The Elder talk about the Ancients
The Ancients are the former inhabitants humans who lived in the world of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden prior to the apocalypse during the Old Age.
Apocalypse is the combinations of activities such as climate change , red plague and finally nuclear war which wipe off most of the humanities remain from the world of Mutant Year Zero. In forty years, most of the Ancients is wiped almost to the extinctions due to the combinations of their actions.
This is also how the Mutants and Humans in the Ark refer them as. The only ways the we know of their existence is through the skeletons/corpses that proof that Ancient once existed, all the scraps , artifacts , building ruin , as well as the leftover MIMIR machines that are seen scattered across the Zone.
Ghouls are believed to worship the Ancients as seen in the shrine located at World Ender.
Dialogue[]
We call these fools the Ancients. We don't worship the Ancients like the madmen in the Zone do, because our salvation doesn't depend on false gods who live in space. It doesn't depend on a mirage of paradise beyond the Zone. Our salvation depends on us.
When the world fell apart, a few of humanity's best and brightest constructed hidden bases where they could survive. These bases were called Enclaves.
One was deep beneath the ground, another at the bottom of the sea, a third orbiting the planet. The best and brightest, trapped inside the Enclaves, grew paranoid. Then hostile. They created machines that did everything for them. Except immortality.
The Ancient's best and brightest died bur their machines remain.