Aconcagua

Aconcagua is an island apart from the mainland, but it is counted as part of Tamoanchan's South District. Like the rest of that district it is rough and bleak compared with rich lands such as Atlantis or Hesperia, yet it supports life, and its primitive people may have been spared precisely because their barren home tempts no greedy outsiders. Game is not abundant but varied enough to feed the small, semi-nomadic hunting population: many kinds of rodents, deer, herds of miohippus (a small, nearly extinct horselike animal), birds, frogs, fish, large sloths, camelids and rheas, with several kinds of whales offshore. Wild plants round out the diet with roots, herbs, berries and the odd nut.

The inhabitants of Aconcagua and neighboring Gualaguala are a variant breed of neanderthaloids, brown-skinned, of average height and usually muscular. Civilized peoples call them dumb brutes, but they are as intelligent as any humans. Ages ago their kind lived all over the world; now these two islands are among their last lands. They declined because they are unaggressive and in tune with nature, and so opposed to cities and the trappings of progress; other races pushed them aside easily and waged wars of extermination against them.

Here they still live as their ancestors did, hunting with stone axes, stone-tipped spears and bolas. They make no pottery, have no writing or metalworking and only the simplest tools, but they fashion needles, knives and even simple musical instruments from bone, and use cured hides and furs for clothing, shelter and much else. They are clever craftsmen, and their rock paintings, which belong to their shamanic cult of the Old Gods, are remarkable. The peoples of Tamoanchan call them the Chono and know them especially for the power of their shamans.