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So, did humans not evolve from apes in the Cosmere?


Mick7655

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There're three sapient races on Yolen--Humans, dragons, and sho-del. We don't really know if any of the races really dominated. It's likely that humans evolved from a primate ancestor on Yolen, and possibly on a few other planets. But it's equally possible that they were created as is by Adonalsium or something like that.

So I guess the short answer is: Maybe? We don't know. Sorry!

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Well Scadrians (Scadrialites?), as explained in the Mistborn series, were full-on created ex nihilo with the united powers of Preservation and Ruin, "in the form of that which we'd seen before," with the conscious ability to "choose to preserve at times, but to ruin at others", with Preservation giving just a bit more of himself than Ruin did.

That implies that alone of all people we know of so far in the Cosmere, they definitely are not descended from Yolen-ish stock (that place name itself being officially unmentioned as yet in any canonical work, if I'm not mistaken, only being mentioned in WoBs and unpublished works?).

Edited by robardin
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Brandon has said that it's assumed Adonalsium created humans (and possibly the other sapient races... or everything) but Brandon has RAFO'd whether this is actually the case. None of the worlds (except maybe Taldain) currently have the combination of scientific method and excavation technology to do the kind of research that they'd need to realize that they didn't evolve naturally on their worlds, though Rosharans probably would have eventually figured it out on their own even without the Eila Stele. Renarin for example notices that some animals humans keep don't fit into the rest of the ecosystem.

7 minutes ago, robardin said:

That implies that alone of all people we know of so far in the Cosmere, they definitely are not descended from Yolen-ish stock (that place name itself being officially unmentioned as yet in any canonical work, if I'm not mistaken, only being mentioned in WoBs and unpublished works?).

Yolen is directly named as the first world in Arcanum Unbounded and mentioned without being named by Khriss in Mistborn Secret History, along with the implications when she describes how Yolish lightweaving is the 'original' version of that magic. There's also at least one other planet in the Cosmere besides Scadrial which is inhabited now but which was not at the time of the Shattering.

Edited by Weltall
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For what it's worth, Brandon has said that a lot of what we see on Roshar (obviously excluding humanity and the flora and fauna they brought with them) was the result of natural evolutionary processes. Well, 'natural' when you have huge amounts of Investiture and symbiosis unlike anything we have on Earth, but natural by Cosmere standards at least. :D

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  • 1 month later...
On 1/31/2019 at 6:01 PM, Quantus said:

For what it's worth, Singers existed pre-shattering

I've always wondered... since Greater Roshar was one of Adonalsium's playgrounds, are the Singers an equivalently independent race, like Human's, Sho Del, or the Dragons? Or are they related to the relatively unknown Sho-Del or Dragons?

I don't really have time to dig it up right now, but there's a WoB that there were two conflicting ecologies on Yolen.

Also, do we have a word on if Yolish life had colonies or outposts off-world, pre-shattering? The humans on Ashyn, Threnody, First of the Sun, etc. have to have come from somewhere. If so, are there any Sho-Del colonies/refugees?

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5 minutes ago, TheFoxQR said:

I've always wondered... since Greater Roshar was one of Adonalsium's playgrounds, are the Singers an equivalently independent race, like Human's, Sho Del, or the Dragons? Or are they related to the relatively unknown Sho-Del or Dragons?

I believe so. Their biology is tailored to the spren mechanics of Roshar itself. They appear to be completely native. 

6 minutes ago, TheFoxQR said:

do we have a word on if Yolish life had colonies or outposts off-world, pre-shattering? The humans on Ashyn, Threnody, First of the Sun, etc. have to have come from somewhere. If so, are there any Sho-Del colonies/refugees?

Not that I'm aware of, but if those varieties of sapient life were created by Adonalsium, there's really nothing to have stopped him from producing it in multiple places, even if the Yolish weren't capable of interplanetary travel. 

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35 minutes ago, Calderis said:

I believe so. Their biology is tailored to the spren mechanics of Roshar itself. They appear to be completely native. 

Yeah, but then take the Humans on Scadrial. They were made by just Preservation and Ruin, are basically the same as other Humans, and yet have completely internalized the metallic arts. Theoretically, if the Sho-Del are more investiture dependent than regular Humans, then they would adapt to a different ecology much more drastically - fain Sho-Del and Rosharran Singers could be the same species, they just fit into two very different ecosystems, and as such, have two very different but common biologies. Like two different kinds of Spiders - the daddy longlegs spider is very different from the tarantula spider, but they both belong to the same species.

35 minutes ago, Calderis said:

Not that I'm aware of, but if those varieties of sapient life were created by Adonalsium, there's really nothing to have stopped him from producing it in multiple places, even if the Yolish weren't capable of interplanetary travel. 

If Adonalsium made Humans on multiple planets independently, then that is a BIG deal.

Spoiler

Did he make multiple Sho-Del or Dragons? Did he even make the Dragons or Sho-Del, or was he just the maker of Humans? If he is, then Singers could be his take on the Sho-Del. Also, if he's a Human God, then it could be a possible explanation of the conflicting ecologies. Or maybe it's the other way around. The Sho-Del and Fainlife was Adonalsium, and the Humans were the norm. If so, that's an impetus for the Shattering right there - to stop fainlife.

See, whenever we've seen a species deliberately built on a planet, the investiture cycle usually becomes inherent to it - for any Humans on a planet with a Resident Shard, the investiture eco-system has a tendency to seep in. For example, the origin of violet as an eye color on Roshar for lighteyes, or Breath on Nalthis. If this is true, and Adonalsium was Resident on Yolen, then any Humans he made on Yolen would be different from Humans he made elsewhere, and that has... implications. We know that the Shattering destroyed the investiture ecosystem (or investiture-cycle) on Yolen, and that it had a huge impact on the species on the planet (source: Hoid's comment on him being the bones of a species lying in a desert that was once a Sea).

I haven't been a part of the community for too long. Have there been discussions on this before? If so, do you know how I could look them up?

 

P.S. I know we've had "Yolish" as an adjective, but me personal headcanon word is Yolenite.

Edited by TheFoxQR
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36 minutes ago, TheFoxQR said:

Yeah, but then take the Humans on Scadrial. They were made by just Preservation and Ruin, are basically the same as other Humans, and yet have completely internalized the metallic arts.

Humans on Scadrial 'internalized' the Metallic Arts because they were created directly by the Shards that power those systems. It's pretty much built into them by literal design. That doesn't really tell us anything about human evolution anywhere in the Cosmere, since each magic system has its own means of Initiation and we know some of them don't really care whether you're originally from a world or not. Anyone can receive Breath and perform Awakening, even if you have to be Nalthian to receive one innately or to Return. Anyone who meets the individual spren's requirements can become a surgebinder and that one definitely crosses the species boundry, much less the world boundary.

Quote

See, whenever we've seen a species deliberately built on a planet, the investiture cycle usually becomes inherent to it - for any Humans on a planet with a Resident Shard, the investiture eco-system has a tendency to seep in. For example, the origin of violet as an eye color on Roshar for lighteyes, or Breath on Nalthis. If this is true, and Adonalsium was Resident on Yolen, then any Humans he made on Yolen would be different from Humans he made elsewhere, and that has... implications.

The only world where we know a species was deliberately created to populate it is Scadrial, whose ecosystem was modeled after Yolen's. We don't know whether humans anywhere else were created by Adonalsium (Brandon has said it's widely assumed by in-universe scholars that Adonalsium created everything) or the Shards, or whether the humans on all other world but Yolen were transplanted.

We know that in the Cosmere, genetics are sufficiently fuzzy that species with no common ancestor can have children together (the various human/singer and human/aimian hybrids on Roshar) and humans from different worlds can also have children so the exact nature of how any given population came to exist is pretty much irrelevant at the biological level, even if it's very interesting at the worldbuilding level.

Quote

We know that the Shattering destroyed the investiture ecosystem (or investiture-cycle) on Yolen, and that it had a huge impact on the species on the planet (source: Hoid's comment on him being the bones of a species lying in a desert that was once a Sea).

That was a metaphor, it doesn't necessarily mean the ecology was so badly disrupted. Once can understand the concept without having seen it in action firsthand, provided one can conceive of sufficiently long time scales. What we've seen of Yolen in The Traveler matches the description of the fain forest in The Liar of Partinel. Even with the caveat that neither is canon, the similar description suggests that Brandon doesn't conceive of the world being completely devastated ecologically. In fact, Khriss' comments on Scadrial in Arcanum Unbounded imply that the Yolish ecosystem is doing just fine, since she compares Scadrian life to the non-fain parts of Yolish life using the present tense.

Also, per Brandon the Shattering meant 'everything and nothing' to Investiture. You can use Roshar as a case study, since its 'Investiture Cycle' with the highstorms and spren bonding to the local fauna predated the Shattering and continued after it. It's only after Honor and Cultivation arrived that things started changing and more sapient spren started to appear.

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3 hours ago, Weltall said:

Humans on Scadrial 'internalized' the Metallic Arts because they were created directly by the Shards that power those systems. It's pretty much built into them by literal design. That doesn't really tell us anything about human evolution anywhere in the Cosmere, since each magic system has its own means of Initiation and we know some of them don't really care whether you're originally from a world or not. Anyone can receive Breath and perform Awakening, even if you have to be Nalthian to receive one innately or to Return. Anyone who meets the individual spren's requirements can become a surgebinder and that one definitely crosses the species boundry, much less the world boundary.

The only world where we know a species was deliberately created to populate it is Scadrial, whose ecosystem was modeled after Yolen's. We don't know whether humans anywhere else were created by Adonalsium (Brandon has said it's widely assumed by in-universe scholars that Adonalsium created everything) or the Shards, or whether the humans on all other world but Yolen were transplanted.

We know that in the Cosmere, genetics are sufficiently fuzzy that species with no common ancestor can have children together (the various human/singer and human/aimian hybrids on Roshar) and humans from different worlds can also have children so the exact nature of how any given population came to exist is pretty much irrelevant at the biological level, even if it's very interesting at the worldbuilding level.

I know, the point I was trying to make there was that the Human population on Scadrial has an independent origin - they have this unique genetic thing (that was deliberately put there) but they are still Humans. Could the Singers and Sho-Del have a similarly independent but connected origin? You make the same point as I was trying to - just because the singers developed independently on Roshar doesn't mean they have to be different from the Sho-Del. Granted, I haven't read Dragonsteel, which is why I'm speculating based on the Human example alone. Again, I'm not saying they are the same, just advocating for not discounting that idea.

In the second paragraph, I was trying to highlight a different case - that when a Human population goes to a shardworld and starts internalising investiture there, then they start changing. We have a WoB that if a bunch of Rosharrans or Scadrians went and settled on Nalthis, then several generations down the line they would start being born with Breath. This is because investiture on Nalthis behaves that way. Something similar wouldn't happen on Scadrial unless they started breeding with people there. Similarly, natural violet eyes would not have been present in the original refugees from Ashyn - but now that genetic marker exists in the population because some individuals internalised Roshar's Honor based magic system and became Radiants. Again, even if they now move out, this marker has now been introduced into the population. Sure, it will eventually dilute and fade away - but for now, the specific changes that the Rosharran investiture ecosystem brings have been diffused among the population.

The point is, whenever we see a species being specifically created an a planet (Scadrians, Singers, and presumably Sho-Del, Dragons, Yolish Humans), they follow the first case. When we have a species that comes to a place from outside, we have the second. So presumably, if Adonalsium created several different Humans independently, then they should have Scadrian-esque unique genetic markers that allow them to fully internalise the investiture cycle of their shardworld. However, by observation, we have a lot more examples of the second kind. It seems it is safer to assume that there only two independent origins of Humans - Yolish and Scadrian. Which then leads to the question - when did people move out from Yolen? If it was post shattering, then why has EVERYONE forgotten that origin, and have no recollection of the shattering or exodus? It seems more prudent to assume that pre shattering, Humans could make interplanetary travel, whether through the physical or cognitive, and get to all the different "Greater Roshar"-esque playgrounds of Adonalsium.

 

3 hours ago, Weltall said:

That was a metaphor, it doesn't necessarily mean the ecology was so badly disrupted. Once can understand the concept without having seen it in action firsthand, provided one can conceive of sufficiently long time scales. What we've seen of Yolen in The Traveler matches the description of the fain forest in The Liar of Partinel. Even with the caveat that neither is canon, the similar description suggests that Brandon doesn't conceive of the world being completely devastated ecologically. In fact, Khriss' comments on Scadrial in Arcanum Unbounded imply that the Yolish ecosystem is doing just fine, since she compares Scadrian life to the non-fain parts of Yolish life using the present tense.

Also, per Brandon the Shattering meant 'everything and nothing' to Investiture. You can use Roshar as a case study, since its 'Investiture Cycle' with the highstorms and spren bonding to the local fauna predated the Shattering and continued after it. It's only after Honor and Cultivation arrived that things started changing and more sapient spren started to appear.

 Well, I'm not saying it became desolate or anything. And when I said Ecosystem, I meant the investiture cycle, not biological ecosystems. Just this, combined with Hoid's metaphor:

Quote

Questioner

Did the Shattering of Adonalsium have a chance of a breakdown of the magic system on the planet of its creation?

Brandon Sanderson

There was an effect. Breakdown might not be the exact right phrase, but it could fit, but there was definitely an effect.

Leipzig Book Fair (March 24, 2017)

 

Edited by TheFoxQR
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