Yeah I was thinking about that while I was fixing some food, and I'm sure in the hundreds of pages this kind of speculation has already happened more than once. I suppose if there's no Caine in this continuity then the Antediluvians were never cursed and maybe they don't have such a close connection to their descendants.
Incidentally I remembered that Arikel was not the only Ishtar in World of Darkness, there's a fairly obscure reference to the author of the English translation of the Book of Nod saying that he felt the correct translation for Lilith was actually Ishtar, but he used Lilith because it was more traditional (and he probably didn't want to risk offending the Bahari). So maybe instead of turning Caine into the first vampire, Lilith is the first and is one of the ones awoken? That doesn't account for there being two the way the Arikel and Malkav theory does but maybe the second vampire is based on Na'amah.
