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Age of Terra and the Stellar Exodus (M1-M15)

For millions of standard years after the Necrons and their captive C'tan Shards went into hibernation on their Tomb Worlds, the devastated populations of the intelligent species of the galaxy slowly recovered from the C'tan's "red harvests." In time, the Aeldari emerged as the most dominant civilisation in the galaxy, with the core of their star-spanning empire located in the region of the galaxy that would later become the Warp rift called the Eye of Terror .

But on the planet called Earth and later Terra by its inhabitants, an intelligent, mammalian humanoid species known as Humanity was rising to prominence over 40,000 standard years ago. During the Age of Terra, or the Age of Progress as it is sometimes called by Imperial historitors, the Human race advanced beyond its ancient pre-industrial past to obtain spacefaring capability and began to slowly settle the terraformable worlds in its own solar system and in the star systems near its homeworld using massive sublight starships.

The so-called "Stellar Exodus" which occurred during the Age of Terra is a poorly-understood period of Human history which is generally accepted to cover the majority of Mankind's initial forays into interstellar space and the genesis of most of the oldest Human extrasolar colonies, beginning at some unknown point in the mid-to-late 3rd Millennium.

This period is generally understood to lead into the so-called "Dark Age of Technology" sometime around the 15th Millennium A.D. During much of the Stellar Exodus, Humanity lacked any knowledge of the existence of the Immaterium or Warp-Drive and so was forced to travel between the stars in great, sublight generation voidships or using cryogenic hibernation.

Age of Technology (M15-M25)

The Age of Technology saw the development of the first Human, Warp-capable interstellar spacecraft.

Much of the era of Human history known to Imperial historitors as the Age of Technology or the "Dark Age of Technology" that lasted approximately between the 15th Millennium and the 25th Millennium A.D. is mysterious. It was in this time that the psychic mutants called Navigators were first born or created through genetic engineering, and combined with the invention of the Warp-Drive, allowed Humanity to travel between worlds faster than the speed of light by using the dangerous hyperdimensional, psychically-reactive medium of the Immaterium or "Warp."

Long before the rise of the Emperor and the birth of the Imperium, during the Age of Technology Humanity reached out to the stars, eager to occupy new worlds and expand its burgeoning interstellar empire. Vast colonisation starships carried eager Human settlers, along with all the resources they might require, and landed on far-flung, often isolated worlds.

The first Knight Worlds were founded at the very start of the Age of Technology, before the discovery of the Warp-Drive in the 18th Millennium, when scouts from Old Earth travelled far through the galaxy seeking planets to use as agricultural worlds to provide food for Mankind's burgeoning population, or as mining colonies to provide the materials needed to fuel their expansion across the stars. Indeed, these so-called "Knight Worlds" had already been established for thousands of standard years when the Imperium was first founded in the 30th Millennium.

When those first Human scout ships discovered a suitable planet for colonisation, gigantic, sublight voidcraft were dispatched to settle them. These ships were part of Terra's "Long March" fleets, named after the duration of their voyage and their destination among the stars. The name was apt; each of the Long March colony ships carried thousands of settlers on a solar decades-long journey to a far distant planet. Upon arrival, the colony ship would land and be immediately cannibalised by the colonists to provide the raw materials needed for their first settlements; there was no hope of return to Mankind's distant homeworld.

The struggle for survival on many of these worlds was grim. On some, the settlers found themselves the prey of vicious predators or were attacked by native alien species, which saw the Human settlers as invaders. On other worlds, extreme weather conditions or an unbreathable atmosphere made travel outside of domed habitat-zones next to impossible.

However, problems like these had been anticipated, and in order to deal with them, the settlers were supplied with artificially intelligent Standard Template Construct (STC) databases and fabrication facilities that allowed them to build powered suits of exoarmour. The pilots of these bipedal walking machines were protected by a hard shell of plasteel and armed with an array of military-grade heavy weapons.

The suits proved invaluable: few, if any, natural predators or hostile alien warriors could stand against them, and they could travel through even the most dangerous environment with ease. The towering armoured figures soon became a common sight on the Human Long March colonies, where they were known as "Knights" by the settlers, after the legendary armoured warriors and protectors of ancient Terran history.

Compelled by the mind-altering effects instilled by the Thrones Mechanicum (a mind impulse control platform that allows a pilot to mentally interface with their Knight battlesuit), over the course of a few generations, these elite warriors gradually developed a society that evolved into the later knightly houses. The plasteel plates of the original exo-skeleton suits were slowly replaced with more ornate armour made from adamantium, providing better protection as well as a panoply befitting the wearer's prestige and rank in their society.

The more mundane duties that the Knights had once taken part in on the colony worlds -– logging with their mighty Reaper Chainswords, for example, or blasting apart rock ore with their rapid-fire Battle Cannons -– were delegated to those of lesser ranks, allowing the Knights to focus on the arts of war and governorship.

Dwelling in tall strongholds, these "Nobles" and "Scions" strove to protect the lives of their subjects (as they now saw the settlers they protected) and to bring order to the primeval maelstrom on the planets that were their homes. The knightly houses proved to be highly successful at both of these things, and soon became a vital part of Human society during the Age of Technology.

The existence of rapid interstellar travel eventually provided by the invention of the Warp-Drive allowed Human colony worlds to interact on a normal timescale for the first time and interstellar commerce and communication became possible, allowing like-minded Human worlds to join into political and economic combines for their mutual benefit.

Eventually, at some point during this era, all of Humanity was united beneath some form of interstellar government. What is also known (largely from the works of Keeper Cripias) is that a group known as the "Men of Gold" relied on the works of the "Men of Stone" in order to create a fantastically prosperous interstellar society, but one devoid (by later Imperial standards) of spirituality or piety, focused instead only upon the advancement of science and technology.

The Stone Men are known to have created a third group, the "Men of Iron," postulated to be some form of artificially self-aware robots or thinking machines, in order to assist them in their labours and carry out military duties. The Iron Men became uncontrolled and rebelled against their Human creators, and a cataclysmic conflict broke out, resulting in a partial Malthusian catastrophe across much of the Human-settled galaxy in which there were no longer enough resources to support the vast populations of Mankind. From this time onwards, it became an article of faith in Human societies that the creation of thinking machines and all artificial general intelligence should be forbidden.

Even worse, following the destruction caused by the war against the Men of Iron, Human psykers began to appear in large numbers across many Human colony worlds, one of the harbingers of the final decline of the Aeldari Empire which controlled even more of the galaxy than Mankind did in these years. The result was Humanity's first introduction to the "Daemonic" entities that dwelled within the Warp and the ultimate collapse of Human interstellar civilisation during what became known as the Age of Strife. On Terra itself, this period would be remembered by a different name -- "Old Night."