Proto-Humans in Fantasy

So I'm kind of burned out on the standard fantasy elf, dwarf, hobbit etc mix, along with their subtly (or not so subtly) renamed equivalents. I am, however, currently reading the Malazan books, which include a really cool idea: T'lan Imass – immortal zombie Neanderthals, forever bound by magic to the dread task of genociding the fuck out of the Jaghut.

So ITT: world build some fantasy that, rather than using the classical fantasy races, uses proto-humans. Also, discuss the same if you can think of some other examples in fantasy fiction.

~~~

So the Malazan books contain two examples of cool magical proto-humans.

The T'lan Imass I've mentioned. They were once the Imass, flesh-and-blood stone age Neanderthals that got enslaved by Jaghut tyrants and occasionally accidentally squished by normal Jaghuts - Jaghut magic operating on a scale more commonly recognized as ice ages. So they said, screw this for a handful of carefully knapped flint arrow heads and performed a great magical working that bound their souls to immortal never dying bodies. Armed with this power, they then made millennia long war against the Jaghut until that great race was all but extinct.

The other is the (somewhat less cool but still interesting) Eres. The Eres are more or less homo errectus. They were enslaved by the proto-dogs, the magical Deragoth, and evolved to stand upright to help the Deragoth watch for threats. Such as flying mountains driven by hive-mind dinosaur lizard men because when you live in the Malazan world, that is just how you role.

Other urls found in this thread:

rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis?
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

>Cromagnon = Human, baseline human
>Neanderthal = Dwarf, stocky, live more underground than aboveground
>Denisovan = Elf/Fey, so enigmatic, mysterious and rare some even doubt they exist
>Habilis = Halfling, same as human but worse in every aspect

>Fire = Magic, who masters fire can accomplish feats of wonder, like cooking and not dying of cold, and create artifacts of immense power and utility, like metal tools or clay pots

dont forget the barghast moranth and trell, who are direct descendants of the t'lan imass, but not the main humans of the series

The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross (and part of the The Laundry Files series) contains 'elves' - a human subspecies from a parallel dimension who evolved the focused psychopathic minds needed for 'safe' ritual magic. They live in a hive like society enforced by magical compulsions called geass.

You forgot to mention that the hive-mind dinosaur lizard men had sword arms

There were also zombie hive-mind dinosaur lizard men who had sword arms (though they didn't have flying mountains - the flying mountains were on the other side that time).

In a game I ran last year I stated that there was only one 'race,' but gave the players the option to heavily modify said race.

>There used to be a single species on the plane. Eventually they achieve almost demigod like power.
>Start creating alchemical creatures to do their bidding.
>Over time said alchemical creatures are refined down to a single template, from which they can be altered to suit the needs of their creators.
>For reasons not known to their creations, the Creators went to war with each other.
>Haemonculus are turned out in the millions to act as soldiers/spell fodder.
>Eventually, one of the Creators decides to build and use a doomsday device. None of the survivors were Creators.
>When the last of the Creators died the Haemonculus found themselves in posession of free will.

And that's where the game started. The players abruptly found themselves standing in the center of a battered, crumbling city with no directives or clue what to do now. At the start they were relatively 'unmodified,' but as the game progressed they were able to slightly alter their bodies and minds, as did the other now free creations who found themselves in posession of the world. It was really interesting as a GM to see what the players made of their characters.

I stand corrected, I forgot that it was the Short-Tails that had the flying Castle-mountains

So Engine Hearts then.

Prior to the Short-Tail rebellion, both types did work together, though. We saw that during he Tiste invasion of Lether. So I wouldn't say you were incorrect. Also, the Short Tails were REcreated, so we have no idea what happened the first time.

>Malazans
Mah nigga

Recently I changed the origin of races in a novel I plan on writing to be sort of similar to what there is in Malazans, just cause I love the Imass and Jaghut and their history.
Most of the races descend from a common ancestor, with races more closely related obviously being more similar. In addition, cultural separation further divides the groups. I have two races they are actually the same race, but highly divergent ethnic groups that split sometime in the last milllenia or so.

I also have proto humans, and a race that is obviously based on Jaghut

God I forgot how convoluted this series was, I love it so much

Pretty much. Engine Hearts meets Nine.

Watts' Blindsight is another interesting proto-human case. In that, vampires are a predatory human sub-species that prayed on early man. They ate humans because they became dependant on a enzyme they couldn't produce on their own, could hibernate because they tended to overhunt their prey and were repulsed by crosses because of a flaw in their visual cortex triggered by hard angles which led to them going extinct when people stopped living in soft angled forests. They also had an entire 'super smart without being sentient' thing going.

In the Peter Watts novels Blindsight and Echopraxia, "vampires" are a genetic throwback to a species of early hominid that evolved to eat other hominids. They have incredible strength and speed, and the mental prowess you'd expect from something evolved to hunt sapient life, but they went extinct around the time humans evolved architecture due to a flaw in their neurology causing them to have seizures whenever they saw right angles. Not something particularly dangerous in the wild, so evolving it wasn't maladaptive at the time, but it let us kill them more or less by accident. The myths about vampires not being able to cross thresholds is a dim memory of their aversion to the right angles in doors, and if obviously gives them a problem with crucifixes. It's kind of neat. Here, have a little in-character presentation Watts made as promotion for one of his books, it's cool stuff: rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

Well, that's what I get for not updating the page while I'm writing my response.

After Man might give you inspiration. It gets posted here a lot. It's about a post-human future of all sorts of creatures that evolve out of humanity.

my favorite illustration by far is this picture.

Neal Stephenson's Reamde has a character speculate that elves, dwarfs etc fill half remembered metal niches created by now extinct human subspecies.

Neanderthals - spiritual, tool-makers, hunters and have mighty endurance, they have fire soul spirit magic. There are different types of them, too, there are brutish warrior ritualistic cannibalism neanderthals in the hills and dry steppes, there are plains-dwelling animal-taming peaceful neanderthals and there are sun-worshiper sorcerer neanderthals in the mountains.

Ape-men - straight up half ape, half human, some kind of evolutionary leftover and mutation, no one knows which. They are the degraded remnants of some primal civilization, perhaps the first ever proper civilization, they inhabit the isolated ruins of their long lost ancestors dotted about the lands, they have lost fire, but they have a mighty and terribly drive in their souls, so deep it seems merely like instinct, to reclaim lands and tools and they steal fire from neanderthals which they continually feed to keep burning. They are warriors of monstrous strength and speed, but they don't have the endurance of the neanderthals. Their battles are short and bloody and they consume the dead. Concentrated into small, tight tribal units.

Pygmies, shrunken humanoids who dwell in steaming jungle undergrowth in massive root-system cities, absolutely vast, stand about knee-high on a neanderthal, absolutely vicious little creatures that leap and run and crawl and climb, they pole vault through the trees to move at alarming rates. They are masters of the jungle. They have no fire, but worship at the deep, still lakes fed by no stream found in the innermost depths of the jungles.

>"Turned out, thought, that when we got Don Donald in here, he had god reasons why elves and dwarves were not just arbitrary races that could be swapped out for ones we made up but archetypes, going back..."
>
>"How far?"
>
>"He thinks that the elf/dwarf split was born in the ear when Cro-Magnons coexisted in Europe with Neanderthals."
>
>"Interesting! Way back, then, like tens of thousands of years."
>
>"Yeah. Before even language, maybe."
>
>"Makes you wonder what we could find in African folklore," she said.
>
>This stopped Richard for a few moments, while he caught up with her. "Since there might have been even greater diversity of, of..."
>
>"Hominids," she said, "going back maybe farther."

I was working on a setting a few years back. I suppose there were some kind of proto-humans in it. There were human tribes and such who developed naturally. And then those humans learned how to grow new humans from trees. Then those tree-born humans eventually got to be pretty much everywhere. And then they forgot they were even born from trees in the first place.

Wow I never knew this was actually from something and not just a weird drawing.

You're a cool guy. I'd buy you a drink.

Too bad that's a rather anachronistic conclusion built out of modern concepts of those creatures that don't always fit with the actual historic myths.

>Halflings
>Habilis
>Not en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis?

Homo habilis is too far down the family tree. They're smart, but wouldn't quite be capable of language as we understand it. Homo erectus and its offshoots (Neandertal, Georgicus, etc.) would be better, of which, floresiensis is one.

Fun side note, Homo erectus was the first hominid to spread to other continents.