Evolution Question (personal universe related)

[Somes J]

I have a question about evolution relating to my Omniverse One universe.

As a lot of you probably know, the universe is a fantasy-type setting inspired by Nemo Ramjet's All Tomorrows. The idea is that, tens of thousands of years ago on Earth, a pre-modern technological civilization arose. It eventually collapsed, but a faction of them managed to escape to another world. This civilization used early humans as slaves and used genetic modification to create a variety of specialized slave races. On the new world, there was a slave rebellion and the slaves killed off their masters and ran off into the wilderness, where they devolved to stone age level. Over time, the various specialized slave races adapted to fill vacant ecological niches on the new world (which lacks any large indigenous animals - nothing bigger than a turkey - with maybe one or two exceptions). The result is a world with a whole, albeit rudimentary ecosystem of hominids filling various roles (scavengers, browsers/grazers, hunter-gatherers, apex predators), some of them sapient and some of them not.

Now the question I have is, assuming maybe 50,000 years to adapt to the new world and a number of empty ecological niches to exploit, what sort of adaptation and radiation would you see? Or, put it more simply, how far do you think it is plausible for some of the species to have diverged from their original forms?

For instance, the local equivalent of deer is a hominid evolved to be able to live on low-quality plant material (leaves, basically). Could something like that evolve naturally in such a short time? Similarly, another one is a species descended from humans who colonized a huge cave system inhabited by predators that were attracted to light. The result is they had to learn to survive in total darkness, and by now their eyes have atrophied to the point that their eyelids have become unbroken flaps of skin that can't be opened. Is that plausible, after a few tens of thousands of years of living in a lightless environment?

It's not really a huge deal, as whatever can't be explained by natural evolution can be explained as some specialized slave race that went feral. The deer hominids, for instance, might be descended from a hominid designed as a food animal, or perhaps simply a slave race designed to subsist on low-quality food as an economy measure. I'm less sure about what slaves with no eyes would have been good for, but they might have started out as some semi-insane bioengineer's idea of a joke or something. Still, I'm curious to know what you think is plausible.

The conservative scheme I've got in mind right now is something like this:

Humans (biologically like you and me): naturally evolved (duh).

Killer People/Apex Predator Hominids: originally descended from a slave race used as gladiators, the ones around today will probably exhibit some minor secondary adaptations to their new lifestyle (for instance, specialized meat-processing teeth and no facial hair on the males - if you live on raw meat, you probably don't want to have a giant mop on your face).

Leaf Eaters/Deer Homininds: originally descended from a creature the Masters might have created either as a food source or a draft animal (it was basically a hominid warped out of all recognition). Might exhibit some secondary adaptations (being very skittish and afraid of other hominids for instance - since we're the only things that eat them).

Blind People: these guys live in a cave system and are adapted to a life in complete darkness, to the point that they have totally atrophied eyes that are completely covered by skin. Now this is the one that's most iffy. I had a nice origin story worked out about how they're humans naturally adapted to the cave, but I'm really not sure how plausible it is for them to evolve that radically (lose your eyes) in 50,000 years or less. I think I may rethink them and maybe make them some Master bioengineer's twisted idea of art/a joke.

Cave People: these guys inhabit the upper levels of the same cave system as the Blind People and are basically just albino humans with really good night vision. Seems modest enough that they could be naturally evolved from normal humans.

Forest People: originally descended from Master pets/house servants/sex slaves. Essentially unchanged from their original state (in fact, thanks to the anti-cancer mechanisms the Masters gave them which kill any mutant cells in their bodies, they're basically gene-locked in their present form).

Animal People: originally descended from hominids the Masters used as grunt labor. The Masters made them very physically strong, but also very stupid. They're 4X the strength of a man, but their intelligence is toddler-level or lower.

Scavenger People: variant of the Animal People evolved as scavengers. They developed dwarfism, lost some body hair (for the same reason as the Killer People), developed a better sense of smell (to sniff out the sweet, sweet rotting corpses), and basically specialized in eating dead stuff nobody else wanted. They seem "moderate" enough that they could plausibly be naturally evolved.

Water People: originally hominids specialized for underwater work, now they fill the same ecological niche as seals do on Earth. Living in a relatively unchallenging environment where fire is impossible and advanced tool use is problematic they have lost most of their sapience since they went feral.

Sound good? What do you think?

[Destructionator]

Yeah, it sounds fairly plausible, though 50k years might be a bit short for all of it. Given their starting points, it could work, but to be safe, I'd crank up the time. Homo has been around for a couple million years in various forms, so 50k seems too short for the changes you've described.

Furthermore, you should make sure there is isolation between the niches - if someone can just walk out of the cave and eat, or more importantly mate with those who eat leaves for example, their specialized mutations are doing to be dissipated quickly.

This isolation occurring naturally will probably also crank up the time you'll want; give enough millenia for geological activity to cut them off or something like that.

[Shroom Man 777]

Fifty thousand years is too quick unless you've got cataclysms that caused rapid shifts in population and caused small groups to become isolated, thus causing them to evolve divergently and all that.

Or unless the customization of the Master Race were extensive so that each city or nation had different versions of the humanoids.

Killer People/Apex Predator Hominids: originally descended from a slave race used as gladiators, the ones around today will probably exhibit some minor secondary adaptations to their new lifestyle (for instance, specialized meat-processing teeth and no facial hair on the males - if you live on raw meat, you probably don't want to have a giant mop on your face).

Breeding special people for gladiator games is kind of silly. Why not breed them to be soldiers initially? Their predatory nature could come from the Master Race engineering them to be able to operate with minimal food supplies - where they'd have to feed on the felled meat of vanquished foes!

Leaf Eaters/Deer Homininds: originally descended from a creature the Masters might have created either as a food source or a draft animal (it was basically a hominid warped out of all recognition). Might exhibit some secondary adaptations (being very skittish and afraid of other hominids for instance - since we're the only things that eat them).

Maybe descended from Domesticated Humans? House pets or house helpers with limited intelligences, just good for mopping the dishes and washing the floors and stuff at home or something. They'd eat leaves so the Master Race won't have to spend money on People Food. They'd be about as intelligent as particularly dumb grass-eating children? Menial labor humans?

Blind People: these guys live in a cave system and are adapted to a life in complete darkness, to the point that they have totally atrophied eyes that are completely covered by skin. Now this is the one that's most iffy. I had a nice origin story worked out about how they're humans naturally adapted to the cave, but I'm really not sure how plausible it is for them to evolve that radically (lose your eyes) in 50,000 years or less. I think I may rethink them and maybe make them some Master bioengineer's twisted idea of art/a joke.

The blindness is hard to explain. Maybe the planet has a very large cave system, like a Hollow Earth, and maybe there were experimentations on Next Generation Slave Humans able to operate in the pitch black through the use of echolocation or enhanced hearing/smelling or even thermal senses (like snakes!) at the expense of their ocular faculties. Maybe these experiments proved successful and the small population of experiment humans escaped and prospered in the wild?

Or maybe defective humans got tossed into the caves or something, and the blind ended up prospering!

Forest People: originally descended from Master pets/house servants/sex slaves. Essentially unchanged from their original state (in fact, thanks to the anti-cancer mechanisms the Masters gave them which kill any mutant cells in their bodies, they're basically gene-locked in their present form).

Hrm... comparing these with the Leaf Eaters... hmm...

Animal People: originally descended from hominids the Masters used as grunt labor. The Masters made them very physically strong, but also very stupid. They're 4X the strength of a man, but their intelligence is toddler-level or lower.

Now these are very much like the Leaf Eaters.

Maybe the Leaf Eaters and the Animal People were Slave People who filled basically the same role. Except that they were created by different groups of Masters. Masters from City A would use the Slave Humans who'd end up becoming the Leaf Eaters, while Masters from City B used Slave Humans who'd become the Animal People. Both population of Masters engineered their Slave Humans with different traits, although they filled similar roles.

Scavenger People: variant of the Animal People evolved as scavengers. They developed dwarfism, lost some body hair (for the same reason as the Killer People), developed a better sense of smell (to sniff out the sweet, sweet rotting corpses), and basically specialized in eating dead stuff nobody else wanted. They seem "moderate" enough that they could plausibly be naturally evolved.['/quote]

Interbreeding between the Animal People and the Killer People?

Maybe the Scavenger People are diverse, including the "runt" and "reject" versions of the Animal People and the Killer People who have become foragers. The "Scavenger People" wouldn't refer to a single homogenous group, but a whole bunch of rejected shitpieces struggling to survive by eating garbage and carrion.

Water People: originally hominids specialized for underwater work, now they fill the same ecological niche as seals do on Earth. Living in a relatively unchallenging environment where fire is impossible and advanced tool use is problematic they have lost most of their sapience since they went feral.

They don't need to lose their sapience. Dolphins are smart. If the oceans are filled with monster sharks or anything, the Water People would have to think to survive, and they could be highly social and work in dolphin pods.

There could be varities of Water People as well - from average Slave Humans who were underwater workers who evolve into dolphin or seal analogues, to Slave Humans engineered by the navies of the Master Race, basically the undersea equivalent of the Killer People. These Sea Killers would fill the niche of sharks and orcas!


Maybe you can explain your speciation by having different populations of Master Race breed subtly different versions of Slave Humans. Different Master Race cities could have different versions of Slave Humans to fill out the same roles as the other cities.

Maybe the Master Race created Slave Humans by first manufacturing "neutral" humans who have undeveloped features - no hair, limited eyes, soft teeth, weak muscles, no pigmentation, transparent skin (think of that Arnold movie, The 6th Day). Then they'd "specialize" these neutrals by infusing them with chemicals or nanomachines or DNA or recessive genes or something, having them then develop in a grotesque parody of puberty into the specialized forms of the Slave Humans (who'd eventually evolve into the Leaf Eaters, Killers, Water Peoples, Animals, etc.).


PEOPLES! SO MANY PEOPLES!

[Somes J]

On another note, I've been giving some thought to the nature of the Masters' civilization. Namely, why the heck would an advanced civilization even need stuff like this?

The best thing I could come up with was this. The Masters originally got their technology from a foreign source. I'm thinking an alien ship crashed on Earth many thousands of millions of years earlier. The Masters dug it up. They were around Neolithic level at the time. The ship, being an STL colony ship, had a database with all the knowledge of the civilization that sent it, from making fire to building starships, and it was designed to be accessible even to people who didn't know what it was (it had a universal translator type language deciphering system etc.). With the alien computer system as their "teacher" the Masters went from stone age to space age in a matter of centuries. The ruling dynasty owed all its power to knowing all the secrets of the database, and to preserve their power they tried as much as possible to limit the spread of technology. They set aside a Forbidden City like compound which was the only place on the planet where scientific research and industrial manufacturing could be carried out, and forbade the technicians who worked there from ever leaving (a little like what the Venetians did with glassmakers, but more extreme).

In a society like that, I could see how organic slaves might be preferred. If you want a machine to till your fields you have to go buy it from the Forbidden City, at ruinous expense because the limited scale of the industry means virtually everything complex is going to be a handmade custom job, and when it breaks you have to repeat that all over again. Whereas if you go get some superstrong genetically engineered slaves instead, well you only need the first generation. And when your stock is big enough you can recoup the expense selling some to all your neighbors.

Such a set-up actually works rather decently with the way I envision the civilization as being small in scale and leaving very few recognizably high-tech or long-lasting remains (since it's sort of an Atlantis-type deal: it has to become lost to the mists of time by the modern era).

Sounds OK?

Breeding special people for gladiator games is kind of silly. Why not breed them to be soldiers initially? Their predatory nature could come from the Master Race engineering them to be able to operate with minimal food supplies - where they'd have to feed on the felled meat of vanquished foes!

I'd considered that but, I don't know, a hominid with the features of an apex predator doesn't strike me as a particularly good soldier. There's a reason nobody used domesticated attack tigers in warfare. Logistics for an army of carnivores would be a real pain, and apex predators tend to be intractable creatures that wouldn't be all that good at following orders (although I suppose intelligence would help there).

Bloodsports seems like something where a predator hominid would be more appropriate. People in plenty of historical cultures enjoyed pitting their manliness and wits against vicious and powerful beasts (lions, tigers etc.). Given that the Masters saw humans as animals, I'm sure they'd have gotten a kick out of hunting "the most dangerous game" (a desperate human). It doesn't seem unlikely that they'd use their biotech to up the ante, making their opponents more dangerous. From that perspective a proto-Killer makes sense: it combines all the (to them) awesome aspects of taking down a tiger and taking down a human.

Maybe descended from Domesticated Humans? House pets or house helpers with limited intelligences, just good for mopping the dishes and washing the floors and stuff at home or something. They'd eat leaves so the Master Race won't have to spend money on People Food. They'd be about as intelligent as particularly dumb grass-eating children? Menial labor humans?

That makes as much sense as anything else I've been able to think up.

The blindness is hard to explain. Maybe the planet has a very large cave system, like a Hollow Earth, and maybe there were experimentations on Next Generation Slave Humans able to operate in the pitch black through the use of echolocation or enhanced hearing/smelling or even thermal senses (like snakes!) at the expense of their ocular faculties. Maybe these experiments proved successful and the small population of experiment humans escaped and prospered in the wild?

Yeah, that's probably the explanation I'll go with. I do envision precisely such a cave system existing on the fantasy world, and I also have a vague idea that it might be quite minerologically rich, so it makes sense that before the rebellion they might have tried to produce a specialized hominid to work there.

Now these are very much like the Leaf Eaters.

Maybe the Leaf Eaters and the Animal People were Slave People who filled basically the same role. Except that they were created by different groups of Masters. Masters from City A would use the Slave Humans who'd end up becoming the Leaf Eaters, while Masters from City B used Slave Humans who'd become the Animal People. Both population of Masters engineered their Slave Humans with different traits, although they filled similar roles.

That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking something along those lines myself.

Interbreeding between the Animal People and the Killer People?

Possible. The various species only diverged 50,000 years ago, so I figure with a few extreme exceptions (like the Water People *) they'd probably still be genetically close enough to interbreed, like dogs and coyotes.

*A major exception actually is the Masters themselves. They were about as distant from us as Neanderthals, which would probably mean either they couldn't interbreed at all or could only produce sterile hybrids like horses and donkeys. I'm not sure which, but I'm leaning toward the second option.

That said, I kind of see the Scavengers as an independent evolutionary development, though gene flow with other hominids may have had a hand in it. Kind of ironic you should mention it though, as I'm thinking the section on interfertility for the Scavengers would probably read something like "nobody really knows because almost nobody ever wants to have sex with something that goes around eating rotting dead bodies and smells like it".

Maybe you can explain your speciation by having different populations of Master Race breed subtly different versions of Slave Humans. Different Master Race cities could have different versions of Slave Humans to fill out the same roles as the other cities.

Yeah, something along those lines would make sense.

[Shroom Man 777]

Hey, just because apex predators suck as soldiers doesn't mean soldiers can't evolve into apex predators.

It's like saying domesticated dogs can't go feral and live off in the wild. They can and can fare very well.

[Somes J]

Hey, just because apex predators suck as soldiers doesn't mean soldiers can't evolve into apex predators.

It's like saying domesticated dogs can't go feral and live off in the wild. They can and can fare very well.

Yes, but 50,000 years doesn't really seem long enough for something human-like to turn into a specialized predator.

Hmm, here's a tentative more refined draft of some of the various species. What do you think?

Leaf Eaters
Early in their history, the Masters acquired a taste for the meat of their fellow hominids. Later, they used biotechnology to modify those unfortunate wretches consigned to serve them in this way. They reduced the creatures' intelligence to the point where they would be content with being left chained to a feeding trough their whole lives, reduced their maturation periods and lifespans, and modified them to be able to digest low-quality feed like grass. When they went to the new world they began raising some of these creatures as food. During the chaos of the rebellion some of them escaped into the wild and began to breed.
Today, their descendants wander aimlessly through the forests of the world, placidly shoveling vegetation into their mouths as they go. They possess almost no tools and no real language; their grunts and screams conveying only simple messages of pleasure or fear. They are by far the most common hominid in the world, being near the base of the food chain, and are frequently preyed upon by their more technically adept cousins. As a result they have evolved a terrible fear of other hominids; they will instantly run in terror if they catch the slightest whiff, sound, or sight of one.


Killer People
During the height of their civilization, the Master elite liked to amuse themselves by hunting dangerous animals, including other hominids. Eventually they used biotech to create more formidable prey than mere nature could provide. Among these creations was a hominid they created to be the ultimate clever and dangerous prey. It was a human with enhanced strength and senses and genes grafted from various predatory beasts, giving it the instincts of a natural killer.
On the new world, some of these creatures escaped into the wild, and began to breed. Their natural attributes made the creatures ideally placed to assume the role of apex predators, and since there were no other large animals they evolved to prey on other forms of man.


Animal People
These are descended from creatures the Masters created to do low-skill manual labor. The Masters took humans and enhanced their physical strength while dulling their minds. They are quite physically powerful, but their minds never really mature beyond early childhood. During or before the rebellion some of them escaped into the wild and began to breed. Their minds, numbed as they were, were still adequate to let them fashion crude tools and survive as hunter-gatherers. They have only the most rudimentary language and their technology makes that of Earth's Tasmanians look advanced by comparison, but they survive.


Scavengers
A variant of the Animal People, evolved to specialize on feeding on rotten corpses. They are similar to Animal People but they are much weaker and smaller in stature, they have developed very sensitive noses (to smell out rotten meat), and they have some other specialized adaptations to their feeding habits, like lack of facial hair (for about the same reason a vulture doesn't have feathers on its head). Their intelligence also seems to have atrophied somewhat; their lifestyle doesn't demand much intellect.


Blind People
The new world possesses an immense cave system, in which lies considerable mineral wealth. One of the projects the Masters undertook on arriving was to create a specialized slave race that could operate there. They attempted to create a race of hominids that could operate effectively in total darkness. As it happened, some of their experiments managed to escape into the great caves and survive and breed. These became the Blind People.
Hmm, as they're written up now the Blind People function mostly by touch, smell, and hearing, but if they started out as a specialized slave species, I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense for them to have a real vision-equivalent. Probably sonar. On the other hand, they could be descended from an unrefined experimental prototypes.


Water People
These are specialized slaves bred by the Masters to work underwater. Originally there were two races of them, an intelligent one used for skilled work and a dumber one used for grunt work. Since the rebellion, the two have interbred together. The Water People today are like the Animal People or maybe a little smarter; they're comparable in intelligence to small human children. They fill the ecological niche of seals. They live on beaches and rocky crags where they breed and raise their young and go into the oceans to hunt fish. They congregate in densely populated nesting grounds but these are not real communities; they live as individuals or in small family groups, competing with each other for space in the nesting grounds. They have some rudimentary technology, mostly crude stone tools and nets of woven reeds they use to hold fish (the males get females to mate with them by giving them fish); the nets are the most impressive example of their technology; cleverly designed not to get in the way of the hunters' hydrodynamics as they swim.

There's more races out there but those are the ones I have more-or-less fully planned out.

One idea: what about a hominid originally designed for deep-water work, which has now assumed the ecological niche of dolphins?

[Shroom Man 777]

Yes, but 50,000 years doesn't really seem long enough for something human-like to turn into a specialized predator.

50,000 years isn't enough for something human-like to turn into a specialized anything.

Besides, a human "soldier" breed designed to kill enemies and survive in the battlefield by feeding on slain enemies doesn't seem that far off from evolving into a predator. Leave them in the wild, force them to survive by killing other humans (which they already do in war) to feed, and you've got a specialized predator!

Seems more specialized for than low-skilled labor humanoids turning into foraging herding buffalos anyway.

[Somes J]

Seems more specialized for than low-skilled labor humanoids turning into foraging herding buffalos anyway.

The story on those now is they were originally designed as a food source (as in meat animal).

[Shroom Man 777]

I was talking about the Animal People.

Though aren't humans a pretty shitty nutrition source? Why don't the Masters import some livestock as well as humans?

[Somes J]

You know, I've been thinking, I think I might go for a radical revision and eliminate the Masters entirely. What I'm thinking instead is that this world is sort of like the Red Moon in Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Origin; a collecting jar set up by some superadvanced race that's interested in humans for some reason. Then go with the various species being naturally evolved as a result of humans and earlier hominids being dropped on a world with no large animals and adapting to a variety of roles.

The main problem I can see with that is the anatomically modern human species is only around 2-125K years old (depending on exactly how you define anatomically modern), and that doesn't really seem like enough time to get all these specialized hominids. Unless maybe there's a super-high mutation rate for some reason.

Then again, if we go with the Punctuated Equilibrium model of evolution, it might not be as implausible as it first looks. Of course, you'd need rather heavy selection pressure to create a new species with a different diet and lifestyle that quickly.

Maybe a lot of the various hominids are descended from earlier forms of Earth hominid, instead of Homo Sapiens? Homo Erectus was kicking around almost two million years ago, after all, and the archaic types that were the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals are more than a million years old. And of course if you count Australopithecus it goes back further. That seems long enough to have more specialization happening. The Leaf Eaters might be descended from some sort of Australopithecus, the Animal People might be Homo Erectus, with the Water People and Scavengers being derived species thereof, the Killer People and Blind People might be descended from Homo Heidelberginis, and then humans would actually be one of the most recent additions. Or, heck, for all we know some of the species might have evolved in whole different parallel universes.

Or I could just say that it's been, say, 500,000 years since humans arrived, and invoke a Narnia Effect (time passes faster in one universe than the other) if I ever want to have any interaction with our universe (I have a vague plot idea that involves that).

Of course, if I do this the Forest People become sort of weird. I think I'll leave them as they are, and give them a creation myth hinting that they were once pets or slaves or something in an advanced civilization on a different parallel Earth, and then a handful of their ancestors get teleported off by the people who set off the experiment and dumped on the world of the setting.

[Shroom Man 777]

That would be a wiser course of action. Seeing all sorts of weirdly evolved homonids would be cool.

[Somes J]

Something I'm thinking of. I'm considering the possibility of maybe changing it from an alternate universe to a deep-future postapocalyptic setting. Sort of like Dougal Dixon's Man After Man, or Stephen Baxter's Evolution but with less nonsensical grimdark.

The idea would be that at some point in the relatively near future humanity fights a huge war involving gratuitous use of nukes, bioweapons, and ultimately a large asteroid getting slammed into Earth which completely screws up the climate and causes a KT-level extinction event. The only survivors might be a handful of people in a bunkers or something, and they quickly revert to stone age, basically knocking humanity back to the Pleistocene.

The setting might then be something like this:
It has been a million years since the end of the first age of man. The survivors have long since regressed to stone age hunting and gathering. The brief golden age of man is totally forgotten, its ruins long since crumbled into the earth, save perhaps for the occassional lonely relic, regarded by the living with superstitious fear and awe*. Even the climate has changed; the world having become warmer and wetter to the point of now more closely resembling that of pre-Pliocene times. And man is once again not alone on the Earth. During his golden age other forms of man were created, and some have survived, and in the million years since the hominid family has diversified into a number of offshoot species.

* I remember reading in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us that Mount Rushmore would probably last 7 million years because of the hard rock it's drilled into. Makes you wonder what these people would make of those giant human faces rearing up out of the mountain...

I sort of like the idea because it eliminates the rather Dues Ex Machina aspect of somebody randomly bringing humans over into this alternate universe. On the other hand, it does make some of the evolution more problematic. The problem is a bright race, like humans, tends to use technological adaptation to make physical evolution unnecessary. With an alternate universe, you can handwave a lot of that away with descendants of Australopithecus and other not very technologically skilled creatures.

Also, it does make for a more depressing atmosphere. Our children get to look forward to thousands of millenia of crappy stagnation. And I'm not a big fan of grimdark.

What do you think? Good idea, or do you prefer the alternate universe explanation?