User blog comment:WC-83/History of the Schnee Family/@comment-14078953-20130806025021/@comment-10390252-20131014091633

I read somewhere that, these days, archeologists say pretty much everything that we consider 'civilisation', incluidng written language, agriculture and even permanent settlements are between 10 to 20 thousand years old at the very most. We've packed quite a lot into that time, when you think about it.

If we read a lot into the prologue of the show, I think that the first use of Dust as a weapon occured in Vytal's equivalent of the Neolithic era and probably partially enabled the development of civilisation on the planet.

I also suspect that the War that Jaune mentioned might be another major watershed event. It wouldn't surprise me if the system of academies and the industrialised production of Dust applications all dates from that time (although the oldest Dust companies could be far older but had previously taken very different forms from the current corporations).