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The population was limited by the space available to agriculture, and even after full exhaustion of the planet´s oceans for food production, more than a billion people could not be sustained. It was only when the natural resources on the main continent and under the ocean floors slowly started to near depletion that a more thorough exploration of the polar continents was conducted and revealed the third drastic influence on the eudorian evolution.
The first geographical surveys that were conducted found ancient ruins, burried deep in the sands. It would take almost a century to uncover the whole extent of the ruins, but one thing quickyl became obvious: A civilization had existed on Talien long before the Eudorian one.
It was also soon apparent that it had been a technologically advanced civilization, and Eudorian science was spured and leapt forward in giant steps.
And while many things found were benefitial to the Eudorians, others raised questions and fears. The age of the ruins was estimated at about half a million years, and engineers determined that the buildings had been weathered by the encroaching sands rather than been destroyed by force. That of course meant that at one point, the polar regions hadn´t been covered with sand. Was that the effect of a natural desaster or simply the hundreds of thousands of years in this climate? And why were there no signs whatsoever of any civilization on the equatorial continent? But the question that the whole planet would be asking was raised after fice years of extensive search revealed no signs of any remains of lifeforms within the ruins. Where did they go?
It wasn´t for another two centuries that the answer to this question would be found.
During those twenty years, the Eudorian people took their first steps into space, thanks to technology reverse-engineered from the ruins. They found orbital debris, determined to be the remains of satellites and other orbital platforms, dating back to the times of the ancient civilization.
After centuries of continuous, intensive research and excavations on the ancient ruins, interest in them vanished when no new information or technology could be found. But several groups of devoted archeologists remained committed to the projects that had occupied their entire lifes.
One of them was still looking for any surviving records. So far, every computer, every storage medium they had come across had been wiped clean by massive magnetic disturbance, or simply by age. Then, while investigating a ruin found deep inside a mountain by a mining operation, they stumbled upon a single intact computer drive – kept save by the massive shielding of both the ruins thick walls and the rich lead deposits in the surrounding rock. When the data on that drive was analized and translated, it changed everything.
It became clear that the ruins where the drive was found had been a research facility, and that the reason for its massive shielding and buried location was the same that had ended the ancient civilization.