A powerful ayy lmao wizard visited Earth before genus Homo appeared, and stopped this evolution branch of hominids.
Instead, it uplifted bees and octopi to almost neolithic human level of intelligence.
What would happen? What kind of culture and civilisation would octopodes and bees develop?
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Well. Octopodes would have no fire, or would be strictly coastal, and would have to develop extremely extensive trading before getting any sort of metal tools. Various sorts of fish herding would be likely and fairly simple, though, so other than that specialization would be easy. A lopsided tech tree, in favor of concepts and aquaculture over anything mechanical. I'm not too sure about their personalities or values, but I get the sense that they'd be rather religious because of how comparatively easy building huge megastructures would be underwater.
Then they'd get raped by dolphins, who are almost as smart.
Bees are a little too small to accomplish anything except in huge numbers. Building would be an extension of their biological building materials, though. Strict caste, yadda yadda, I can't think of anything original for these.
a magical realm
Redundant, everything's a magical realm. If you use it in buzzmeme sense, of course.
>Then they'd get raped by dolphins, who are almost as smart.
78 keks
Good post, thank you
Octopi are colorblind, so despite their ability to camouflage, their buildings and language wouldn't be particularly colorful.
They'd probably mostly work with etching.
There's a strong chance that they'd have some sort of pouch filled with moisturizer that they carried around on land as sort of a reverse diving suit, or maybe large bowls with plow structures on the front so they could drag themselves along.
They couldn't hold spears properly, nor do their limbs really lend themselves to hurling projectiles or swinging elongated melee weapons.
I can see them wielding hooks, though.
Their habitual stealth and seclusion, rather than sociable nature, would probably create sparse tribes that functioned out of necessity rather than desire.
Social networks would be simple, with no real chain of command.
Their religion would have some /very/ weird opinions on reproduction, given that most octopuses just straight up die after they do.
Males detach a tentacle filled with spooge, then die.
Females starve to death slowly while guarding their eggs.
God knows what the octopus afterlife would be like.
Both would quickly lose their intelligence as the waste of energy from their enhanced brains would select the stupidest ones first.
Intelligence is an exclusive trait of bipedalism, though this is a fallacy as all animals are intelligent and fully 'sapient', just at different levels of social and mental ability.
What part of having two legs is necessary for intelligence? I don't follow.
Well, if you have two legs, then you can use your hands to jerk off and pat yourself on the back at the same time
Bipedal means two legs, though, not two hands.
Apparently, birds meet the requirements for forming a high intelligence society.
Tentacles can be used to do this.
Mandibles may evolve to be more complex to manipulate tools.
You are a fag.
>Their religion would have some /very/ weird opinions on reproduction, given that most octopuses just straight up die after they do.
>Males detach a tentacle filled with spooge, then die.
>Females starve to death slowly while guarding their eggs.
You mean they have to choose between a life without sex, and a gruesome death? Tough call.
Who knew octopi and jewish space crabs would have so much in common?
>Females starve to death slowly while guarding their eggs.
Isn't that something they'd simply get over thanks to their increased intelligence? What sort of society could sit idly by while their women literally starve to death performing their civic duty?
Men would be kind of fucked though. I could see lazy NEET r9k people being even more common with octopi than among humans. Women will leave you both financially and literally dead in this world.
Fry please go and stay go
Octopeople would eventually figure out how to spread coral reefs and expand their range. Since civilization requires a settled population, reefs are the best place for octopeople to settle. Eventually the reefs wouldn't be able to sustain large populations and populations would be pushed out into other biomes and variations would arise that are adapted to kelp forests, open sea, and perhaps mangrove forests.
I think the aliens would have removed this biological quirk since it isn't conducive to civilization. Other species of cephalopod do not have this limitation.
Actually, sexual activity isn't the trigger for cephalopod death as far as I've studied. They just hit sexual maturity very shortly before natural senescence.
This is how an octopuss do
Octopi aren't social animals, they won't make a civilization at all. It'd more be similar to if tigers were uplifted. Really scary to be on the receiving end, but still tigers.
Bees might be able to accomplish a lot, but they're really small.
Alright... So, to get shit done,
>octopi need to get rid of being seclusive and killing 'selves when breeding.
>bees need to become bigger
Humans evolved walking legs and big tits/dongs, so the mentioned animals may also change, especially if aliens keep controlling the evolution process
Bees and other eusocial insects would lend themselves fairly well to feudalism and/or a monarchy with nobility, I think. I mean, there already are Queens. Just imagine that the polymorphism between drones, males, and queens grows bigger with sentience.
Drones are sentient, but uneducated beyond areas of specialization and considered 'smallfolk'. They're happy to labor and die for their rulers, however, as they believe the Queens hold divine power and will reward them in the afterlife.
Males are prepped from birth to serve as consorts/husbands to Queens. Basically male versions of Medieval Princesses.
id fuck a male bee.
Didn't some sort of octopus learn how to use coconut shells as a sort of defense? I can imagine octopus duels being a game of encirclement in which the aim is to pull the other guy's shield ball off with hooks.
There was that one octopus that learned when to leave his tank and eat stuff in nearby tanks without getting caught.
It even remembered the guards rounds, so it knew when it had to be back in it's tank.
They don't even need a wizard, just make them social and they would take over the world.
civilization isn't just about intelligence. humans are the perfect storm: intelligent, highly social and dexterous. humans are not only intelligent but cultural creatures that form large-scale social groups, have complex language capabilities, and can combine these things to pass down knowledge effectively. because of our hands and fine motor coordination we can actually use that knowledge to build better and better tools. octopi have the tool-using part, but they're not social. bees are social, but not really equipped for using tools.
So you're saying we need to make octopi and bees interbreed.
It's a real shame about the short lifespans/terminal breeding.
If they just lived longer and could meet their offspring they could actually start developing social behavior. Aparently even the Giant Squid is thought to have a lifespan as low as 5 years (which means they grow at an insane rate.)
Apparently the ONLY cephalopod with polycyclic breeding is the Naulilus (which is thought to live beyond 20 years.) They're not generally regarded as intelligent as the Octopus or Cuttlefish, but recent studies indicate they do have both short and long-term memory in addition to stimulus association learning.
Octopi lack the dexterity and precision of limbs to build tools, and since they are beneath water they will never get fire. Hence they are pretty much stuck at this technological level regardless of their intelligence.
It will probably end in mass suicide, rejecting their physical form.
As for the bees? Revolution.
This.
Bump maybe
Well, over the course of evolution I imagine natural lifespans will extend as they change shape. Look at the average human lifespan even pre-modern healthcare. Possibly the increased access to food and and survival rates given by sentience will provide evolutionary incentive for longer-lived octopi to breed. The terminal breeding does sort of shoot that in the foot however as one breed per octopus stops longer-lived ones breeding more.
Perhaps the female is the route for the species' evolution, then? The longer it lives the more eggs it can protect, with the society conferred with intelligence (maybe a handmaiden caste of some description to care for the brooding mother) so more octopi in the gene pool will have the longer-lived traits. Far slower than it could be without the terminal breeding though.
>Octopi are colorblind
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bomp
Sounds like the beginning of BugWorld minus the bees
They came later
>BugWorld
huh?
A thing Veeky Forums tried to get done a while back. It was a setting where bugs were the primary race, there was a massive google doc made and a lot of oc art.
I think that before developing anyfurther we have to keep in mind that mankind was able to thrive mostly because it killed off all or most of its direct predators.
Octopi have tons of natural predators so they'd have to do something about that first.
>I think that before developing anyfurther we have to keep in mind that mankind was able to thrive mostly because it killed off all or most of its direct predators.
Ticks,mosquitos, lice and parasites of the intestines are still going strong, and none of the large predators target humans for food under normal circumstances.
these are parasites, not predators. they hurt fitness, but not so much that passing on genes is impossible.
even ignoring that, thread so far hasn't mentioned culture as the primary factor in sapience's domination of Earth. it's the ability to stand on each other's metaphorical shoulders, rather than actual problem-solving ability, that propelled humans to numero uno. unless the ayy lmao also improved the communicative abilities of whatever they uplift, the experiment goes nowhere
Acuatic AI that would force octopi into the lower strata of dominant/knowledgable speices as the AI passes undetected once the hominids evolved long enough.
Reminder: Bees lost the Great Jellyfish War and were dominated into submision.
>octopi
He didn't have to do much to their intelligence, just their lifespans.
>none of the large predators target humans for food under normal circumstances.
Because we killed the ones that did.
>octopi
Octopodes*