Prehistory

The Age of Strife, also sometimes called Old Night, was a 5,000-year-long period of anarchy, war, and destructive technological regression from the 25th to the 30th Millenniums that brought Mankind to the brink of extinction -- and reversed the highly advanced scientific and technological discoveries made by the galaxy-spanning interstellar human civilisation of the Dark Age of Technology that had preceded it. The Age of Strife was caused by the negative psychic and physical effects of the vicious Warp Storms that ravaged large portions of the galaxy beginning in the 25th Millennium, which were the "ripples" in realspace of the psychic gestation of the new Chaos God Slaanesh in the Immaterium. Slaanesh was forming within the Warp as a result of the growing hedonism and utter excess of the ancient Eldar empire in the millennia before its Fall. One result of the Warp Storms was the impossibility of faster-than-light travel or telepathic interstellar communication through the ravaged currents of the Warp, which led to the subsequent isolation of human colony worlds and star systems separated by multi-light-year distances. Human civilisation in the colonised portions of the galaxy fragmented, and where it survived, it took on wildly different forms. On Earth, the planetary economy collapsed with the loss of interstellar trade and communication with the rest of humanity even as the social order broke down. Wars, rebellion, and disease were rampant. Vast swathes of the advanced scientific and technical knowledge accumulated in the previous millennia was lost or forgotten, and a slow descent into pre-industrial barbarism seemed inevitable. Brutal warlords emerged, who carved out new kingdoms to serve as their fiefdoms. The emergence of these often brutal neo-feudal kingdoms, the new nations of the people later termed "techno-barbarians" by Imperial historians, imposed an uneasy peace on the Earth that was frequently interrupted by feudal conflicts. The human race seemed on the brink of extinction at the start of the 30th Millennium, when the man who would become known as the Emperor of Mankind once more inserted Himself into the affairs of humanity.