On Almea's Residual Zones

[TriceraTiger]

You've mentioned before that Almean humans are not well-adapted to mountains and thus leave them to the elcari, which is why a situation like that of the Caucasus cannot arise. That said, are (for instance) the peninsulas of Eidnan, Mnese, and Trund (or Luduyn or Jagai on Erelaé) intended to work as residual zones? Are the western parts of the Bekkai also supposed to be a residual zone?

[zompist]

Not all of those areas are mountainous-- if nothing else, there's the coastal areas. But they're pretty much all hunter-gatherer areas, so the population is low. The zones in Arcel are also very cold, so their mountainous spines are uninhabited.

[TriceraTiger]

I brought up those areas because they remind me a little of Siberia, which is a residual zone on Earth. Dense jungles can also work this way, but the Beic sphere, for instance, seems too uniform for this to be the case there.

As an aside, I feel like Lebiscuri is a lot like New Guinea but scaled up.

[Pedant]

As an aside, I feel like Lebiscuri is a lot like New Guinea but scaled up.

The way it looks from a distance I kind of assumed Lebiscuri was a stand-in for Europe. They’ve even got a Scandinavian Peninsula and all...

[Frislander]

I would point out that a sufficiently rich coastal environment can support a fair density of even hunter-gatherers à la the Pacific Northwest, while more swampy environments can do similar, particularly with some immersion-tolerant crops like sago in the Sepik River area. In the case of the latter I would actually expect Nan to be representative of this, especially away from the main rivers.