for the regressed humans, built an outpost on Mars to observe the humans as they developed and see if they would join their empire or not.

**98,300 BC**

The Prothean Empire collapses with the arrival of the Reapers through the Citadel. The obliteration of the Prothean leadership left them as easy prey for the Reapers with little problem from the remnants of their military. The Reapers decide to focus their extermination efforts on the Protheans, for a swift victory.

The Forerunners, weakened from their war on the ancient humans, the Prothean Empire, and their allies, unable to fight off the Reapers and even at full strength, decide to leave the Protheans to their fate, despite what the Mantle of Responsibility would've demanded.

Over the next several centuries, the Reapers hunt the Protheans system by system, world by world, and city by city.

**97,745 BC**

The Forerunner-Reaper-Flood War begins. Already fighting the Reapers, with the appearance of the Flood, the Forerunner Ecumene starts its slow collapse. Their time is lengthened, however, as the Flood and Reapers primarily focus on fighting each other.

**97,495 BC**

With the last of the Protheans gone, the Reapers turn their attention to the rest of the galaxy. Martians, Isu, Engineers, and numerous other species all disappear in the time approaching the conflict’s end, either from destruction by Reapers, or absorption by the Flood.

The first test-fire of a Halo Installation is conducted. Installation 07 is fired on solar system setting, destroying life in the Charum Hakkor system.

Members of species throughout the galaxy begin to be taken to the Ark for preservation, as a precaution for what would await ahead.

**97,445 BC**

The Forerunner-Flood War reaches its conclusion with the firing of the Halo Array, annihilating nearly all organic life in the galaxy. Most life-forms are returned to their homeworlds, reseeded by Forerunner Keyships.

Some errors by the Keyships occur, such as one crashing on Janjur Qom, and others crashing onto a number of other worlds, explaining the presence of plants and animals on worlds other than those that have fossil record evidence of them evolving on.

Cybertronians, immune to the Halo Array due to being mechanical life forms, survive effortlessly, though they recorded this event as a great tragedy for the galaxy. Their records are the primary basis for knowledge of the time period in the modern era.

The Chozo manage to shield themselves from the effects of the Halos, possibly within a Shield World. Some speculate that these events are what caused the race to universally become pacifists, or at least contributed to their decision.