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Further examination of this story can account for all twelve Scaroth splinters, assuming that none of them live for more than a century, and that they acquire Scarlioni’s antiques while they are new. One Scaroth version (presumably the Neanderthal that we see) demonstrates “the true use of fire”; a second gives mankind the wheel; a third “caused the pyramids to be built” (we see this one both as a “human” Egyptian Pharaoh and as a Jagaroth on an ancient Egyptian scroll); a fourth caused “the heavens to be mapped”; the fifth is an ancient Greek; the sixth is the Roman that we see (a Senator, or possibly even an Emperor); the seventh is the Celt that we see; the eighth gives mankind the printing press (presumably, this accounts for why Scarlioni has more than one Gutenberg Bible); the ninth is Captain Tancredi; the tenth is an Elizabethan nobleman (who obtains the first draft of Hamlet); the eleventh lives at the time of Louis XV (and is presumably the splinter who purchases the Gainsborough that’s just been sold at the start of the story - he’s named as Cardinal Scarlath in Christmas on a Rational Planet), and the twelfth is Carlos Scarlioni.
[134] Invasion of the Cat People
[135] TW: Small Worlds. Jack says the fairies are “from the dawn of time” - it’s possible that he’s speaking metaphorically, although in truth the fairies reside “backwards in time” and might pre-date humanity, even though they hail from it. Mention of the “lost lands” might suggest that they held more of a foothold on Earth until Scaroth’s spaceship sparked humanity’s birth. It might be far simpler, however, to assume that their development coincides with that of mankind.
[136] Loups-Garoux
[137] The Land of the Dead
[138] Doctor Who and the Silurians
Continental Drift
According to scientists, continental drift is a continuing process. In Doctor Who, there’s evidence that it was a single event. The Doctor talks of “the great continental drift, two hundred million years ago” in Doctor Who and the Silurians. In the broadcast version of Earthshock, the Earth of sixty-five million years ago looks like it does today. Continental drift was a reality according to Invasion of the Cat-People. In The Ark, the Earth of ten million years hence also looks exactly like contemporary Earth, although we saw the continents devastated in The Parting of the Ways, and The End of the World acknowledges that technology was used to arrest continental drift.
[139] Dating “Time Bomb” (DWM #114-116) - “Earthdate 200 Million Years BC”, according to the caption.
[140] Transit. This may be a dream sequence or an allegory.
[141] In Earthshock, the Doctor states that the dinosaurs existed for “a hundred million years or so” and died out “sixty-five million years ago”, which is in tune with scientific consensus.
[142] The Also People. No date is given, but the People fight in the Millennium War in The Quantum Archangel.
[143] “Millions of years” before The Fall of Yquatine. The Omnethoth also fight in the Millennium War according to The Quantum Archangel.
[144] The Quantum Archangel. The Millenium Wars (consistently misspelled with one “n”) were a feature of the early Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic strips, but this would appear to be a different conflict.
[145] Dating The Hand of Fear (14.2) - The Doctor identifies the rock in which Eldrad’s hand was discovered, and twice tells Eldrad that he has been away from Kastria for “a hundred and fifty million years”.
[146] Dating “Time Bomb” (DWM #114-116) - The caption reads “Earthdate 150 Million BC”.
[147] Neverland. The war is referred to as over by Time-Flight. The Vardons are probably not the Vardans seen in The Invasion of Time. A Kosnax appears in Cold Fusion.
[148] Dating Time-Flight (19.7) - The Doctor informs the flight crew of the second Concorde that they have landed at Heathrow “one hundred and forty million years ago”. He states, correctly, that this is the “Jurassic” era, but then suggests that they “can’t be far off from the Pleistocene era”, which actually took place a mere 1,800,000 -10,000 years ago. The Seeds of Doom gives a more accurate date for the Pleistocene.
[149] Carnival of Monsters. The Doctor states that the Pleisosaurus “has been extinct for one hundred and thirty million years”. The MiniScope presumably captures its specimens in a Timescoop like those seen in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Five Doctors.
[150] Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Happiness Patrol.
[151] Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Whitaker tries to take Earth back to a “Golden Age,” but there’s no indication that this is the age of the dinosaurs, which would hardly be an Earthly paradise for humans. He uses dinosaurs to scare people out of London.
[152] The Mark of the Rani, Time and the Rani.
[153] “Cuckoo”
[154] Made of Steel. The two dinosaurs seen are apato-saurus and tyrannosaurus, from the Upper Cretaceous.
[155] Mission to Magnus. The Doctor says that Anzor’s TARDIS has been dispatched back to “the beginning of time”, but his subsequent comments about the things Anzor might encounter there suggest he didn’t mean the term literally. The Mesozoic era started 250 million years ago, and ended about 65 million years ago.
[156] I, Davros: “Corruption”. This is a cheeky explanation for why the male Thals so outnumber the females in all three of their TV stories. The Planistavian Age was “a hundred million years” ago according to Davros.
[157] Dating “A Glitch in Time” (DWM #179) - It’s “the Cretaceous”, so between 145 and 65 million years ago.
[158] “Several million years” before Time Zero.
[159] Dating Benny: The Sword of Forever (Benny NA #14) - The timeframe is given.
[160] Dating Earthshock (19.6) - The Doctor dates the extinction of the dinosaurs, and confirms that the freighter has travelled to that era, back “sixty-five million years”. In the original TV version, the pattern of prehistoric Earth’s continents are those of modern-day Earth. A correction was attempted for the DVD release, where an effects option allows the viewer to see an updated special effect. However, the correction itself is historically awry, as it features the super-continent Pangea, when the proper configuration should be somewhere between Pangea and the present day.
[161] Benny: Epoch: Judgement Day
[162] Dating Benny: The Adolescence of Time (Benny audio #9.2) - The blurb says that the story occurs “many years” after the freighter collided with Earth (Earthshock) and enough time has passed that only one of the characters involved is old enough to have remembered the impact. The story helps to bridge the freighter impact with the rise of the Silurians; it’s implied that the “psychic forces” released by the collision helped to develop the Silurians’ third eyes, and the relocation of the flying reptiles to the ground presumably unifies the reptile-people into a single society. See the When Did The Silurians Rule The Earth? sidebar.
[163] Dating The Boy That Time Forgot (BF #110) - Adric claims to be “more than five hundred years old”, so that long (give or take) has passed since Earthshock.
[164] SJA: The Lost Boy
[165] “Fifty million years” before The Company of Friends: “Benny’s Story”.
[166] All Consuming Fire
[167] Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Sea Devils, Benny: The Adolescence of Time. See the When Did the Silurians Rule the Earth? sidebar.
[168] According to the Doctor in The Hungry Earth. This line accounts for the physical differences between the Silurians in that story and their previous appearances, and presumably also accounts for the differences between the Silurians in Doctor Who and the Silurians and those in Warriors of the Deep (and, by extension, the winged race in Benny: The Adolescence of Time).
[169] The Scales of Injustice
[170] Doctor Who and the Silurians
[171] Blood Heat
[172] According to Eldane in Cold Blood.
[173] Warriors of the Deep
[174] The Hungry Earth. The implication is that Silurians lived in jungle areas, although the next episode, Cold Bl
ood, suggests they lived in deserts.
[175] Blood Heat, The Scales of Injustice, Bloodtide.
[176] The Scales of Injustice
[177] “The Devil of the Deep”
[178] All-Consuming Fire
[179] The Crystal Bucephalus, named in The Taking of Planet 5. The name was spelled Urgmundasatra in Benny: Twilight of the Gods.
[180] “Final Genesis”
[181] Tomb of Valdemar
[182] “Final Genesis”. This is set in a parallel universe, and it’s unclear if Mortakk also lived in ours.
[183] Doctor Who and the Silurians
[184] Bloodtide
[185] The Scales of Injustice
[186] Cold Blood
[187] Doctor Who and the Silurians
[188] The Scales of Injustice
[189] Dating “Twilight of the Silurians” (DWW #21-22) - It’s “millions of years before history began”. There’s a note to the effect that the Silurians are also known as Eocenes.
[190] Dating Bloodtide (BF #22) - It’s set at the time the Silurians are going into hibernation, “over a million years ago”, and “ten years” after Earth’s surface has become uninhabitable. In Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Scales of Injustice, it’s stated that the Silurians don’t revive because Earth’s climate stabilises below the levels the Silurians set. In Bloodtide, Tulok claims he prevented the reactivation, and the Doctor finds evidence of his sabotage.
[191] Cold Blood
[192] Doctor Who and the Silurians
[193] Cold Blood. It’s unclear if Malokeh’s family remained awake the whole time, or periodically woke up to check progress, just as it’s not explained why they didn’t bother waking the other Silurians at any point after they realised the Earth was habitable once more.
[194] “Twenty million years, give or take” before Eternity Weeps, according to Benny.
[195] See The Creation of the Cybermen sidebar.
[196] The Tenth Planet
[197] The Tenth Planet, and elaborated in Spare Parts.
[198] According to the sixth Doctor in Attack of the Cybermen. The implication seems to be that Mondas left the solar system deliberately and under its own power. However, Spare Parts shows the propulsion unit first being used at the far end of Mondas’ journey.
[199] The Quantum Archangel
[200] Dating “The Cybermen” (DWM #215-238) - “The Cybermen” strip covered the early history of Mondas. It places the creation of the Cybermen in the Age of the Reptile People, which may or may not support the date for the creation of the Cybermen less than five million years ago given in “The World Shapers” (see the When Did the Silurians Rule the Earth? sidebar).
[201] “The World Shapers”
[202] Dating The Keys of Marinus (1.5) - There is no way of dating this story in relation to Earth’s history, but taking the comic strips into account, it has to happen before “The World Shapers”. As it’s set on Mondas, the only place it can fit is after the first fall of the Cyberman civilisation seen in “The Cybermen”.
There’s confusion within the chronology of the story - Arbitan seems to state that Yartek is at least thirteen hundred years old (as the Conscience was built two thousand years ago, and Yartek broke its conditioning after seven centuries). Arbitan has been working to upgrade the Conscience to defeat the Voord, and he and his followers have hidden the micro-keys around the planet, but there’s no indication of how long Arbitan’s been at work. Arbitan is mortal and feeling the effects of old age, and there’s nothing to suggest anyone on Marinus has anything other than a normal human lifespan.
[203] Dating “The Cybermen” (DWM #215-238) - It’s “three thousand years” after the previous strip.
[204] Dating “The World Shapers” (DWM #127-129) - The story is set no more than five million years in the past, as the Time Lords calculate that the Cybermen will become a force for peace in that time, and they haven’t even by our far future.
The Doctor mentions the Fishmen of Kandalinga, from the first Doctor Who Annual, and the TARDIS initially lands on a platform very like the one seen in the illustrations from that story. However, as the name suggests, that story was set on Kandalinga, not Marinus.
When Were the Cybermen Created?
It’s unclear when Mondas leaves the solar system. In The Tenth Planet, the Doctor says it was “millions of years” ago. The Cyberman Krang says it was “aeons”, and an aeon is a billion years. But the Mondasians were “exactly like” humans when Mondas started to drift away. As the land masses of the “twin” planets of Earth and Mondas are identical, it seems logical that life evolved in the same way and at the same rate on both worlds (we have to gloss over the fact that aliens such as the Daemons and Scaroth accelerated human development on Earth, but presumably not on Mondas).
“The World Shapers” sets the origins of the Cybermen within five million years of the present day - the Time Lords, at least, believe the Cybermen will be a force for good five million years after their creation. David Banks, in both his Cybermen book and his novel Iceberg, dated Mondas’ departure to 10,000 BC. The Terrestrial Index concurred. Banks suggested that the “edge of space” was the Oort Cloud surrounding the solar system. The audio Spare Parts contradicts that, saying that Mondas reaches the Cherrybowl Nebula, and states that Mondas left orbit because of the moon’s arrival. Real Time says Mondas left “millennia” ago. In a story outline for a proposed sixth Doctor story, Genesis of the Cybermen, Gerry Davis set the date of the Cybermen’s creation at “several hundred years BC”. Timelink notes that as the Fendahl planet was the “fifth” twelve million years ago, Mondas must have already left its orbit by that point.
Over the years, a number of fans - including the first two versions of Ahistory - have speculated that the Mondasians and the Silurians were contemporaries, linking the disaster that put the Silurians into hibernation with the one that threw Mondas out of its orbit. There’s little to either support or contradict this in the stories themselves. The Cyberman design seems to echo the Silurian third eye at the top of the head, but the Cybermen clearly aren’t cyborg Silurians. Not only are we told in The Tenth Planet that the Cybermen “were exactly like you [humans] once”, the same story shows them with human hands, not reptilian ones. “The Cybermen” strip in DWM, though, ingeniously solves that problem by depicting the Cybermen as descendents of apes augmented by the Silurians.
The Virgin edition of Ahistory suggested that Mondas was subject to time dilation, explaining why the Cybermen weren’t more advanced. Timelink and The Death of Art reached the same conclusion. However, the continents on Mondas are exactly like those on Earth, so this theory doesn’t account for the identical continental drift, assuming such a thing affected the ancient Earth in the Doctor Who universe.
[205] “Ten thousand years” before the novel Iceberg, which uses the same dating system as David Banks’ book Cybermen. This schism is the given explanation for the difference in appearance - and apparent lack of contact - between the Cybermen from The Tenth Planet and The Invasion.
[206] Dating Spare Parts (BF #34) - There is no dating evidence in the story itself. It takes place when Mondas is at its farthest point from Earth and the implication is that the return journey will be much faster than the outward one, as it will be powered. Spare Parts could, then, take place a matter of decades before The Tenth Planet (and further evidence for this might be the Mondasian society of Spare Parts resembles Earth’s in the mid-twentieth century).
That said, while it’s never quite stated, Mondas seems to have left the solar system within the lifetimes of the older characters, not the “millions of years” the Doctor spoke of in The Tenth Planet. There’s no indication that Mondas immediately set course for a return to the solar system. We know that the Cybermen didn’t attend the Armageddon Convention (Revenge of the Cybermen) and that the Convention was signed in 1609 (The Empire of Glass), so that they were a force to be reckoned with by the seventeenth century.
It theref
ore seems fair to speculate that the Cybermen piloted Mondas around the galaxy for a long time (certainly millennia) before finally returning to their native solar system.
[207] The Underwater Menace
[208] The presence of blue grass in The Hungry Earth tips the Doctor off to the presence of Silurians.
[209] Forty-Five: “False Gods”. The terminology is a bit off here; creodonts were an entire order of mammals whose members included the Megistotherium, said to be the largest mammalian predator.
[210] When asked in Autumn Mist when humanity evolved, the Doctor says “the accepted figure’s about half a million years, though its really nearer six”. It’s only one suggestion that human origins in the Doctor Who universe stretch further than conventional scientific wisdom would have you think. According to Image of the Fendahl, the Fendahl skull arrived on Earth twelve million years ago, just as the first humanoid bipeds evolved - this is eight million years before Dr. Fendelman had believed.
[211] “Millions of years” before FP: Ozymandias. Presumably, these are the Martians wiped out by the Fendahl. It may also be a Quatermass in-joke, as Quatermass and the Pit depicted insectoid Martians who had become extinct millions of years before.
[212] Image of the Fendahl
[213] The Creed of the Kromon, which we might retroactively think is referring to The Judgement of Isskar.
Life on Mars
The Fendahl couldn’t have wiped out all life on Mars, as the Ice Warriors come from Mars and lived there at least from the time of the Ice Age on Earth (The Ice Warriors) until the twenty-first century (The Seeds of Death) and apparently far further into the future (The Curse of Peladon). It should be noted that in Image of the Fendahl, the Doctor only speculates that the Fendahl attacked Mars.
As it happens, Image of the Fendahl is not the only occasion that the show seemingly ignores the existence of the Ice Warrior civilisation on the Red Planet. The Ambassadors of Death has manned missions to Mars that don’t encounter the Ice Warriors (yet they do meet another alien race there - one that’s not from Mars itself). Pyramids of Mars, as the name suggests, has the Doctor and Sarah visiting a pyramid on Mars and never mentioning the Ice Warriors. We never see UNIT encounter the Ice Warriors, although Castrovalva has the fifth Doctor mimic his previous selves, and seems (unless, in his post-regeneration confusion, he’s just marrying together two unrelated elements) to refer to an adventure with the Brigadier and the Ice Warriors. In The Christmas Invasion, UNIT knows that there are Martians, and that they don’t look like the Sycorax.