The Races

[Nait]

The one thing you're forgetting is that since they come from times where governments already existed, they will know about various styles of government and they will develop a lot faster. We're not talking overnight - five years is way more than enough for people to have begun building towns, and every town has a leader. Bang. Government, right there. Move on to the next stage - the leaders from the previous worlds will try to unite people under their rule. Some other random people will show great leadership too. Uniting of towns? Bang. Nations, right there. That's all it takes. And just because it's a new world, who's to say that they don't still have apples and cabbages and sheep? Five years is easily long enough to have figured out what is edible. If it took longer than that, the people wouldn't have survived five years. They need to establish what is edible within a week, really, and I imagine they would do just that. Starting with meat, mostly, I'd imagine. If you see a carnivore eating any animal, then more often than not you can do the same. In medieval times a lot of people knew how to use nature to survive, unlike this modern world, so don't think that Joe Bloggs the peasant doesn't know how to help his comrades build a house. The five races would also help each other out a lot.

But yeah, making nations for the very first time would be awfully difficult if it had never been done before, and obviously it took a long time for the world we live in to get to that stage - but once you've figured it out, there's no stopping anyone from trying to do it again. United we stand, divided we fall - a lot of these places would be quick to unite so as to avoid other people coming along and killing them or something.

But, y'see, it doesn't work that way. If there is no ready agriculture for a whole lot of people to feed on, there is not enough food for them all. Even if they hunt as much as they can, it's going to be very difficult to survive, and people are forced to spread out - no cities without food, without people, and no nations without cities.

And even if they have food with them, how long can they survive on that? If they want agriculture, they definitely need seed-cereal - and who carries around bags of seed-cereal, even in medieval times? You are throwing a whole lot of people, all to many people, in a world with NO infrastucture, which they CANNOT build fast enough to survive. The children of peasants turn to hunting, and hunting-gathering, and only a very small percentage of food will come from agriculture - too little. After all the wild game and whatnot has been exhausted in a certain area, they must move on or die - and take their knowledge with them in their grave.

And that's only IF these people have domesticated cereal with them! It takes literary hundreds, thousands of years to domesticate plants, and that's when you know the territory, and only when there ARE bid-seeded and good wild cereals - like in the Fertile Crescent, where there is the greatest amount of different, big-seeded wild cereals that are good for domestication. If there aren't any good cereals for domestication, there will be no domesticated cereals - or the process will be hugely slower than the Fertile Crescent cereals like wheat (IIRC) and rye(IIRC) - as in the case of North American Eastern Plain Corn, which had to be domesticated for thousands of years to be a viable cereal - and which was replaced by better cereals from South America.

So, if you transfer people in an unknown world, without domesticated cereals, domesticated animals, they WILL revert to tribalism after most of the first generation will die in starvation. A process that will take thousands of years to counteract, a short time I'm giving you because there must be some sort of cultural baggage from an era past, which could work as an inspiration - if it isn't forgotten completely.