[Huinesoron]

As William Cloud Hicklin has noted, the new NoME (Nature of Middle-earth) features an explicit timeline connecting the Elder Days to ours. In 1.VI, "The Awakening of the Quendi":

The Atani entered Beleriand in 310 Bel. That is in the 22nd Sun-year of VY 1498. Men had then existed for 448 VYs + 22 SYs: i.e., 64,534 Sun Years, which, though doubtless insufficient scientifically (since that is only - we being in 1960 of the 7th Age - 16,000 years ago: total about 80,000), is adequate for purposes of the Silmarillion, etc.

A related essay (NoME 1.X "Difficulties in Chronology") confirms that the "Beleriandic Reckoning" (= the traditional "First Age of the Sun") lasted 590 years under the Sun in Tolkien's conception at this point, which lets us construct the full timeline of the Elder Days:

- 14,350 BC: first year of the Beleriandic Reckoning, ie the usual F.A. 1.
- 13,760 BC: Fall of Morgoth / S.A. 1
- 10,441 BC: Downfall of Numenor and the Change of the World
- 10,319 BC: Fall of Sauron / T.A. 1
- 7298 BC: Fall of Sauron Redux / 4.A. 1
- ca. 4865 BC: 5.A. 1
- ca. 2432 BC: 6.A. 1
- 1 AD: 7.A. 1

I said at the top of the thread that Tolkien wasn't deeply invested in the 6000 years idea - well, here's the proof, because now it's over 9000 years since the War of the Ring! The NoME text postdates Letter 211 by a couple of years (1960 versus 1958), so it seems Tolkien had given it a bit more thought and tweaked his ideas a bit. He wanted the Seventh Age to explicitly be the Christian era; and it seems as though he actually calculated (off-page) the lengths of the 4th-6th. Evenly spacing the Age lengths from 3021 (3rd) to 1960 (4th) gets a total of 7471 years for the 4th-6th, within 200 years of the length implied by "only 16,000 years ago".

So! Where do our Ages fall in (pre-)history now?

The Wars of the Jewels - 14,300 - 13,700 BC. The end of the European Paleolothic. The archaeological record shows a spate of new (stone) technology around the end of this period, coinciding with the influx of refugees from drowned Beleriand.

The Numenorean Catastrophe - 10,450 BC. The Younger Dryas, a thousand year cold snap beginning around 10,950 BC, is clearly the result of the drowning of Numenor and the change of the world. Arnor especially was a cold place, quite likely leading to its breakup.

The War of the Ring - 7300 BC. Actually a relatively quiet time for major milestones. The first walled city (Jericho) was ~1000 years old by this point; barley and wheat had been cultivated about as long. The Sahara Desert became a fertile region about this time, and stayed that way until ca. 3500 BC; possibly the effect of the Gondorian renaissance under the house of Telcontar. Over the next thousand years, Britain would be cut off from the continent by rising sea levels, isolating the hobbits from the Big Folk.

The End of the Fourth Age - ca. 4800 BC. Riiiight about the dawn of known civilisation - Sumer emerged in 4500 BC, along with the earliest stirrings of the Bronze Age. The next few hundred years are also when the likes of chickens and horses were domesticated; it looks like the Fourth Age was a long decline, with the Fifth being a restoration of 'lost' technologies like metalwork and horse-riding.

The End of the Fifth Age - ca. 2200 BC. The dawn of History. Writing. And, exactly spot-on for the end of an Age, the 4.2 kiloyear event brings down the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Akkadian Empire, the Indus Valley civilisation, and the Liangzhu culture in China. This is the event which seems to have led the Proto-Indo-European peoples to migrate west and consume Europe - a fitting end to the last of the ancient Ages.

(Also: 2200 BC is about when Stonehenge was built. I'm guessing that makes it an evil temple of Melkor. ^_^)

We know from the "Lost Road" quote in my last post, that Tolkien was thinking about Numenor in relation to the Ice Age, and placing it immediately before it; I think it's very, very likely that "16,000 years" was calculated to align the Numenorean Catastrophe directly with the onset of the Younger Dryas.

(As an incidental: the "80,000 years total" figure for the awakening of Men aligns very nicely with the Recent African Origin dates. But given how in flux the timeline of early human history is - not to mention how often Tolkien changes his own mind - that can't be more than coincidence.)

hS