Tongkoko

On a bright summer day, more than three thousand years before the rise of the first states in the Fertile Crescent, a volcano that would later become known as, on the island that the world would later call , in Indonesia, erupts. Its eruption, though not especially damaging to the area's low-density hunter-gatherer population, produces a sizeable quantity of ash. In our timeline, the prevailing winds push the ash west, where it settles harmlessly into the Indian Ocean. Yet, a simple shift in the prevailing winds would have driven the ash east onto the, later to become known as the Spice Islands, where the ash might have devastated these island's population of - even as the same wind carried the seeds of these last few trees into the Halmahera Sea, to wash up on the shores of the island of New Guinea - then already becoming one of the world's few centres of independently developed agriculture. When, millennia later, the world began to hanker for the taste of cloves, its ships would have to come not to the Moluccas, but to the agricultural powerhouse of New Guinea - a densely populated island lacking only contact with the technologies, livestock and crops of the outside world to propel it into the status of civilizational centre as well. What would the early establishment of such contact have meant for the future of New Guinea? For the Indian Ocean? For the world as a whole?

Point of Divergence
The destruction of cloves on the Moluccas by the eruption of Mount Tongkoko in 3376 BC leaves New Guinea as the sole source of the spice, just as the Moluccas were OTL. Consequently, as the Indian Ocean spice trade begins in the develop in the 300s BC, the petty kingdoms of what would, OTL, become Indonesia turn to New Guinea rather than the Moluccas - unleashing an explosion of new agricultural techniques, tools, and livestock onto the island, leading to political centralization and the rise of the same trade-driven states that arose in Java and Sumatra - with immense future consequences.

Notes on the Timeline

 * All citations are present for aesthetic reasons, and the works cited do not actually exist. For similar reasons, the timeline attempts to roughly replicate the degree of scholarly knowledge that exists about different regions OTL, rather than pretending to omniscience about alternate Southeast Asia. This means it will rely on (often fictional) archaeological evidence, coins, inscriptions, etc.
 * The timeline's initial focus will be on Southeast Asia, with other regions being addressed in detail only when they become relevant to the story.

Key Pages

 * List of Nations
 * List of Wars
 * Timeline (300 BC - 1 AD)