Succession of Earth’s dominant species

The succession of Earth’s dominant species overturns the human assumption that history belongs principally to humanity. In the account assembled by Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, civilizations rise, inherit the planet, and disappear across spans that dwarf recorded history; humankind is only one, and perhaps the least, of Earth’s dominant races. The surviving clues make that sequence both a cosmological history and a challenge to the reliability of the person trying to recover it.

Humanity in a Deep-Time Sequence

The myths and impressions Peaslee studies imagine an inhabited Earth long before humanity, with beings that had mastered nature before humanity’s amphibian ancestors emerged from the sea. Some races came from the stars, while others arose from terrestrial life; their histories could stretch across billions of years and reach beyond Earth. This scale unsettles ordinary historical time: the story treats human civilization not as history’s culmination but as one temporary phase within a much longer succession.

The account singles out the Great Race of Yith as the greatest of these civilizations. It lived until roughly fifty million years before humanity’s advent, and its distinction was not simply power or longevity: it had conquered time through the projection of minds into other eras. Its knowledge of past and future allowed it to collect histories, arts, languages, and sciences from successive terrestrial species. In this chronology, the succession of dominant races is therefore also a succession of minds able to occupy, study, and outlast different forms of life.

The Great Race and the Elder Things

The Great Race’s own mental heritage began on a dying elder world. Its beings sent their minds en masse into the future, taking possession of the minds of the cone-shaped entities that had peopled Earth about a billion years earlier. The minds displaced by this migration were sent backward into unfamiliar bodies and left to die. The Great Race thus arose through a transfer between species and worlds: its identity persisted by changing bodies rather than by preserving its original physical form.

When the Great Race arrived on Earth, another ancient power already dominated it. The Elder Things had come from distant universes and ruled Earth and three other planets about six hundred million years ago. The Great Race used its instruments to defeat them and drive them into the underground caverns connected to their dwellings, sealing the entrances. It then occupied most of their cities. The victory did not end the danger: sporadic incursions from below later prompted stronger defenses and the permanent closure of many routes. The earlier dominant race remained a latent threat beneath the civilization that had replaced it.

Succession Beyond Humanity

The Great Race’s history does not end with its own earthly dominance. Its minds were expected to face death again and migrate forward into a species with a longer physical future. In Peaslee’s account, after humanity comes a powerful beetle civilization; the most capable minds of the Great Race will take up the bodies of its members when the elder world approaches its doom. Later, those minds will move again through time and space, this time into bulbous vegetable entities on Mercury.

Nor does that sequence describe a simple march toward progress. After these migrations, other races are said to persist on a cold, dying Earth, clinging to the planet and burrowing toward its terrifying core. The projected future is not a human-centered promise of advancement: each civilization is provisional, and survival may mean abandoning the body and world that once sustained it. The Great Race’s repeated migrations make continuity possible, but only by transferring consciousness into forms belonging to another age.

Ruins, Records, and Uncertainty

Material traces lend the succession a foothold in the present. In Western Australia, blocks of sandstone, granite, and possibly concrete were described as remnants of a civilization older than any previously imagined. An expedition recovered about 1,250 scattered blocks, including carved megaliths and pieces suggestive of vaulting or arches. Their erosion and disorder implied immense age and geological upheaval, but the excavators found no clear arrangement that could establish what the structures had been.

The most unsettling evidence appears in a buried ruin: a book on brittle, ancient cellulose, inside a metal case, bearing English words in Peaslee’s own handwriting. The discovery links an immense prehistoric record to a modern human mind and seems to collapse the distance between the Great Race’s archive and the narrator’s experience. Yet the account does not turn that apparent confirmation into certainty. Peaslee acknowledges that he did not bring back the case, and that the underground corridors have not been found; he cannot rule out that what he saw belonged to dreams shaped by myth. The succession of Earth’s dominant species therefore remains suspended between a material history on a cosmic scale and a testimony that cannot fully prove itself.