They don't, really. RJ's comments on this was to remember this is only fiction, and he's not tried to make everything fit reality. In his cosmology, there's no big bang at the beginning and the sun won't ever die.

We have no idea at which point in evolution RJ has decided that everything before that is "false" and has become a forgotten previous Age.



Maybe this happens, but RJ actually never said that. He said there were Ages without any channelling - like our own - he never said humanity had to fight Shai'tan in those Ages. As far as we know (and character like Fel believe), this happens at the end of the second Age and mark the whole Third Age.

RJ's said there was nothing too special about this Third Age, so forcibly there's always channelling in those two Ages.



According to Thom Merrillin, yes Mosk and Merk were from the Age before the AOL. He must know, because these were old stories about the past Age known in the AOL (perhaps much less fanciful)and that survived the Breaking. If we go by Thom, very few things about Ages before the AOL have survived, because almost all that was known in the AOL disappeared with the Breaking. We are most likely Balthamel's "primitive civilizations" in RJ's eyes.




That isn't quite true. First of all, we don't know it's "by the time the AOL came around", and it's extremely doubftul it's the case. The evidence is that channelling eventually lead to an utopian civilization that rejected war, even stopped studying how to wage it. With the WOS, they had to look at the past to reinvent it. For how many centuries/millenia had the state of things at the end of the Age, right before the Bore, has endured? We don't know, no more than we know how long it took humanity to get from the discovery of channelling to the utopia of the end of the Age. Nothing says the whole Age has been peaceful.



You remember it wrong, because there's zero information from RJ or the series about how the other Ages end, except for the AOL of course. We know the "second Age" began with the discovery of channelling, and beyond that we have only a vague hint a nuclear conflict might have destroyed civilization right before (which would be an incentive to try to build an Utopian world).




No, like wolfbrothers, Min's talent etc., it depends strictly on the "rules" for an Age. RJ said in his design there are Ages that never know channelling, such as our own.



Some think the fact RJ spoke as if non-humans made the Horn may be a clue it's non-humans we know about.

The inscription is irrelevant. It's in the Old Tongue because this phrase was inscribed on it during the AOL only, not by the makers of the Horn (Maria Simmons confirmed this). As we already know in that Age the Horn was believed to be just an artefact associated to old legends but with no actual magical power, and that when foretellings about the Horn appeared it had alreary been lost during the war, and finally retrieved only after the Sealing, then we can pretty much guess Deirdre's group were the ones who put the inscription on the Horn before placing it at the "Eye". This reveals nothing about its makers, but notice the Horn seems to fold a point where TAR and the RL become one somehow - yet another "portal" between dimensions, like the PS, like Ghenjei.



What attracted many's attention is the fact the Finn symbols (to enter Ghenjei, and on their portals/doorways) is very similar to the style of the inscriptions on the Portal Stones. The shape of the PS is also very similar to the ToG's. This may or may not be a coincidence.