Which humans actually conquered Roshar?

[CMac716]

So, we're led to believe that the Ashyn refugees are the ones that conquered Roshar. My big problem with this is that the humans populating the rest of the planet look nothing like the Shin. Is it possibly a mix up and it was the other human refugees that actually did this? (Irali I think it was) or has evolution simply made the rest look way different?

[Karger]

5 minutes ago, CMac716 said:

So, we're led to believe that the Ashyn refugees are the ones that conquered Roshar. My big problem with this is that the humans populating the rest of the planet look nothing like the Shin. Is it possibly a mix up and it was the other human refugees that actually did this? (Irali I think it was) or has evolution simply made the rest look way different?

Modern Shin were the group Ashynites that keeped the ancient treaty.  Thus they became culturally and racily distinct.  Ashynites are not all Shin it has been many thousands of years.  The Iriali were a latter migration that arrived after the exodus from Ashyn.

[CMac716]

I guess it makes sense they could have evolved over the 4500 minimum years, I just thought it was odd they eye so different than everyone else. Thought it might have been another case of incorrect histories that we've seen

[Gilphon]

I've been thinking that the complete and total conquest we see in the present day may be a lot more recent than we've been led to believe- I feel it's possibly it's a post-Recreance thing, since that's the point where enslaving the entire race could be done easily- but the Eila Stele implies that the humans started reaching beyond Shinovar while their arrival was a living memory. 

The Iriali, it should be mentioned, are also visually distinct from other Rosharan humans. It's not quite as noticeable as the Shin, since the Iriali aren't nearly as xenophobic and have therefore been intermarrying at a decent rate, but they're still an obviously different ethnicity from, say, the Alethi, or the Reshi. So the idea of most Rosharans being descendant from them doesn't really work.

[RShara]

1 hour ago, CMac716 said:

I guess it makes sense they could have evolved over the 4500 minimum years, I just thought it was odd they eye so different than everyone else. Thought it might have been another case of incorrect histories that we've seen

It's been closer to 10k years since then, btw. 4500 years ago was just when the Heralds abandoned the Oathpact, after millennia of Desolations.

There've also been multiple waves of migration to Roshar, so in 10k years, it makes sense that an epicanthic fold would spread out and become the default, given the nature and ferocity of the highstorms (going off the belief that the fold gives a slight advantage when trying to peer through rain and wind).

[CMac716]

3 minutes ago, RShara said:

It's been closer to 10k years since then, btw. 4500 years ago was just when the Heralds abandoned the Oathpact, after millennia of Desolations.

There've also been multiple waves of migration to Roshar, so in 10k years, it makes sense that an epicanthic fold would spread out and become the default, given the nature and ferocity of the highstorms (going off the belief that the fold gives a slight advantage when trying to peer through rain and wind).

This makes a great deal of sense to me. Couldn't think of any evolutionary advantages to the different eyes but that makes definitely works. Just out of curiosity, do we know where the Irali come from? The whole Oneness thing seems like it the shattering of Ad so are they Yolen?

[RShara]

1 minute ago, CMac716 said:

This makes a great deal of sense to me. Couldn't think of any evolutionary advantages to the different eyes but that makes definitely works. Just out of curiosity, do we know where the Irali come from? The whole Oneness thing seems like it the shattering of Ad so are they Yolen?

There are a lot of theories, but we don't have anything concrete on their origination, other than that Roshar isn't the first planet they've migrated to (it's probably the 4th).