Benny’s enjoying the show
↓ Transcript
The twins dance, aglow with the joy of their art. Benny stares up at their performance, dumbfounded, as Carrie and Avery look on with parental amusement.
Had some dialogue ideas for this one but ultimately I thnk it felt better without.
I’m convinced at this point that Sarnothi are just genetically modified humans. There’s no way they evolved naturally:
– They have such a low population that genetic diversity would have doomed them if they weren’t recent creations. They’re endemic to one small geographic feature on one continent.
– Despite this atrociously low population, they have divided into four phenotypes that somehow don’t blend into one. If you put a small population of four different human races in a settlement, they’d all blur into one. There’s got to be something going on here. My best guess is that the clans are all different species in the same genus, and that they are sterile if they interbreed or don’t produce offspring at all. Society isn’t so powerful it will keep people from forming relationships between caste. This is blindingly apparent in every human civilization ever.
– They can speak fluently in human languages despite having an aquatic build. Not even great apes can fluently speak human words. A few birds can imitate it, but at least birds are making sounds in air.
– A species optimized for the water would not have anything resembling the Sarnothi body. They’re basically humans in wetsuits with hand- and foot-fins, and even with that equipment, human divers are poor swimmers compared to anything that evolved in water.
– Lungfish are literally the only fish in the known world that have both lung structures and gills. If Sarnothi evolved from their common ancestor, we’d likely see more examples than just them.
– They even have human quirks like blushing, visible breasts (most mammals don’t have swelled breasts all the time the way humans do), and extended adolescence.
If this got clarified in the past, I missed it, so I’m spilling all this here. The last question I have is that if they are engineered, why do they have such a strong culture? You’d think they would still be developing one, since we haven’t had genetic engineering for long. Also, they probably wouldn’t have a religion separate from human ones, because religions take a long time to arise.
What a riveting post!
I don’t recall these issues being settled, and it’s probably best if they aren’t, but let me riff on your speculations, it’s fun.
I agree Sarnothi may not have evolved naturally, but they needn’t have been derived from humans. The difference in body chemistry argues against it.
Genetic variety concerns me too! But has it been established that the Sarnothi originated on this world? They may be extra-terrestrials, ultra-terrestrials or (less likely) time-travellers, sampled from a much larger original population.
The four clans may be exactly that—extended families. Though of course you’re right, the idea that there wouldn’t be, er, friendly approaches is very unlikely indeed (Kate Beaton on having both Campbell and MacGregor blood—“I’m honour bound to kill myself, then avenge myself!)
The linguistic aspect is terribly interesting, isn’t it? You’d think underwater sounds would have to be very powerful indeed to carry, and the requisite organs wouldn’t be convenient for human articulation and projection. But if, as you surmise, the Sarnothi were engineered from a wild genotype, that may be artificially addressed.
The Sarnothi probably aren’t optimised for the water, any more than we humans are optimised for the savannah (did I get that right? We’re apes that learned upright stance on the African plains?). Once intelligence becomes the deciding factor, breeding for running and distance eyesight took a back seat with us, and presumably streamlining and temperature regulation went the same way for the Sarnothi.
The common ancestor may not be on this planet—though I admit I’ve paid less than close attention to any clues that Dave’s given, preferring to speculate as I do!—but I incline to your opinion that the Sarnothi are the product of genetic engineering.
Blushing? Every social creature needs a poker tell! Yeah, I can’t shoot that one down (if I’ve shot any), the Sarnothi have so much in common with us it speaks of some material connection. Perhaps a “Chariots of the Gods” scenario, or a “Marvel Kree” one, in which the same alien race interfered with evolution on both Earth and the Sarnothi homeworld.
Their culture may be a hangover from their engineers’ own culture.
The general shape of the skeleton is normal for an amphibian, but hair makes no sense for an aquatic animal. At all.
If I existed in this world, I would assume the convolution to be so ridiculous that this must be a simulated reality, or they were crossed with humans in an experimental attempt to colonize land
Always down for help with the speculation!
Fair, they don’t have to be human-derived. I still believe they were human-produced, however. Humans almost always create alien-like beings that look like them (see: Star Trek etc) because they’re easier to empathize with and imagine. That said, it’s weird as hell that Sarnothi have what seem to be relics of mammalhood while being a clearly mesothermic non-mammalian species — namely, the breasts and hair.
Humans are very optimized for the savannah. We stand upright, putting them above grasses, meaning we can see predators. Sweating gives us a massive advantage in a biome with a strong dry season, and our impressive aim at throwing things works best in an open environment not blocked by lots of trees. We lost our arboreal tendencies because our habitat started losing trees, and being able to escape into the branches was superceded by being able to see ambush predators before they could surprise us.
I am entirely willing to accept the idea that Sarnothi may be an alien experiment, plunked on Earth to see if a second sentient species works out, or maybe both humans and Sarnothi are created from/by the same spacefaring race. There’s a major point to be made that humans have always had some kind of aquatic sapients in their mythos, from selkies (har) and mermaids to swamp things and kappa. Just about any of these could be evidence that sarnothi have coexisted with humans through history and are the inspiration for legend.
A bit of a hitch to me is their habitat. The Great Lakes are only 10,000 years old! Human sapience dates to roughly 300,000 years ago. This says that either the sarnothi are a relatively recent deposit on Earth, or that like humans, they migrated from habitat to habitat before settling somewhere. If we assume legends are evidence, that means they lived on basically every continent, and then somehow either no other populations have been found since the computer age or else they all died out except for the Lake Superior cluster. That is solidly *possible*, since humans have outcompeted or flat out killed all their competition in the Homo genus and could certainly have killed all the sarnothi that they encountered; we’re a very aggressive species. That said, odds seem low that we wouldn’t have found sarnothi fossils or trustworthy records of their slaughter or what have you.
If I had to posit a theory for them that isn’t recent genetic engineering, it’d be this: sarnothi ancestors evolved around the time that dolphin and whale precursors were returning to the sea, so they had a mammal template. They attempted to spread across the world by moving from river/sea to river/sea, but they ran into an evolutionary bottleneck during the Ice Age and almost all of them died. (The same happened to humans at one point, just not during the Ice Age. I figure a cold phase is as good a time as any for the warmth-loving sarnothi to find an obstacle they couldn’t handle.) We’re at the end of that bottleneck, with the Great Lakes population being the last one alive. This population developed within the past few millennia and never left, having slowly developed whatever Echo abilities actually are. The first Echoes were a substitute for fire as the accelerating factor in their societal development, and so they slowly caught up to primitive human technology and began their advancement. Lake Superior’s relatively small size in geographic terms prevented their mass expansion (also predators, since they seem to have no reprieve from giant eels and other marine beasties), and so they remained a fairly consistent and stable population.
This assumes that all their human-like traits are just weird convergent evolution, which is a bit farfetched, but eh, I’ve seen worse in sci-fi/fantasy. 😛
Let’s say a humanoid race would produce another humanoid race– for who’s to say humans were the first?
Humans are well-adapted to the savannah, but not optimised. Giraffes are optimized! And the Sarnothi seem no further from dolphins than we are from giraffes (well… perhaps a tad).
The body chemistry and the form of the young (“AAARGH!– er, how cute”) argue against a common origin. Of course, if Huxley is right about neotony in humans, if we live long enough we’ll become hairy apes again. (You’re rambling, Dondonesque!)
In Wales we have the “afanc”, freshwater and humanoid (when it wants to be).
Lovely point about the lack of fossils. Surely, Sarnothi are an introduction to the ecosphere, an invasive species. (Though not an invading nation… I hope.)
A rival theory (for which I claim no more evidence and less ingenuity): the Sarnothi are ultra-terrestrials from a parallel Earth, in which the ice-ages were rarer, and warmer, shallow, much less salty seas covered the continents for much of geological history. A change in these circumstances (probably not cooling, that would make the land less amenable, but perhaps volcanic or meteoric poisoning of the marine habitat?) was exploited by a creature similar to the newly-hatched stage of the Sarnothi, which evolved intelligence and bipedalism to pursue prey onto the land.
This avoids the genetic intervention hypothesis– beings similar to humanity altering their children to exploit another ecological niche, creating either the Sarnothi or humans or both– which needs more assumptions.
(But which remains the more fun theory!)
OK I thought of a thing on fossils. Here we go. We actually don’t know what sarnothi bones are like — if they have reverted to a more cartilaginous state, like sharks, they might fossilize poorly! We’re also not nearly as good at unearthing aquatic things as terrestrial things. If sarnothi living significant amounts of time on or near land is a new thing, relatively speaking, we might just not have found fossils yet. Or, because of our bias toward “they’re all legends,” any of those “mermaids” or such pulled out of the sea in the past might have been written off as fakes or multiple species fossilized together (like an ape that drowned on shore getting buried with an aquatic predator).
You make a good argument there. We’ve got shark’s fossils going back 450 million years, but sharks have always been comparatively abundant.
But Where would the Sarnothi fit in the Ocean’s ecosystem? Terrestrial predators would die in the attempt to consume even the Sarnothi’s remote ancestor– so they should be much more numerous if they’ve had geological time to on this planet. And then there’s “Pants”– the Sarnothi seem to have brought samples of an alien ecology with them. (And that freshwater plant whose name I don’t recall?)
I say… how do the Sarnothi dispose of their dead?
Fun fact! There’s a theory (somewhat a fringe theory, but it’s out there) that Humans (specifically H. sapiens) are actually a semi-aquatic offshoot of the larger Homo family tree!
We have bare, sparsely covered skin (most commonly seen on aquatic mammals- though others like Elephants have this as well- and Hippos…), our method of sweating may have gotten its start as a salt-regulatory system, and it’s been posited that our upright stance came not from trying to ‘see over savanna grass’ (or why wouldn’t baboons also stand up?) but was rather something that let us move through high water- and bipedalism is most commonly seen in the other great apes when they’re in the water.
But the biggest clues that humans are actually ‘water apes’ are things you don’t even think about.
1: We have webbing between our fingers and toes. It’s minor, but it’s WAY more than any other Great Ape has. Some mutations among humans even have entirely webbed digits- it’s not super common, but it’s common enough that everyone _knows_ about it. (There was even a gag in Ren and Stimpy about it!).
2: We automatically hold our breath and swim when we’re born. This is something that other terrestrial mammals just don’t do, because it’s ONLY required for water births. Indeed, some people claim that water births are the safest and easiest method for an otherwise somewhat dangerous biological process. We also have a more pronounced Mammalian Dive Reflex than many other terrestrial creatures, which is related to this.
3: Finger wrinkling. This is such a little thing, but it says so much. It’s something that ONLY humans have, among primates. It serves almost NO function, except to improve grip friction _in water_. It happens when the fingers are submerged, and is something that the human body actively does, rather than just being a physical or chemical reaction. It also has no downside when active for a long time. An adaptation across the entire population, that’s distinctly aquatic.
Mind, I agree with the whole “The Sarnoth can’t be Earth-native with their physiology” thing. But Humans could very well have ended up developing into aquatic lifeforms, had things gone differently.
Elaine Morgan’s “Aquatic Ape” theory! Yes, the book is wonderful. In my edition there’s a picture of an Olympic diver with the caption “more streamlined than what?”
Hey, I’ve heard of the Aquatic Ape theory! It would in fact let us survive a bit better, because at one point humans’ adaptation to fishing and living coastally gave us a leg up over other Homo species, especially when terrestrial megafauna started dying in droves during and post-Ice Age.
Or ‘race’ is determined by 2 codominant gene pairs.
Their tech is totally alien and essentially ‘magic’.
I think a much more likely explanation is they left as part of a cult from the ocean a few hundred years ago.
A modern urban city will have a population of millions, far more than a stable gene pool.
I actually don’t know what codominant genes do! Would that result in strict divides in race like this even through mixing?
Yeah, I can’t explain the tech.
Cities can get big, but I have a hard time believing nobody would see a city of millions before now. Unless the government is actively disappearing anyone who saw them. I thought the catching of a sarnothi in a net was the first encounter with non-government that managed to get any publicity?
Just wanted to peek in to say that I love reading everyone’s thoughts/ideas/theories/etc.
I love people speculating on my universes. Glad you’re having fun too 🙂 I hope we do learn the answers at some point.
So basically Sarnothi “dancing” is like the sport of “sky dancing” where aerobatics are combined with music and the beats of the maneuvers are synchronised with the music?
I really like the world-building in this series. It makes sense that dancing, for a lake-species, would take full advantage of the kind of vertical maneuvering that can only be done underwater.
Benny’s wearing swim trunks. I foresee major embarrassment in his future.
I don’t remember, do sarnothi even have uh… that?
Aquatic creatures have a range of genitals. Some, like many fish, don’t have any kind of phallus but will just release sperm clouds into the water around target eggs. Whales do have more familiar male genitals, and they can get terrifyingly huge! I imagine that sarnothi, being more humanoid and having mammalian traits like hair and breasts, have a phallus just based on similar body plans.
I swear every parent has had this moment with their kids.
Yes, I think his parents are enjoying the show as well… just a different show.
That first moment the boy finds out about girls, huh.
Oh, no… he’s got a history of girl-chasing, from his very first appearance (complaining about an “ugly” princess in a game and gushing over the anime-tiddies princess option)
Not quite “ugly”, just too young. He also didn’t seem to gush about her, just commented how if he wanted to hang out with a kid (Selkie), he’d be grinding points with Jailbait instead of Princess D-Cups. And to be fair, what teenager wants to hang out with a kid?
But yeah, he’s been finding out about girls all day here. Since God invited the teenagers to say hi earlier and all that.
Benny epitomizes the term “gobsmacked”.
I think you meant, “gillsmacked.” Heh heh heh.
The expressions on all of their faces in this one are just priceless. Fantastic, love it!
The look of sheer “oh fuck” on Avery’s face. He knows what’s coming.
It looked to me like a knowing grin, but he definitely knows what’s on his adopted son’s mind.
Any bets on which twin he’ll ask out first? AND a side bet of: Will it piss off the OTHER twin that doesn’t get asked?
or then again he could be going all out like Olivia and Tony’s Dad did at college…