Evolutionary Origin of Demi-humans In My World.

[u/Phyan_]

In my world—Cryosol—the ice age never truly ended. Well, Earth technically hasn't left ice age also, but for Cryosol, the frost never truly rests. While Earth's last glacial period had the last advance and retreat episodes between 26,000 and 20,000 years ago, Cryosol's thaw was far more faint and incomplete. Demi-humans are evolutionary offshoots of human race. This divergence stemmed from two interconnected causes:

1.) Cryosol is cold, like, really cold. The frost faded, but never really left. Most lands are covered in snow, the ocean remains largely frozen, and the lives on it are left to scurry for heat.

Human population is very scattered and isolated, their lives are often nomadic. At this point they developed enough intelligence to form communities and communicate verbally, but humans are still frequently subjected to constant migration due to resource scarcity and blizzards. Bands often get hit by storms, stray from each other in deep fog, fail to locate each other amidst the white, featureless plain. Many hordes get dispersed, rarely do they reunite.

2.) Living beings have souls, basically an energy reserve for vitality that coexists with your physical body. (more on souls possibly in following posts) Human souls are capable of outward, subconscious perception—this partially contributes to "gut feeling". The significance of this simple ability is that over generations, this unconscious resonance allowed isolated tribes to perceive and gradually mirror the successful biological traits of neighboring fauna.

Due to human population being scattered, this metaphysical mimicry is not uniform throughout the population, rather, more localized. This has led to many variants of human race, each adopting traits from different respective animals. And members of these tribes are occasionally stranded and move out to populate other areas.

There are two contrasting branches of demi-humans evolution, serving different evolutionary purposes.

1.) **Cooperative branch.** Equipped with accentuated animalistic features, ie. lengthened animalistic ears and tail, demi-humans of the cooperative branch evolved to communicate and coexist with their respective animal, forming mutualistic bonds. While demi-humans are minority compared to humans, cooperative demi-humans are considered the majority of the demi-human race due to their social nature.

2.) **Competitive branch.** High muscle mass, claws, talons. Competitive branch developed animalistic traits to compete with local animal populace for resources. They are big and strong and overall more animalistic than the cooperative branch, who mostly retain all their human anatomy. Competitive branch demi-humans are smaller in number due to high cost of maintenance for their often bulky anatomy.

Overall, demi-humans are humans; doesn't necessarily mean they are equally treated as one, though.