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| 14 | [[quoteright:320:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/human_subspecies.jpg]] |
| 15 | |
| 16 | As the trope HumanAliens describes humans that are literally Aliens, Human Subspecies are genetically "alien" but related to humanity to some degree. Quite simply, they are biological variants of regular humans. They are typically a result of evolution or other scientific developments, causing a derivative of ''Homo sapiens'' to form, or a completely new species of the genus ''Homo'' -- or even a new genus altogether! Unlike Human Aliens, Human Subspecies [[StarfishAliens do not have to look like humans]], and [[HumanAllAlong may not even be recognized as human at first]]. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | There are generally three types of subspecies: |
| 19 | * Those modified through genetic or technological engineering. This tends to be the most common. |
| 20 | * Those as a result of regular evolution ([[HollywoodEvolution or at least as far as the author understands it]]) -- the genetic descendants of ''Homo sapiens''. |
| 21 | * Those related to us via a common evolutionary ancestor. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | Those who are offshoots of today's humans are often termed ''Homo superior'' [[note]]note the lower case of the species name, as is done with binomial nomenclature[[/note]] if they are supposed to be a significant improvement (or they perceive themselves as such, if they're the ones calling themselves that). However, this is not necessary -- writers could use other Latin or Greek words for use in their work. If the derivative humans are a literal subspecies, then the scientific name would come after "Homo sapiens". For example, regular humans are ''H. sapiens sapiens'', a hypothetical subspecies of human could be named ''H. sapiens hupothesis''. |
| 24 | |
| 25 | {{Heavyworlder}}s and {{Lightworlder}}s are often portrayed as this, as are TheMorlocks and FrazettaMan. |
| 26 | |
| 27 | Contrast with {{Demihuman}}s, who resemble humans but are considered a separate species. |
| 28 | |
| 29 | This should not be confused with [[BioAugmentation "regular" biologically augmented humans]], or TranshumanAliens. To be considered a subspecies, they need to have some biological difference from baseline humanity. If that difference is pronounced enough, they will also be examples of BizarreHumanBiology. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | Often, the two subspecies will be treated as different EvolutionaryLevels (ignoring that the whole evolutionary levels concept is [[ArtisticLicenseBiology biologically inaccurate]]), and will engage in a ClashOfEvolutionaryLevels. |
| 32 | |
| 33 | ---- |
| 34 | !!Examples: |
| 35 | |
| 36 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 37 | |
| 38 | [[folder:Advertising]] |
| 39 | * An anti-smoking [[PublicServiceAnnouncement PSA]] from 1985 depicts a future world with a [[BodyHorror rather disturbing]] human subspecies known as the natural born smoker, who has plenty of adaptations against the harmful effects of smoking. These include a larger nose to filter out impurities, self-cleaning lungs, highly developed index and middle fingers, smaller ears (because they don't listen), secondary eyelids to protect from the irritation, and an in-built resistance to conditions like heart disease, lung cancer, and thrombosis. |
| 40 | [[/folder]] |
| 41 | |
| 42 | [[folder:Anime & Manga]] |
| 43 | * ''Anime/BNABrandNewAnimal'': Beastmen are described as such; a separate and parallel human species with distinctly different DNA and behavior. |
| 44 | * ''Manga/DeliciousInDungeon'': The word "human" is an umbrella term used to refer to the various hominid species such as [[HumansByAnyOtherName tall-men]], elves, dwarves, gnomes, and [[{{Hobbits}} half-feet]] as a whole, making them all explicitly human subspecies. These are capable of interbreeding, with half-elves and half-gnomes known to exist. Furthermore, in chapter 87, a glimpse into the time of the [[{{Precursors}} ancient civilization]] strongly implies [[spoiler: the ancients were the common ancestor species of all of the above (having features from all of them, but not as distinctively as in their descendants), and implies their divergence into different species began with magical BioAugmentation that was reinforced and bred true across generations.]] |
| 45 | * ''Manga/ElfenLied'' gives us ''Homo diclonius'', the result of mutant ovaries. They have neko ear-like [[HornedHumanoid bone horns]] and enlarged pituitary glands; besides that, they're a cross between humans (most of what they are), [[BeePeople social insects]] (for Silpelits in how they age), viruses ([[FaceFullOfAlienWingWong how they reproduce]], for the most part) and [[PersonOfMassDestruction gods]] ([[MindOverMatter the vectors]]). |
| 46 | * ''Franchise/{{Gundam}}'': |
| 47 | ** It's hypothesized that Newtypes are the next step in evolution. However, considering how vague Newtype abilities are, and how people become one, it's difficult to say if it's a result of a genetic adaptation. ''Manga/MobileSuitCrossboneGundam'' and ''Anime/AfterWarGundamX'' present a counter-hypothesis: Newtypes are simply people whose bodies have adapted to live in space rather than on Earth. Nothing inherently superior about them. In fact, ''Crossbone's'' Newtype protagonist points out the difficulty he has living on Earth, where [[{{Lightworlder}} the extreme gravity (from his perspective)]] makes him incapable of something as mundane as walking a few miles without getting utterly exhausted. |
| 48 | ** ''Anime/MobileSuitGundam00'': Innovators, which are humans that have undergone a number of beneficial mutations through exposure to GN Particles. The only reason they didn't appear earlier is that GN Particles don't occur naturally on Earth. |
| 49 | ** {{Subverted|Trope}} in ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamSeed''. Patrick Zala believes that the genetically modified ''Coordinators'' are a superior new species. In reality, Coordinators are simply genetically engineered DesignerBabies. His rival Sigel Clyne points out the error: "We never evolved." |
| 50 | * In ''Manga/InterviewsWithMonsterGirls'', the [[{{Demihuman}} demi-humans]] can be called this, being humans born with traits of fantastic creatures. |
| 51 | * ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure'': |
| 52 | ** The Pillar Men, the main villains of ''[[Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventureBattleTendency Battle Tendency]]'', were a tribe of pre-history Mesoamerican {{Horned Humanoid}}s who were physically harmed by sunlight, but had long lifespans and advanced technology. As such, they were worshiped as gods by early humanity. [[spoiler:The four Pillar Men in the present only survived by [[OurVampiresAreDifferent using the Stone Mask]], which gave them immortality and BodyHorror-tastic [[MasterOfYourDomain body-manipulation powers]]. Kars, the leader of the four and the creator of the Stone Mask, wiped out the rest of the tribe when they tried to kill him.]] |
| 53 | ** The Rock Humans of ''[[Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventureJoJolion JoJolion]]'' are a species of humanoids who can turn into rocks, have SuperDrowningSkills, and name themselves after mountain ranges. |
| 54 | * ''Manga/LandOfTheLustrous'' takes place far into the future after humanity has gone extinct. It is said that the three sapient species around are their remains, metaphorically known as the flesh, bone, and spirit. |
| 55 | ** The "flesh" is the Admirabilis, a race of sea slugs. On land, they appear as small snails/slugs, but when underwater they can transform into humanoid forms. Females are translucent, humanoid jellyfish-like, while males are black humanoids with CombatTentacles. |
| 56 | ** The "bone" is the titular Gems, a race of sentient, humanoid gemstones. They are immortal and genderless. Most of their thought and mobility seems to be down to their "inclusions", making them a sort of GeniusLoci. |
| 57 | ** The "spirit" is the Lunarians, the main antagonists of the series. They look like heavenly beings from Buddhist lore, and appears every once in a while to attack the Gems and take them to the moon. [[spoiler:They're literally ghosts, human souls unable to pass into the afterlife since there are no living humans left to pray them onward]]. |
| 58 | ** The Ice Floes are a different variant from the three races. When humanity's genetic data was scattered into the waters, it eventually resulted in a formless mass of voices in the ocean constantly whispering to those who will listen, holding onto vague memories of what they were like as living beings. |
| 59 | * ''Anime/{{Macross}}'': Inverted; humans, Zentraedi and indeed most known sentient races are subspecies/descendants of the {{Pr|ecursors}}otoculture. Humans and Zentraedi in particular are so genetically similar that they're treated more like different races then distinct subspecies, to the point where they're capable of easily interbreeding; the tremendous size difference between the two is from some sort of easily-reversible process. |
| 60 | * In ''Manga/MonsterMusume'', this is both the politically correct and actual classification of the "monsters" of the series. For the most part they act like humans with physical quirks; [[spoiler:in fact, humans and some extra-species have always reproduced together, notably with the AlwaysFemale species but seemingly able to with every species]], and the zombie extra-species is, in fact, composed of [[OurZombiesAreDifferent actual former humans anyway]]. |
| 61 | * ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'': According to WordOfGod, Angels and humans are different subspecies of a common template; humans are even given the designation of Lilim, the Eighteenth Angel. |
| 62 | * ''Manga/OnePiece'': The numerous races/tribes that inhabit the world are all but explicitly stated to be various offshoots of humanity that have evolved into new subspecies. There's [[LoadsAndLoadsOfRaces a lot of variety]]; they range from normal humans, [[RubberForeheadAliens human but with small deformities]] (third eyes, unusually long limbs, vestigial wings, etc.), to [[BeastMan animalistic]] [[FishPeople people]], [[OurGiantsAreDifferent giants]], and {{Lilliputians}} who bear little resemblance to baseline humanity. They're all apparently still close enough genetically to interbreed with each other, judging by the fact that we see multiple types of hybrid. In something of an inversion, the [[BeastMan Minks]] don't see themselves as a separate species or subspecies, they view ''[[HumansThroughAlienEyes humans]]'' as one type of Mink (specifically monkey Minks with less hair). |
| 63 | * ''Anime/RahXephon'': The Mu are suggested to be either this or simply another race of humanity: they are physically indistinguishable except for their literally blue blood and can interbreed with humans without any problems. [[spoiler:The backstory even suggests that they co-existed on Earth millions of years ago with regular humans, before a RealityWarping experiment gone wrong shifted them into another universe.]] |
| 64 | * ''Manga/SaintSeiya'': Lemurians are a human subrace from the continent of Mu. They look like humans except for strange eyebrows and have telekinesis. They are famous for their alchemy. |
| 65 | * ''Manga/TokyoGhoul'': The [[OurGhoulsAreCreepier titular species]]. Their exact origins are a mystery, something that Touka states she would like to study in the future, but the two species are closely related enough to make organ transplants and [[HalfHumanHybrid interspecies reproduction]] possible. Humans that [[BadassTransplant receive a Ghoul's organs]] become a powerful ArtificialHybrid heavily favoring the Ghoul half, while in theory it is possible for a hybrid child to be born between a human woman and a male Ghoul. |
| 66 | * {{Subverted|Trope}} in ''Anime/{{Vandread}}''. [[OneGenderRace Taraks and Majerans]] ''think'' that this is true of themselves, but they're actually just ordinary men and women whose societies are completely separate, such that neither group ever meets members of the opposite sex ([[DesignerBabies reproduction is achieved via cloning]]). They were set up by the humans of Earth to be [[WalkingTransplant harvested for spare biological parts]]; specifically their reproductive organs, which is why their race was sexually segregated in the first place (for ease of sorting when the Earth people come to collect). |
| 67 | [[/folder]] |
| 68 | |
| 69 | [[folder:Comic Books]] |
| 70 | * ''ComicBook/BuckGodotZapGunForHire'': Humanity has a reputation for creating these, either to colonise distinct environments or just for the fun of it. Buck himself belongs to one such human offshoot species; the Hoffmanites, huge, bulky, powerful bruisers who were engineered [[HeavyWorlder to live on planets with gravity in excess of four times Earth gravity]]. At least two other subspecies appear during the comic's run, in the form of the Silverrunners (centaurs) and [=PSmith=] (clone-based HiveMind) -- both of these races were seemingly engineered for the fun of it. |
| 71 | * ''ComicBook/{{Crossed}}'' has ''Homo tortor'' (Torturing man), a prehistoric subspecies based in Indonesia who, well, torture people. Known as the Blood Men by their victims, they created an empire based on causing suffering on an unheard-of scale, up until they get hit by the Crossed virus and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory the supervolcano they live on explodes]]. [[spoiler:Maybe. The entire story was written by a paleontology professor who eventually caught the virus, and who apparently wasn't all the way right in the head to begin with.]] |
| 72 | * ''Franchise/TheDCU'': |
| 73 | ** Ancient humans had interbred with a naturally-magical sub-species called ''Homo Magi'', and this is the origin of any ability to wield magic safely instead of having to bargain for it from a supernatural patron. Since the ability to wield magic this way comes from a complex of genes that are recessive in normal humans, it manifests only rarely. In theory any human being can learn how to wield ritual magic and magic that comes from invoking an eldritch god or similar supernatural force, but that sort of magic is incredibly dangerous. This is what differentiates ComicBook/{{Zatanna}} and her innate magical power from ritual spell-casters such as Felix Faust who must wrangle their power from supernatural sources. |
| 74 | ** DC Comics also has metahumans, who have a meta-gene. This allows them to not only survive experiences that would normally kill someone, but gain superpowers from doing so (often a FreakLabAccident). Once a metahuman has manifested a power, this often [[SuperpowerfulGenetics breeds true]] without the need for their children to have a seperate "origin event", although this varies (for instance, all the Flashes have children who inherited their superspeed, but Jay's daughter had the same exposure to "heavy water" as he did, whereas Barry and Wally's kids were born with it). |
| 75 | ** ''ComicBook/LegionOfSuperHeroes'': Several alien races (like the Carggites and Bismollians) that look suspiciously identical to humans (but with superpowers) are {{handwave}}d as people given superpowers, forming colonies on new planets in case Earth should ever need help from an alien invasion. |
| 76 | ** DC's Atlanteans comprise ''multiple'' human subspecies who have their origin when Atlantis sank. The human-appearing residents of Poseidonis, such as Comicbook/{{Aquaman}}, used science to evolve into water-breathers. The [[OurMermaidsAreDifferent merfolk]] of Tritonis, such as Comicbook/{{Superman}}'s friend Lori Lemaris, used magic to become part fish, or [[DependingOnTheWriter perhaps]] were cursed by their mystic leader for accepting Poseidonian help. Mutations in both methods have caused the development of other subspecies, resulting in Atlantis as a whole being home to people with [[FishPeople various degrees of scaliness]]. |
| 77 | * In ''ComicBook/TheFlintstones'', some Neandertals appear as workers and within the context of the series are considered inferior by the ''Homo sapiens'' of the story (including the main characters). |
| 78 | * In ''ComicBook/HackSlash'', the AncientConspiracy known as the Society of the Black Lamp has deliberately created these over centuries of specialized breeding of humanity. Four species are known to exist; the aquatic Poseidons and night-vision'd Hades are only mentioned in passing, but the other two are relevant to the plot. The Artemis strain are humans that have been bred into twisted, vaguely lupine monsters as a result to create a superior guardian and hunting beast. The Venus strain are uncannily beautiful and naturally docile, due to having been engineered as the ultimate race of sex slaves. |
| 79 | * ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'': |
| 80 | ** The Mutants, Human Mutates, Atlanteans, Eternals, Deviants, and Inhumans. These came about via (in order) [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin random mutation]] (prenatal for mutants, post-birth for mutates), divine intervention (Poseidon saving his worshipers from drowning), cosmic alien intervention (Celestials designing unchanging Eternals and ever-changing Deviants) and regular alien intervention (Kree experimenting on humans to help kick start their own inability to mutate). |
| 81 | ** ''ComicBook/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy'': The original guardians have it that the more human-like alien species are the descendants of humans who gained superpowers and settled other planets. In fact, out of four original characters, only one (Yondu) could be called a genuine alien. |
| 82 | * ''ComicBook/SonicTheHedgehogArchieComics'': The Overlanders, who resemble humans with four fingers, were created when the first Xorda attack caused most lifeforms to be severely mutated; this is also what caused the first Mobians to be created from regular wildlife. For the longest time, it was thought that they were what's left of humanity. Then ''VideoGame/SonicAdventure'' came out, and was adapted into an arc. Baseline humanity managed to survive in hidden cities that survived the Xorda. |
| 83 | [[/folder]] |
| 84 | |
| 85 | [[folder:Fan Works]] |
| 86 | * ''Fanfic/AmbienceAFleetSymphony'' and ''Fanfic/AmbiencePlatoonMoebiusFour'' depict [[VideoGame/KanColle shipgirls]] as this. Somewhere between heavy BioAugmentation / GeneticEngineeringIsTheNewNuke and RidiculouslyHumanRobots, indistinguishable from human from the outside yet with superhuman abilities, more than a few of them consider humanity to be Other. |
| 87 | * In ''Fanfic/TheBridgeMLP'' and the associated Amalgam'Verse, fae are magical sub-species of mundane races, including humans. Sadly, due to the events of the Extinction Hour, magic is greatly degraded and only a few are left. |
| 88 | * ''Fanfic/ChildOfTheStorm'': There are a ''lot.'' |
| 89 | ** First, Mutants, who have the X-Gene. They're pretty self-explanatory and as per canon, and once a set of powers has been developed, it's usually inherited (presumably on the grounds that it 'works'). However, sometimes power sets mix if two different mutants have children, as seen with the grandchildren of Alexander Summers and [[spoiler: Emma Frost]] - [[spoiler: Gambit, Scott's clone, can psychically control his energy charging powers with some very fine manipulation]], and Scott is implied to have a latent variant on [[spoiler: Emma's diamond form]]. It's also not uncommon to get a MuggleBornOfMages, and sometimes, as seen with Quicksilver, you get someone who has powers apparently unrelated to their mutant parent's. |
| 90 | ** Magic wielders both wanded and wandless have the M-Gene. The difference is indicated to be like being right or left-handed, and it can be trained out - while some people are naturally "magically ambidextrous". The main difference is that the wandless variety have a closer connection to magic, meaning that the powerful ones have better senses and much longer lives, at the expense of more personalised and harder to control gifts, plus being WalkingTechbane. Wanded wizards, by contrast, tend to be numerous, more consistent in their powers, come into the peak of their powers much more quickly, and blend in much more easily. |
| 91 | ** Atlanteans are the result of the Atlantean Empire magically manipulating DNA to create a sea-dwelling amphibious group. They look more or less human, if a bit blue, and they can crossbreed with humans, as demonstrated by Namor (who's half human-mutant), and they're LongLived. |
| 92 | ** Eternals and Deviants a.k.a. the Forever People and the Changing People (Gilgamesh pops up in Book III, while the Deviants are so far unseen). Both were created by Celestial manipulation; the Eternals have ResurrectiveImmortality (though WordOfGod has it that it ''is'' possible to finally kill an Eternal - just really difficult) and ComboPlatterPowers, and they don't change. The Deviants are adaptive, and like mutants dialled up to eleven, meaning that their changes are often random and maladaptive. It's hinted that the energies of Yggdrasil that contributed to humanity's magical sensitivity and ability to crossbreed with so many species put the Deviants into overdrive. |
| 93 | ** It's also been observed that a considerably sized number of people of European ancestry have got a bit of Asgardian blood in them [[AllMythsAreTrue (among others).]] They're not the only population where this happened, with most pantheons embracing the ReallyGetsAround aspect -- and, considering that they're gods, a number would have gone out of their way to have the children of gods. However, it is a bit more prominent due to the fact that the Asgardians fought a number of wars on Earth and were present in greater numbers and armies tend to make a contribution to the local gene pool. |
| 94 | ** The sequel, ''Ghosts of the Past'', also makes mention of ComicBook/TheInhumans, and reveals that [[TheFairFolk the Fae]] were originally human (or at least a closely related species) which migrated to the [[EldritchLocation Nevernever]] hundreds of thousands of years ago and adapted to thrive there as living archetypes. In ''The Phoenix and the Serpent'', it is further revealed that the Forest People ([[BigfootSasquatchAndYeti Bigfoot]]. Very smart, very LongLived, very powerful Bigfoot) similarly migrated, but noticed that they were being altered too, and went back to the mortal world. As a result, they're halfway to Faerie. |
| 95 | ** It's also later established that the [[Series/StargateSG1 Jaffa]] exist, though in this universe they were, like the Inhumans (here, mutants with a chemical trigger), created by the Kree as a warrior caste. |
| 96 | ** Finally, it's worth mentioning that the subspecies can crossbreed, or even happen spontaneously, in the case of magical-mutant hybrids (Illyana Rasputina a.k.a. Magik and Wanda Maximoff a.k.a. Scarlet Witch are natural born examples - and so, technically, is Harry). They're mentioned as rare, but not unknown, and usually, insanely powerful. |
| 97 | * ''Fanfic/KaijuRevolution'': The [[OurFairiesAreDifferent Shobijin]], [[OurMermaidsAreDifferent the Seatopians]] the Iwi, the Watchuka, the Morlocks and humanity itself are all descended from an ancient Paleolithic civilization that collapsed thanks to their attempt to control kaiju and all diverged. The first two are the result of absorbing the DNA of Mothra and Mu respectively, the Iwi came about from living on the mutagenic DeathWorld that is Skull Island and the Morlocks came from a combination of living in space and genetic alteration. |
| 98 | * ''Fanfic/TheLightOfAbyss'': Eda subscribes to the theory that Witches like herself are descended from humans that ended up in the Demon Realm thousands of years ago that managed to learn to stomach the food and adapt to it over the generations, with occasional interbreeding with the more human-like biped demons being responsible for throwback traits like Boscha's ThirdEye, citing how there are too many similarities between humans and Witches for them to be completely unrelated; Luz compares them to Atlanteans or Inhumans. Interestingly, the Emperor's Coven hates this idea, which means that it would get Eda's vote even if it ''didn't'' make sense. More evidence comes up later with the existence of "abnormal talents", which Luz theorizes to be the Witch equivalent of mutant powers. |
| 99 | * ''Fanfic/MassEffectClashOfCivilizations'': It turns out that the asari do not just look ''like'' humans, but the two species are all but genetically identical. The asari, and a species native to Thessia known as a "shia", are genetic cousins of humanity and dogs, respectively. It's later revealed that [[spoiler:they were created by ancient human empire shortly before its destruction by the Forerunners and seeded on a world far beyond known space, in the hope that humanity would endure in some form far from the sight of its destroyers]]. |
| 100 | * ''Webcomic/{{Remnants}}'': [[LittleBitBeastly Faunus]] are a sub-species of humans whose aura mutated generations ago. As a result, they're more specialized than ordinary humans. |
| 101 | * ''Fanfic/{{Resurgence}}'' reveals that the [[LittleBitBeastly Faunus]] are in fact an offshoot of humanity. During the war with the Grimm, humankind split into two factions: one that was sought out the technology of their ancestors, and one that preferred to rely on the natural world, honing their natural abilities and eventually developing the first Semblance. Over time, their reliance on Semblance over technology, affinity to the natural world, and exposure to ancient Dust from years hence led to them developing their animal attributes. |
| 102 | [[/folder]] |
| 103 | |
| 104 | [[folder:Films -- Live-Action]] |
| 105 | * ''Film/TheCannibalInTheJungle'' is a FoundFootage mockumentary special showing an expedition to Flores in 1977 that goes array when the team is stalked, harassed, and then hunted by a tribe of what the locals call "Ebu Gogo", ''Homo floresiensis''. A follow-up expedition in 2015 strongly implies that they're still out there. |
| 106 | * ''Film/CrimesOfTheFuture2022'': {{Discussed|Trope}}, as some people's [[{{Mutants}} biological changes]] no longer make them identical to "classical" humans. The government seeks to prohibit this, though a resistance group embraces the idea. Some regular humans violently oppose this to the point of murdering such divergent people. |
| 107 | * ''Film/TheDescent'' has [[TheMorlocks the Crawlers]], pale carnivorous hominids that according to [[WordOfGod Neil Marshall]] are cavemen who never left the caves and have since adapted to survive entirely in darkness but have become mindless predatory animals. |
| 108 | * ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'': The Engineers are genetically human, but while very humanoid in general appearance, their bodies look like they're [[SculptedPhysique carved from white stone]], they're 9 to 10 feet tall, and [[OrganicTechnology their flesh is apparently fused to their skeletal-looking space suits]]. |
| 109 | * {{Implied|Trope}} in ''Film/{{Society}}''. [[spoiler:The titular society of outwardly human monsters [[LovecraftianSuperpower can distort and mutate their bodies in anatomically impossible ways]], even being able physically merge into each other (which they call 'shunting') while literally consuming a hapless victim by assimilating his body mass. When Bill calls them "alien scum", they claim that they didn't come from outer space and that their inhuman traits are simply the result of "impeccable breeding" -- however, one Society member claims that they've "been here as long as you", implying either a separate species native to Earth or a divergent evolutionary path.]] WordOfGod is that [[spoiler:they are descendants of humans who were taken over by a parasite that turned them into a different species, and that shunting is how they add diversity to their excessively inbred bloodlines]]. |
| 110 | [[/folder]] |
| 111 | |
| 112 | [[folder:Literature]] |
| 113 | [[AC:Examples by author:]] |
| 114 | * Creator/HPLovecraft wrote quite a few stories about humans who have degenerated into savage monsters, though often as a result of [[HalfHumanHybrid cross-species interbreeding]] (as in "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and "Literature/TheShadowOverInnsmouth") rather than evolution or deliberate engineering.[[note]]Of course, the fact that such interbreeding is possible at all suggests that species like [[FishPeople the Deep Ones]] are themselves a subspecies of humanity.[[/note]] The clearest examples come from "Literature/TheRatsInTheWalls", which contains a reference to [[FormerlySapientSpecies "human pigs"]] who were bred underground by medieval cultists as [[ImAHumanitarian food stock]], and "Literature/TheLurkingFear", in which a bygone aristocratic family becomes a clan of [[TheMorlocks subterranean, carnivorous, apelike humans]] after [[InbredAndEvil generations of inbreeding]]. |
| 115 | [[AC:Examples by title:]] |
| 116 | * ''Literature/AlienInASmallTown'' has the Tesks (short for Grotesques), [[SuperSoldier genetically engineered as "cannon fodder" in a war]] generations ago. They've had a hard time fitting into peaceful human society since the war's end. Ironically, because of their heightened senses (an animalistic sense of smell and awareness of body language), they tend to be [[TheEmpath highly empathic]]. |
| 117 | * In ''Literature/AllTomorrows'', a superior alien race conquers a spacefaring human empire, then [[FormerlySapientSpecies re-engineer the inhabitants of various colony planets back into animalistic forms]]. Some of these post-humans eventually re-evolve sentience and rebuild a new galactic civilization... although by the time that they re-establish contact with one another many of them have evolved into organisms that barely resemble humans, such as the Sail People, resembling giant swimming pterosaurs with prehensile tongues, or the Modulars, which are colonies of tiny human "cells" that work together to form a single organism. The only other non-humans are a civilization of intelligent reptiles, who are descended from terrestrial lizards turned feral. That said, they eventually take up the cultural mantle of humanity, and are happily "adopted" into the new empire. |
| 118 | * ''Literature/{{Ambergris}}'': The Partials consider themselves to be a human subspecies. Whether they actually are, or if they're just [[BioAugmentation cyborgs with fungus instead of machinery]], is debatable. |
| 119 | * In ''Literature/AngelNotes'', which takes place in the far future, there exist a hundred different subspecies known as "A-Rays", genetically engineered and/or evolved from baseline humanity and often possessing animalistic or fantastic attributes (we are shown winged humans, colloquially called angels, as well as several forms of beastmen). There are also "Liners", which are mostly human-looking but have been heavily altered to live in the toxic environment of [[AfterTheEnd post-death Earth]]. The two groups refer to themselves collectively as "The Human Race". ''Actual'' humans are extremely rare; the protagonist is believed to be [[TheLastOfHisKind the last]]. |
| 120 | * ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'': The Nartec in book #36, ''[[Recap/AnimorphsTheMutation The Mutation]]'', are a race of [[FishPeople amphibious humanoids with gills, blue skin and webbed hands]] who inhabit a city beneath the ocean. They are descended from humans who lived in a city that sank beneath the waves, and over time adapted to their new home -- a process sped along by the fact that the glowing rocks they use to light up their city are highly radioactive. Unfortunately, the same radioactivity has cursed them with a host of genetic illnesses and resulting short lifespans, resulting in most Nartec being horribly frail or dying young, and the Nartec as a whole being headed for extinction -- something they try to prevent by harvesting fresh DNA from baseline humans, with whom they're still compatible. |
| 121 | * ''Literature/ArrivalsFromTheDark'' has a variation in the form of {{Human Alien|s}} Subspecies. Two species have deliberately engineered their race into various subspecies for different reasons. The Faata did this after their [[ButWhatAboutTheAstronauts astronauts]] return from deep space exploration to learn that their civilization was destroyed by a cataclysm. Instead of a thriving civilization, they find degraded savages barely surviving off the land. Determined to keep this from happening again, they turn the planetbound Faata into servant subspecies with various tasks (soldiers, pilots, breeders, etc.), and enhance themselves to live for centuries. The Kni'lina's civilization was nearly wiped out by a plague ravaging the planet's only continent. The Kni'lina on islands quarantined themselves and began working on genetic therapy treatments that would make them immune to the plague. Due to the isolation, each island ended up with a slightly different treatment that effectively turned them into subspecies. These clans are not able to interbreed. The clans became the basis for modern Kni'lina society. However, there is a large group known as Zinto, who are actually descendants of those Kni'lina who survived the plague on the mainland without resorting to genetic treatments. Being the baseline species, they are able to interbreed with other clans. However, this is forbidden under the pain of death, as it would destroy the modern clan structure and remove the ruling Ni and Poharas clans from power. Another planet was found where the ruling clans also used genetic engineering to make themselves physically distinct from the people below them. Some of those changes turned them horribly ugly (e.g., giant noses, enormous ears, long breasts that reach the ground). |
| 122 | * ''Literature/BlackMan'': There are several subspecies, with the most common being bonobos (hyperfeminized females, lacking aggressive tendencies and having highly developed interpersonal skills as well as a somewhat servile nature) and the titular thirteens (hypermasculine males, a "genetic throwback" to the hunter-warriors of the early hunter-gatherer culture and quintessential alpha males). There are also other variants: specialized, enhanced thinkers with autistic tendencies or extremely energetic, focused individuals who [[TheSleepless require very little sleep]], but need to hibernate in winter for several ''months'' to compensate, for instance. However, the book focuses on the thirteens, who were artificially created as {{Super Soldier}}s/elite commandos, but later are seen as [[SociopathicSoldier so dangerous to baseline humans]] that they are prohibited from interaction with human society and are given the choice of being exiled to Mars or being interred in reservations or "tracts" (essentially open-air prisons), if they stay on Earth. They have a hyperdeveloped neural system and a slightly different neurochemistry, as well as an enlarged "area thirteen", being the brain area responsible for alpha male traits in the book. This results in the average thirteen being both physically stronger and more mentally acute/cunning than the average human, but also in being overly aggressive, unable (or rather, very unwilling) to follow orders or be subordinate to anyone and having a lack of social empathy, being only interested in his own benefit. All of this can be somewhat overcome by force of will (as the protagonist, Marsalis, and Sutherland show), but the tendency is always there. Despite the comparatively minor actual biological changes, the thirteens are different enough (and scary enough) to be considered as a subspecies (and, quite often, non-humans) by the baseline population, which they reciprocate by calling humans cattle or "cudlips" and also viewing themselves as a separate, superior species. |
| 123 | * ''Literature/{{Blindsight}}'': [[OurVampiresAreDifferent Vampires]] were [[DoingInTheWizard a subspecies of human who had a deficiency of some vital protein unique to humans and evolved to obtain it by consuming other humans]]. They were completely sociopathic, had super-savant level mathematical abilities and spatial perception, and could hibernate for decades, among other things. However, their subconscious math skills resulted in a "glitch" that [[WeaksauceWeakness caused them to have potentially fatal seizures when they saw right angles]], and so went extinct as soon as humans discovered architecture. Then a somewhat less-than-ethical biotech company in the mid-21st century discovered and [[FossilRevival recreated]] them without the protein deficiency (but leaving their predatory instincts intact) and gave them drugs to suppress the crucifix glitch. |
| 124 | * In ''Literature/CourtshipRite'', the afterword reveals that the centuries of isolation combined with genetic manipulation have led to the Getans only sharing about 98% of their genes with mainstream humanity -- about the same as chimpanzees! |
| 125 | * ''Literature/CrestOfTheStars'': The Abh were [[TranshumansInSpace engineered to be space explorers]]. They have a ThirdEye and some modifications to the brain so they can navigate better in three dimensions, and longer life and adaptions to cope with extended periods of microgravity with periods of high acceleration, since they were created before the InUniverse discovery of FasterThanLightTravel and ArtificialGravity. Interestingly, the Abh still consider themselves to be 100% human, and do not acknowledge claims that they are "alien" in any sense. |
| 126 | * ''Literature/TheDeathGateCycle'' takes place in a far-flung future involving some sort of nuclear cataclysm. [[OurElvesAreDifferent Elves]] and [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame dwarves]] evolved from human stock during this time, as did a MageSpecies (two of them in fact) which could use magic. However, only the dual Mage Species can interbreed. |
| 127 | * ''Literature/TheDescent'' features hadals, a.k.a. ''Homo hadalis'', a human species that lives BeneathTheEarth in the caverns of the sub-planet. Descended from ''Homo erectus'', they once had a relatively advanced Iron Age civilization millennia before humans did, but they have since degenerated into [[TheMorlocks vicious underground savages]] with a penchant for abducting people as slaves and food. |
| 128 | * ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'': |
| 129 | ** [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame Dwarfs]] are probably a short subspecies of humanity (unless humans are a taller dwarf subspecies), at least if dwarfish creation myths are to be believed. They are close enough to have children, but according to ''Literature/RaisingSteam'' it's a chancy thing and most mixed marriages adopt. (It's widely speculated that the Ogg family have dwarfish ancestry though.) For their part, dwarfs consider being a dwarf to be mostly cultural. Case in point: Captain Carrot Ironfounderson is considered a dwarf by other dwarfs, despite being better than six feet tall, because he has completed all the requisite rites of passage. |
| 130 | ** Discworld's [[OurOrcsAreDifferent orcs]] were magically engineered/bred from humans, as seen in ''Literature/UnseenAcademicals'', because the [[OurGoblinsAreDifferent goblins]] were [[HumansAreTheRealMonsters deemed not to be vicious enough]] to serve as ancestor stock. |
| 131 | * In Creator/RobertReed's ''Literature/DownTheBrightWay'', set in a [[TheMultiverse multiverse]], each Each [[PointOfDivergence began to diverge at some point during the evolution of humanity]]. The Wanderers, an organization that uses an InterdimensionalTravelDevice, is made up of many distinct flavors of humanity. The Termite Mound-earth has the most extreme divergence; while the denizens look pretty much human, they have a biologically driven caste-based society with radically different metabolisms where the rich live in a blur while the poor are like sloths, and the Founders who discovered the travel device look more like apes than humans. |
| 132 | * ''Franchise/{{Dune}}'': Genetic engineering is commonplace, and modified humans take many shapes and fill many roles, some of them rather disturbing. |
| 133 | * In ''Literature/{{Emergence}}'', a new subspecies, ''Homo post hominem'', comes into existence about two generations after [[UsefulNotes/TheSpanishFlu the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919]]. It's theorized by characters that the flu somehow mutated genes in women whose grandchildren would wind up as "hominems" (as the subspecies is referred to). One hominem character who's too old for that theory to apply thinks that said virus might have caused this mutation in more isolated cases before the epidemic. Hominems are stronger and faster than humans, with total immunity to human disease and much quicker reflexes. They also have [[SuperSenses much more acute senses]], including [[InnateNightVision seeing in the infrared range]] (the narrator, herself a hominem, comments that [[IThoughtEveryoneCouldDoThat finding out her vision extends into infrared explains a lot about why human acquaintances couldn't see in conditions that weren't a problem for her]]). They're theorized to have a longer lifespan than humans, all depicted hominems exceed human intelligence, and they breed true (a mating between h. sapiens and h. post hominem [[DominantSpeciesGenes always produces a hominem offspring]]). |
| 134 | * ''Literature/{{Evolution}}'': Humans evolve over time into mole-like and elephant-like forms, among others. |
| 135 | * ''Literature/{{Existence}}'': Autistic people are determined to be a separate subspecies of human; [[FossilRevival recreated chimeric Neanderthals]], [[UpliftedAnimal uplifted dolphins]], and RidiculouslyHumanRobots are considered to be human as well. |
| 136 | * ''Literature/TheExpanse'': Generations of living in radically different environments means that Martians and Belters are already showing signs of evolving compared to Earthers (regular Earthbound humans) -- both require less oxygen to breathe due to living in controlled environments and a higher resistance to radiation due to lacking a natural atmosphere capable to blocking it out. Belters especially show signs of divergent evolution in that, due to [[SpacePeople the very light gravity of the asteroid stations and planetoids in the Belt]] compared to the inner planets, their skeletal systems grow longer, thinner, and more brittle, leaving them as, essentially, {{Lightworlder}}s. |
| 137 | * Creator/HarryHarrison's short story "Final Encounter" has a team with members of two Human Subspecies looking for nonhuman intelligence. At the end, the very promising new species, which can't even breathe the same air we do, turns out to be of Earth descent too -- one group was expanding and searching clockwise around the galaxy, the other counter-clockwise. |
| 138 | -->''"[[AbsentAliens We are alone]]", Hautamaki said, looking at the massed trillions of stars. "We have closed the circle and found only ourselves. The galaxy is ours, but we are alone."'' |
| 139 | * ''Literature/{{Friday}}'': "Living artifacts" (kobold dwarfs, men with four arms) are this trope, while [[ArtificialHuman "artificial persons"]] are [[DesignerBabies genetically engineered humans]]. |
| 140 | * ''Literature/{{Gosick}}'': The Gray Wolves are [[ShorterMeansSmarter petite]], have long blonde hair, green eyes and SuperIntelligence. As they're cross-fertile with baselines but not completely [[HiddenElfVillage hidden from the outside world]], the women really shouldn't wander off. [[spoiler:[[BreakTheCutie Not that Cordelia Gallo had a choice]].]] |
| 141 | * The ''Literature/GreatShip'' universe has the [[SpacePeople Remoras]], a subspecies of humanity that has been twisted by the hard radiation on the exterior hull of the [[PlanetSpaceship Great Ship]]. Remoras are [[BodyHorror horrifically mutated]] from the radiation (one character, Orleans, has [[EyelessFace light-sensitive hairs instead of eyes]]), yet they ''cherish'' and [[BioAugmentation actively cultivate]] their mutations. |
| 142 | * ''Literature/{{Hainish}}'': Humanity and all sapient lifeforms are descended from colonists from Hain, and the various species are all thus branches of the greater human family. Some are essentially humans under different names, but others (such as the short, hairy and lucid dreaming Athsheans and [[Literature/TheLeftHandOfDarkness the Gethenians]], who are sexless by default and only become temporarily male or female to breed) are radically divergent from what we would consider the norm. |
| 143 | * ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'': |
| 144 | ** ''Literature/TheForerunnerSaga'', which takes place 100,000 years ago, uses this trope heavily. Several real human subspecies, including Denisovans and ''Homo floresiensis'' (Florians), are present, coexisting with "Chamanune" (''Homo sapiens'') daily. They are easily identifiable from ''sapiens'' (Florians have no chin, big eyes, fur on their faces, and live for hundreds of years; Denisovans have square heads, "spare" bodies, and lots of reddish facial hair), with their own unique traits, customs, and cultures. Others are seen, and some others are named, but not featured prominently. |
| 145 | ** One minor character in ''Literature/HaloPrimordium'', Mara, is a ''Gigantopithecus''. Not technically human (she's described as looking like a giant gorilla, though her species is most closely related to orangutans), but she's definitely sentient; she's the one who tells Riser (who's the only one who can understand her) to have everyone call her Mara. |
| 146 | ** Humanity is actually noted as being especially diverse compared to other species. The only reason there aren't dozens of subspecies alive today is because [[spoiler:the Ur-Didact turned most of them into [[UnwillingRoboticisation Promethean slaves]]]]. |
| 147 | * In ''Literature/TheHollows'', [[OurVampiresAreDifferent vampires]] and [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent werewolves]] are humans that have been mutated by a virus. [[OurElvesAreDifferent Elves]] are an {{inver|tedTrope}}sion: they were once a completely different species (probably even belonging to a different order) but used magic to become capable of breeding with humans, eventually thinning the line between them... until a virus came along that affected only humans. |
| 148 | * ''Literature/HonorHarrington'': There are a wide variety of distinctly different groups of humans (though all still identifiably human), generally due to genetic engineering. These include {{Super Soldier}}s and their descendants, slaves engineered for particular traits, {{Heavyworlder}}s of varying degrees, a planet populated by albinos (an unintended trait due to their other genetic tweaks), and other, more subtle differences. The central protagonist of the series is herself genetically tweaked to be a sort of mild Heavyworlder and could also be considered a super soldier because of it. |
| 149 | * ''Literature/{{Hothouse}}'': Numerous offshoots of humanity exist in the distant future, at varying levels of intelligence and adaptation to their often hostile environments. |
| 150 | ** The main kind seen are a diminutive, green-skinned people who live in the depths of the world-forest's canopy. |
| 151 | ** The Fishers, also referred to as tummy-belly men, live symbiotically with large stout trees to whom they're connected by long umbilical cords. They depend on their trees for almost everything and possess very limited intelligence. |
| 152 | ** The Arablers were a people with limited agricultural skills who settled the edges of the world's night side. They were largely displaced by further waves of migrants, and by the story's time have become entirely non-sapient beings kept as carriers, servants and beasts of burden by a species of sapient dolphins. |
| 153 | * In ''Literature/HouseOfSuns'', the galaxy is completely colonized over millions of years by a human diaspora, evolved and adapted in countless ways including squid/whale-looking aquatic forms, colossal vacuum-dwellers, and sapient weather patterns. The central characters are still reasonably recognizable as human only because they've spent so much of the intervening time flitting around at relativistic speeds, and thus have had a much shorter subjective experience of the intervening eons. |
| 154 | * ''Literature/HunterJBHuggins'' features one of these as the main villain. The "beast-man", twice referred to as ''Homo scimitar'' but otherwise unnamed, is an extremely aggressive and almost invincible MonstrousHumanoid with outright superhuman abilities -- the strength to kill a rhino bare-handed, virtually bulletproof skin, total immunity to disease, and a lifespan speculated to be almost a thousand years. They started out as a predatory human species that steadily augmented their already-superhuman strength and aggression with a special flower until they became the monsters seen in the book. They're extinct in the present day, but one of the scientists secretly researching their genetics [[WasOnceAMan turned himself into one]] by injecting himself with their DNA. |
| 155 | * ''Literature/HyperionCantos'': The Ousters were originally a small group of humans who decided to modify their own bodies to suit foreign environments instead of the other way around. Fast forward several thousand years, and some people don't even consider them human anymore. |
| 156 | * ''Literature/TheInnsmouthLegacy'': The protagonist Aphra never stops correcting people that [[FishPeople Deep Ones]] are also human, just a branch of it. |
| 157 | * In Creator/CordwainerSmith's ''Literature/InstrumentalityOfMankind'', to survive on alien worlds, some humans have been so modified that they look more alien than human. {{Inverted|Trope}} with the Underpeople, who are animals modified to act and look human. |
| 158 | * ''Literature/JackelianSeries'': Craynarbians and graspers are variants of humanity whose ancestors adapted to harsh conditions, the former to a HungryJungle and the latter to life underground. Ursines may be another variant of humans, or at least are believed to be primate-descendants. Gill-necks are the product of a much older evolutionary split between terrestrial and aquatic humans and claim that ''they'' were the original ones. |
| 159 | * ''Literature/KnownSpace'': |
| 160 | ** The Pak, first introduced in ''Literature/{{Protector}}'', are actually our ancestors ''Homo habilis''. They eat a special root to become Protectors, superhumans that watch over the rest of their bloodline. Humanity sprang from [[LostColony a Pak colony gone awry]]. Humans can also become Protectors, with the added advantage of being more intelligent and able to work with other (human) Protectors. [[AbusivePrecursors They hate us]] because we [[HumansAreSmelly don't smell right]] due to having mutated so much; the special root didn't grow right on Earth, so we mutated far too much without any Protectors to keep us in line. Human Protectors' ability to work together is probably a consequence of another of their quirks: a significantly heightened tendency to adopt the entire species as their bloodline (it seems to come naturally to human Protectors, whereas for Pak Protectors it is a rare reaction to the already rare situation of losing one's entire bloodline but somehow still surviving). It tends to be easier to work together if you have the same goals. |
| 161 | ** In ''Literature/{{Ringworld}}'', the [[RingWorldPlanet eponymous megastructure]] is inhabited by an unknown -- but, given the size of the place, probably staggeringly large -- number of hominid species, all descended from [[spoiler:Pak breeders, same as humans]]. They are highly diversified as a result of the Ringworld lacking large megafauna, resulting in a great deal of diversification as the hominids adapted to become grazers, scavengers, seal-like fish eaters, predators of other hominids, etcetera. |
| 162 | * ''Literature/KonoSuba'' has the Crimson Demon Clan, a literal human subspecies who were founded by one of the "Champions" sent to the world by the goddess Aqua in the distant past. Crimson Demons look and fundamentally are human, but possess two defining traits; every single one of them is [[MageSpecies naturally adept at using magic]], and they are all [[{{Chuunibyou}} flamboyantly melodramatic eccentrics]]. The tabletop roleplaying game adaptation even goes so far as to present Crimson Demon Clan Member as one of the three playable races, with the others being "Reincarnated Otherworlder" and "Native Inhabitant". |
| 163 | * ''Literature/LastAndFirstMen'' follows millions of years of human development and dozens of human offshoots, including humans capable of flight and ones adapted to live on the surface of Neptune (this being when Neptune was still thought to have a solid core). The first few species aren't too dissimilar from our own, but the Eighteenth Men, the last strain to arise, bear about as much resemblance to modern humans as we do to mice. |
| 164 | * ''Literature/LearningToLiveWithOrcs'': Fourteen distinct fantasy species, including [[OurElvesAreDifferent elves]], [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame dwarves]], and [[OurOrcsAreDifferent orcs]], are offshoots of humanity. |
| 165 | * ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'': The Valerians are a {{Heavyworlder}} subspecies, making them, by default, badasses. Similarly, the Family D'Alembert, of the eponymous but less-well-known Creator/EEDocSmith series, were also heavy worlders, albeit of a slightly different physical type -- StoutStrength, as compared to the Valerians' tallness. |
| 166 | * In ''Literature/LivesOfTheMayfairWitches'', Taltos have common ancestors with humanity (they're primates) and can even interbreed with humans and pass as such, but aren't humans. According with the books, they were known as the ancient Picts. |
| 167 | * ''Literature/TheLongEarth'': |
| 168 | ** The Next are essentially natural versions of [[Franchise/StarTrek Khan]]. They have their origin in the stepwise town Happy Landings, where human/troll interactions led to some unusual evolutionary pressures, resulting in children with a very different brain structure. They are much smarter than regular humans and many of them are more sensible as well (Lobsang originally categorized their emergence on Datum Earth as being an unprecedented outbreak of common sense). They do, however, see themselves as fundamentally ''better'' than "[[FantasticSlurs dim-bulbs]]" and this disdainful attitude combined with intelligence leads toward a trend to charismatic sociopathy. |
| 169 | ** Going further back in history: "trolls", "kobolds", and "elves" all share ancestors with humans, but they branched off at various points when ''their'' ancestors 'stepped' out into the Long Earth and generally never came back -- "Datum" humans are the descendants of those that never left. |
| 170 | * In ''Literature/LucifersStar'', the Crius are a genetically engineered [[TheBeautifulElite Beautiful Elite]] (or rather, the nobility is, since they run a FeudalFuture) which also make extensive use of cybernetics to improve themselves. They're blown away by the Chel, though, who have engineered themselves to live in zero-gravity asteroid belts and who look more like TheGreys rather than people. It's implied several other human subspecies exist as well. Bioroids sit in the middle of this trope and RidiculouslyHumanRobots. |
| 171 | * In ''Literature/MagicTime'' (an UrbanFantasy trilogy by Marc Scott Zicree), when TheMagicCameBack, humanity was also affected, and numerous people were altered into the ethereal fairylike "Flares" and the strong but physically twisted [[TheMorlocks "Grunters"]] based on their personalities. One especially greedy corporate head even became a dragon. |
| 172 | * ''Literature/ManAfterManAnAnthropologyOfTheFuture'' is all about this trope, with an incredibly huge array of different human subspecies evolving to replace now-extinct animals as numerous species of megafaunal grazers, predators and parasites of said grazers, eusocial desert-dwellers, anteater analogues, manatee-like aquatic forms and others. The results are, in fact, rather nightmarish. |
| 173 | * In Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Literature/{{Manifold}}'' series, humanity's predecessors and subspecies are a recurring theme: |
| 174 | ** In ''Literature/ManifoldSpace'', the universe is full of intelligence. When the Gaijin MechanicalLifeforms purchase strips of wilderness on Earth, they begin experimenting with human and proto-human DNA. When human civilization on Earth collapses, a number of subspecies crop up; cro-magnons and neanderthals crop up in Africa, the latter of which operate a natural nuclear reactor and are used by the Gaijin to [[spoiler:maintain a superconducting loop on Io to generate fuel for a starship]]. |
| 175 | ** In ''Literature/ManifoldOrigin'', the Red Moon travels from universe to universe, scooping up hominids from Earth and moving them across the universes. On the Moon itself, ''Homo erectus'', ''Australopithecus'', neanderthals and ''Homo sapiens'' coexist. The Red Moon was created by [[spoiler:the Downstreamers from ''Literature/ManifoldTime'' to enhance human evolution and give them a fellow intelligent species]]. |
| 176 | * The ''Literature/MatadorSeries'' has the albino Exotics, bred as sex slaves with uncommon physical beauty and conscious control over their pheromones. |
| 177 | * In ''Literature/TheNarrativeOfArthurGordonPymOfNantucket'', the titular protagonist encounters a race of men living on [[ScienceMarchesOn an island in the Antarctic Ocean]] whose bodies are pitch black all over, including their teeth and the "whites" of their eyes. Given that the color white is taboo in their culture (due to its association with a certain nearby EldritchLocation), it isn't hard to see how their appearance might have come about through self-selecting for increasingly extreme melanistic traits over the course of hundreds of generations. |
| 178 | * ''Literature/Overlord2012'': The traditional "human" race of YGGDRASIL is not Homo Sapiens. In-game, the category of human even includes the likes of elves and dwarves. This is in contrast to the categories of demi-human (orcs, beastmen) and actual monsters (99% of the Tomb of Nazarick, but notably excluding Mare, Aura, and Aureole Omega). |
| 179 | * ''Literature/{{Paradox}}'': The Pelted were created by [[ArtificialAnimalPeople splicing genes from various animals into human genomes]]. They were originally designed as servants to humanity but after a number of demands for rights (and a scandal or two where a billionaire got knocked up by her "pet") they left earth in GenerationShips and colonized a number of planets, then developed FTL drive centuries later and invited humanity into their Alliance. |
| 180 | * ''Literature/PerryRhodan'': All the HumanAliens native to the Milky Way Galaxy can trace their ancestry to Lemuria (Earth until ca. 50,000 BC), its colonies, and ''their'' colonies in turn. There are also the descendants of colonists who started out from present-day Terra and developed in a fairly diverse variety of ways. Some are more suited to interbreeding than others; Terran/Arkonide pairs can canonically have children despite one parent having an internal chest ''plate'' in place of ribs and a somewhat different brain structure, but somebody from Siga, whose ancestors ended up shrinking to only a few inches tall over a number of generations due to [[NegativeSpaceWedgie an anomaly in their sun's 5-D spectrum]], would obviously make a poor match to anybody more "normal-sized". |
| 181 | * ''Literature/PlanetOfAdventure'': The planet Tschai, besides being home to five alien species (the immigrant Chasch, Wankh and Dirdir and the native Pnume and Phung), also hosts several populations of TransplantedHumans. While several tribes and nations are still effectively Earth-normal, the aliens keep human client races, the Chaschmen, Wankhmen, Dirdirmen and Pnumekin, who have come to physically resemble their respective rulers through combinations of selective breeding and surgery in desire to emulate their masters. |
| 182 | %%* ''Literature/PlanetPirates'': |
| 183 | * ''Literature/ThePrincesOfTheAir'': One of the planets visited by the protagonist is an ocean world with no dry landmasses, so the people who live there have been modified to be able to live underwater. |
| 184 | * In the ''Literature/RealMermaids'' series, it's believed that purely land-dwelling humans are descended from mers, or Pesco-sapiens, who in turn are descended from apes. |
| 185 | * The ''Literature/RevelationSpaceSeries'' presents us with several "species" of humanity created through genetic engineering and {{Nanomachines}}. They range from the virtually unmodified Skyjacks to the neural-implanted Demarchists to the wildly altered Ultras and Conjoiners. |
| 186 | %%* ''Literature/RiversOfLondon'': Peter Grant speculates that the Quiet People from ''Whispers Under Ground'' may be this, but opts not to use the word in his report to Nightingale because Dr. Walid's warned him about using technical terms he's not sure he understands. |
| 187 | * ''Literature/{{Seveneves}}'': Genetic engineering causes the Seven Races to diverge. The Blues/Dinans are closest to "rootstock" ''homo sapiens,'' while the Reds/Aïdans have drifted the farthest. [[spoiler:Then you have the Diggers and Pingers.]] |
| 188 | * ''Literature/{{Shannara}}'': The [[AllTrollsAreDifferent Trolls]], [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame Dwarves]], and [[OurGnomesAreWeirder Gnomes]] are humans mutated by the consequences of nuclear war. [[OurElvesAreDifferent Elves]] are commonly believed to be the same [[SubvertedTrope but are actually descended from real faeries]]. |
| 189 | * ''Literature/TheShipWho'': [[ManInTheMachine Shellpeople]] are sometimes considered this way, since their experiences of life are ''very'' unlike those of their parents and siblings and they're much more LongLived. |
| 190 | ** The Kolnari's ancestors were stranded on a DeathWorld with higher-than-Earth gravity. Their skin is [[DarkIsEvil black]], they're stronger and faster and resistant to many diseases, and their culture is [[TheSocialDarwinist incredibly aggressive]]. They hit puberty at eight and breed like rabbits, giving birth four months after conception to anywhere from two to ''five'' at a time, and place a high priority on spreading their "Divine Seed" even among "scumvermin", their term for any other humans. Also, while most humans in the setting are quite LongLived and refer casually to their "first fifty", Kolnari consider thirty to be "ripe" and fifty to be "old and senile". |
| 191 | ** The people of Ozran are split into two of these. There's the more human "mages", who've cultivated slightly more in the way of PsychicPowers than average humans and who modified the other humans into "furfaces". Furfaces have [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin fur]] and animal-like faces, as well as FourFingeredHands thanks to [[{{Fingore}} mutilation in infancy]]. The two subspecies can and do interbreed and most house servants are lightly furred with more human facial features. Some lesser mages shave meticulously to keep their heritage from showing. |
| 192 | *** Before discovering the truth, visitors from offworld speculate on if the furfaces are humanlike aliens or a subspecies. They don't believe enough time has passed for the people of a LostColony to evolve fewer fingers and faces with muzzles. |
| 193 | * The world of ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'' has several peoples from far-flung corners of the world suggested to be not quite standard humans. |
| 194 | ** The Ibbenese from the remote island of Ibben are the most obvious example, who are described as being squat in stature with broad shoulders, sloping and ridged brows with sunken eyes, wiry hair and massive jaws. Offspring between Ibbenese and people of other lands frequently ([[UnreliableNarrator allegedly]]) result in stillbirths and "monstrosities" while the surviving half-breeds are always sterile. Most of these descriptions seem to suggest the Ibbenese are in fact the equivalent of our world's Neanderthals, a small population of whom seem to have survived through cultural and geographic isolation. |
| 195 | ** Another example is the savage "Brindled Men" from the remote and hostile continent of Sothoryos, who are described as almost ape-like in appearance with (as the name suggests) striped skin, hugely muscled bodies and flat noses. As with the Ibbenese, half-breeds between Brindled Men and other races almost always result in malformed stillborn children. |
| 196 | * ''Literature/{{Spin}}'' introduces the Martians who are descended from colonists who continued to evolve for thousands of years while Earth remained in slow-time. All of this time had forced them to adapt to a partially terraformed Mars, making them much shorter, very wrinkly, and relatively longer-lived (though that one is partly because of their advanced chemistry and nanotechnology). |
| 197 | * ''Literature/StarTrekNovelVerse'': A series of books by David Mack reveals the Borg to have originated from humans [[spoiler:crossed with a superpowered [[TheGreys Grey]] who had transformed her body into catoms (programmable matter). The Grey loses her body and then her mind and possesses the humans in an attempt to save herself -- or rather, what little of herself is left. She and the humans are then tossed thousands of years into the past and across space]]. |
| 198 | * ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'' has a great many "[[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Near_human near-humans]]", descendants of far-flung colonies sent out in the days before hyperspace travel was possible. Many were translated into the Disney canon as well. |
| 199 | ** Many of them physically look like baseline humans with only cultural differences, but there are some, like blue-skinned and red-eyed Chiss and the red-skinned Zeltrons, who have striking external differences as well. In the most extreme case, the Twi'leks -- blue-, green- and red-skinned aliens with twin "tails" sprouting from the back of their heads -- are hinted to have originated as the result of genetic tampering with ancient humanity and can still have children with baseline humans. |
| 200 | ** Some don't have much if any ''visible'' different from baseline humans. For example, the Korunnai, Miraluka and Vahla are [[PsychicPowers always Force-sensitive]], but beyond that the only distinguishing features are that Korunnai always have brown skin, Miraluka are always [[BlindSeer blind]], and Vahla are tall and slender (all traits that can appear in baseline humans). |
| 201 | ** According to some material, humans share a common ancestor known as the Kumungah with the Jawas and Tusken Raiders of Tatooine, with humans descending from the ones that were off-planet when [[AbusivePrecursors the Rakata]] devastated it with an orbital bombardment and the others descending from the survivors on the surface, making the three species very close evolutionary cousins. |
| 202 | ** Though not human, in ''Legends'' canon, Neimodians are a Duros Subspecies -- the Duros were one of the first species to develop spaceflight after the fall of the precursor empires and went through a similar radiation as humanity did. |
| 203 | * ''Literature/TheStormSwimmer'' has the sea people, who are mostly similar to humans but have adapted to live in the ocean. Their legs are shaped so that they can swim faster than humans but can't walk, they can hold their breath for a long time, their hair takes on the colour of their surroundings, and their mouths and throats are shaped differently, allowing them to make clicks and trills that are impossible for humans. They're also highly sensitive to magnetism and electricity, which helps them navigate, and their cognition is very concrete and visual. Ginika's grandpa thinks they're descended from humans who lived on an island that very slowly sank into the sea, giving them time to evolve. |
| 204 | * ''Literature/TheSunEater'': While Solarian Empire's religion treats [[SuperBreedingProgram the Palatines]] as merely a superior extension to standard humanity, the protagonist Hadrian Marlowe considers the Palatines as inhuman as [[OurHomunculiAreDifferent the Homunculi]], as they are so deeply changed that they can only viably procreate within their particular caste and (in the royal family's case) [[KissingCousins amongst each other]]. |
| 205 | * ''Literature/TalesFromTheFlatEarth'' has the Sea People, these humans are green-skinned and capable of living underwater when their wizardly ancestors decided to migrate there (magic behaves much differently in the sea, so living there protects greatly against the machinations of beings such as the [[{{Tulpa}} Lords of Darkness]] and demons). |
| 206 | * Some stories in Creator/GeorgeRRMartin's ''Thousand Worlds'' setting mention genetically altered humans on the planet Prometheus. As long as they can still interbreed with regular ''Homo sapiens'', they are considered to be still human. |
| 207 | * ''Literature/TheTimeMachine'' has the Eloi and Morlocks, two species descended from modern humanity as a result of society [[ExtremeSpeculativeStratification becoming heavily split between the workers and the elite]]. The elites, who spent their lives idling and enjoying themselves and did not lead lifestyles that required any physical or mental effort of them, eventually evolved into the Eloi, a species of child-sized, [[StupidFuturePeople simple and unintelligent beings]] who spend their lives eating, resting and not doing anything much, and lack the mental capacity to strive for anything more. The working classes, who spent their lives tending to the underground machinery that kept civilization running for the benefit of the rich, became the [[TheMorlocks apelike, cave-dwelling Morlocks]], who instinctively still keep the machines running and provide for the descendants of their old masters, whom they now [[PeopleFarms raise and eat like cattle]]. |
| 208 | * ''Franchise/TolkiensLegendarium'': |
| 209 | ** The prologue to ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' describes {{Hobbits}} as "closely related" to man; WordOfGod sometimes referred to them as a "variety" or "separate branch" of humanity. In-universe, any such relation is lost to history, and they consider themselves a separate race. There also used to be three [[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Hobbit#Types_of_Hobbits Hobbit subspecies]] (Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides) that lived in different territories; Gollum is a Stoor. By the time of the main story, the three had mostly recombined after all settling in the region of the Shire, surviving only as slight regional differences. |
| 210 | ** The fact that [[OurElvesAreDifferent Elves]] and Men are capable of producing fertile offspring with one another suggests that they're also closely related enough to qualify as the same species. Tolkien himself noted this in his letters. |
| 211 | --->''"Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring -- even as a rare event."'' |
| 212 | ** While Tolkien never settled on a canon origin for the [[OurOrcsAreDifferent Orcs]], it's generally thought that they're a corrupted breed of Elves, Men, or both, so in either case they'd also be an example of this trope. This is further supported by the existence of the [[HalfHumanHybrid Uruk-hai]], which implies that Orcs can be bred with Men. |
| 213 | ** The Drúedain are also apparently this - notably physically distinct from all other humans to a much greater degree than any ethnicity, to the point of resembling earlier hominids, but they have human-level intelligence and are clearly indicated as still being "men" despite their differences. |
| 214 | * ''Literature/VorkosiganSaga'': |
| 215 | ** The Cetagandans are an EvilutionaryBiologist race who are continually experimenting with genetics so as to "perfect" themselves. They still look human now but it's hard to say what the future holds for them. |
| 216 | ** The Quaddies are a people [[SpacePeople specifically engineered for zero gravity]]. Most noticeably, they have [[HandyFeet a second pair of arms where their legs should be]] to allow them to climb instead of walk around the spaceships. Their bones are altered to prevent deterioration, and their pelvic arches have been modified for ease of giving birth in freefall. Normal humans shunned them, so they fled and set up their own society after the invention of artificial gravity precluded any real need for their services. They're different enough genetically that they cannot reproduce with "downsiders" without the help of a laboratory. |
| 217 | ** The Betan {{hermaphrodite}}s are described as "Betan egalitarianism gone mad" and are relatively normal except for the obvious. They're also a minority even on their home planet though they're much in demand as sex therapists. They're different enough genetically (incompatible sex chromosomes) that they cannot reproduce with "normal" humans without the help of a laboratory, but socially they're treated as a subspecies of normal humans. |
| 218 | * ''Literature/TheWarGods'': Humanity is the original race, the other four Races of Man are all human-descended. Dwarves and hradani evolved naturally; their distant ancestors had a mystic affinity to stone (dwarves) or a stronger link to the world's magic field (hradani), tended to find others with the same traits sexually attractive and passed the traits on to their children, and eventually those traits became strong enough to result in separate races. The original elves were created when their original magic was transmuted into immortality, and the ancestors of the halflings were effectively mutated by exposure to way too much tainted magic during the war that destroyed the Empire of Ottovar. All five races remain capable of interbreeding, though half-elves are the only ones confirmed to produce fertile offspring. |
| 219 | * ''Literature/TheWitcher'' has the Nilfgaardians, whose ancestors intermarried so heavily with [[OurElvesAreDifferent the local elven culture, the Black Seidhe]] that, while they are fully human, they retain strong elven features such as large foreheads, tall cheekbones, and aquiline noses and profiles. |
| 220 | * ''Literature/{{Wraeththu}}'' features the titular species as yet another "next step" in human evolution, the first Wraeththu being either born from, or [[TheVirus converted from]], human [[{{Hermaphrodite}} males]]. |
| 221 | * ''Literature/XeeleeSequence'': Humanity often modifies itself to suit new environments. Particularly notable is ''Literature/{{Flux}}'', in which humans have modified themselves into becoming microscopic lifeforms to live within a neutron star. |
| 222 | [[/folder]] |
| 223 | |
| 224 | [[folder:Live-Action TV]] |
| 225 | %%* ''Series/{{Alphas}}'': The Alphas, since they're largely inspired by Creator/MarvelComics [[ComicBook/XMen mutants]]. |
| 226 | * ''Series/{{Andromeda}}'': |
| 227 | ** The Nietzscheans (''Homo sapiens invictus'') have been modified enough to be considered a subspecies. Along with being taller, faster and smarter, they can breathe chlorine and have bone blades growing from their arms. |
| 228 | ** The Inari, modified to inhabit low-light volcanic worlds. |
| 229 | ** The Castalians (modified to survive underwater). Interesting, on their planet there is plenty of FantasticRacism... diverted at "air-breathers", i.e. normal humans. |
| 230 | * ''Series/BabylonFive'': The Centauri were the first alien race to (publicly) encounter humanity. They attempted to persuade humanity that they were an offshoot of the Centauri Republic and should thus come under their control. Garibaldi mentions that an eager humanity initially believed them until they had a moment to get a good look at an actual Centauri body, something which has made the planet a bit more skeptical about every alien race they have encountered ever since. The Centauri claimed it was a clerical error [[BlatantLies possibly to save face]] but also with obvious amusement at humanity's expense [[ConMan that they had managed to pull it off even for a little while]]. |
| 231 | * The original ''[[Series/BattlestarGalactica1978 Battlestar Galactica]]'' had, among the humans in the "ragtag fleet," a ProudWarriorRace with prominent eyebrow ridges called the Borellian Nomen. The strong implication is that, in keeping with the premise of the show that HumanityCameFromSpace, the Nomen are the answer to the question, "What about all these Neanderthal fossils? What are they?" They were Nomen who must have been part of the original contingent that colonized Earth, that's what. |
| 232 | * ''Series/DoctorWho'': Several, including: |
| 233 | ** New Humans from the year 5 billion, who were originally created as lab rats on New Earth. |
| 234 | ** In "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E13LastOfTheTimeLords The Last of the Time Lords]]", [[spoiler: the Toclafane are the last remnants of humanity, who strike a [[DealWithTheDevil Faustian bargain]] to maintain their life]]. |
| 235 | ** It's also implied that the Futurekind are an offshoot of humanity, a devolved subspecies. |
| 236 | ** This eventually proves to be a major issue for the Cybermen in one of the Eighth Doctor comics -- with the human gene pool steadily changed by interaction with other races and their conversion protocols still keyed to pureblood Human or Mondasian physiology, the number of usable converts drops to the point they find it easier to steal people from the past. |
| 237 | * ''Series/{{Farscape}}'': [[spoiler:Sebaceans]] turn out to be genetically modified humans. |
| 238 | * ''Series/TheOuterLimits1995'': In "[[Recap/TheOuterLimits1995S5E13Summit Summit]]", humanity created a genetically engineered subspecies called Dregocians or "Dregs" to mine trion ore on the inhospitable planet of Dregocia. The Dregocians have yellow skin, yellow eyes to reflect the harsh light of Dregocia's sun and a third lung which allows them to breathe the planet's thin atmosphere. Although humanity attempted to breed leadership abilities out of the Dregocians, they nevertheless retained them. Five generations after their creation, the Dregocians seek their independence from the United Coalition and conduct numerous terrorist attacks to that end. |
| 239 | * ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'': |
| 240 | ** Elrond believes that being a hybrid subspecies of Man and Elf, gives him the advantage of seeing faults Elves do not see in themselves. |
| 241 | * ''Series/{{Prey}}'' focuses on [[ClashOfEvolutionaryLevels a brewing war between]] ''Homo sapiens'' and ''Homo dominus'', a newly evolved human species. One of the ways that the "domini" are different from regular humans is their complete lack of emotion. Their senses and reflexes are also much more animalistic than those of humans, and their intelligence is much greater. They are able to sense the electromagnetic pulses in nearby human brains, giving them low-level PsychicPowers. Females have four ovaries and reach reproductive maturity at the age of ''nine'', while males can interbreed with regular humans [[DominantSpeciesGenes with the resultant offspring being pure-blooded "domini"]], giving them a significant reproductive edge. Before the show's cancellation, it's revealed that both species have factions that are for peaceful coexistence, but there are also those who see no alternative to genocide. |
| 242 | * ''Series/{{Primeval}}'': The Mer Creatures, savage and bestial amphibious predators from Future Earth that look something like a cross between a seal and an ape, are speculated to be descendants of humans. |
| 243 | * ''Series/Sense8'' has the titular sensates, or ''Homo sensorium'', a new species with the ability to sense each others' thoughts and emotions. |
| 244 | * ''Series/{{Sliders}}'': Kromags are an example of a Human Subspecies sharing a common ancestor with modern humanity. |
| 245 | * ''Series/StargateSG1'': The Jaffa, modified to be incubators of Goa'uld larvae. They are significantly stronger and longer-lived than baseline humans, but by design their immune systems cease to function when they reach physical maturity and they must rely on the larvae incubating in their stomach pouches to maintain their health, insuring that they always remain faithful to their Goa'uld masters. Additionally, much of the galaxy is inhabited by ordinary, vanilla humans, who haven't evolved or changed at all since being plucked off Earth by the Goa'uld exty thousand years ago. |
| 246 | * ''Franchise/StarTrek'': |
| 247 | ** Despite the Federation banning genetic engineering on humans, they did allow a group of scientists to design their idea of ''Homo superior''. With a very active immune system, psychic powers, and looking like young adults when they're only children, they're the ideal evolutionary step. |
| 248 | ** For an Alien Subspecies example, look no further than the Romulans, who split off from the Vulcans 2000 years ago and traveled for centuries on sublight to their new home on Romulus. It's also implied that several other encountered "Vulcanoid" races (such as the Mintakans) may be descendants of the exiles who have settled on other worlds. |
| 249 | ** Another alien example is the Aenar, an offshoot of the Andorians. They have gray skin unlike the Andorians' blue skin, and they're blind and telepathic. At least one Aenar, [[Series/StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds Hemmer]], joined Starfleet. |
| 250 | * ''Series/TheTomorrowPeople1973'': The titular race is characterized in-universe as ''Homo superior'', the next step in human evolution. |
| 251 | * ''Series/WaywardPines'': The "Abbies" (short for "Abominations") are future descendants of humanity in the fifth millennium. No one is quite sure how they came to be (except that the process appears to have started in the 20th century and may be related to climate change), but they appear to have reverted to a savage state. They have enhanced strength and reflexes, hunt in packs, and possess intelligence (enough to know how to cut backup power). The only normal humans that remain are those who have survived in TheArk as {{Human Popsicle}}s, preserved by a man who foresaw humanity's extinction (he didn't anticipate Abbies, though), and remain within the titular walled town. As a rule, anyone who goes outside is quickly tracked down and killed by Abbies ([[spoiler:although one man managed to survive for years]]). Additionally, [[spoiler:female Abbies are few and far between. They appear to be far more intelligent than the males and are able to exert control over large numbers of males even across distances, implying PsychicPowers of some kind]]. |
| 252 | [[/folder]] |
| 253 | |
| 254 | [[folder:Myths & Religion]] |
| 255 | * Medieval bestiaries posited the existence of a number of races of men with bizarre features, such as the Pigmies (people small enough to ride goats like horses), giants, troglodytic cave-dwellers, Blemmyes (headless cannibals with their faces instead located on their chests), the Sciapods (one-legged pygmies with enormous feet which they'd use as parasols when resting), the Panotti (who have ears large enough to use like cloaks), the Machlyes (hermaphrodites who are male on one side of their body and female on the other), the Nuli (who have backwards feet with eight toes on each), and the Cynocephali, who had the heads of dogs. These races typically lived in far-away places like India and Ethiopia -- during the Age of Exploration, they often relocated to South America -- where readers (and printers) of the time were extraordinary unlikely to have visited. As a result, there were few able to dispute the factuality of these purported beings. |
| 256 | [[/folder]] |
| 257 | |
| 258 | [[folder:Tabletop Games]] |
| 259 | * ''AnkurKingdomOfTheGods'' is a setting that mixes Sumerian mythology and AncientAstronauts. Taking place 25,000 years in the past, aliens control Earth(admittedly just small number of city-states while most of the planet is untamed wilderness), and created five subspecies of Humans as a workforce to mine for gold. |
| 260 | ** Adamu: essentially modern humans. Considered the most adaptable and currently the most common subspecies. |
| 261 | ** Gurmah: Neanderthals who are mainly used as soldiers/warriors because of their greater toughness. |
| 262 | ** Mahdi: Although slimmer than Adamu, Mahdi have enlarged craninums, granting them greater intellgicence. They are commonly employed as scholars, or other highly technicial professions. |
| 263 | ** Enkidu: Basically Sasquatch/Yeti. The physically strongest of all the subspecies. Similar to Shadowrun in that they are mostly peaceful and can understand, but not speak, human language. |
| 264 | ** Ba-lu: Generally only 3 feet tall and able to see in near total darkness, they were originally created as tunnel scouts. But their superior eyesight make them formidable marksmen, and may also work as craftsmen thanks to their natural dexterity. |
| 265 | * ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' has the Clan Elemental phenotype: biologically human and able to reproduce normally with other humans, but intially mistaken for aliens because they are ''enormous'' PowerArmor SuperSoldier types. They are known for their phenomenal size and build, averaging 7.5 feet in height and massing well over 200 kilograms, all of which is muscle. The largest known Elementals border on inhumanly large, at 8.5 feet and 350 kilograms. This is the product of centuries of Clan genetic engineering to produce the ultimate infantryman, and they seem to have succeeded, as Elementals can physically scale and tear apart tanks, bunkers, and HumongousMecha with nothing but their armor-cutting claws. |
| 266 | * ''TabletopGame/CthulhuTech'': The Nazzadi, fake HumanAliens created by the [[StarfishAliens Mi-go]] as an advance force. |
| 267 | * ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' has been home to many different human subspecies, some of them playable, some of them not, across its various settings and editions. |
| 268 | ** The TabletopGame/{{Mystara}} setting is particularly known for this trope, with isolated human variants like the Cynidiceans and Traldar appearing in several setting-specific adventures. Brute-men, a pulp-inspired version of Neanderthals, also exist as a potential player race in the HollowWorld subsetting. |
| 269 | ** The TabletopGame/{{Greyhawk}} is home to several, including the Lerara (Suloise who were trapped in the Greyhawk version of the Underdark and who have devolved into twisted albino creatures). |
| 270 | ** Skulks, a human subspecies that magically developed the ability of innate invisibility, have made minor appearances in all five editions, and have had player character stats in 2nd and 3rd edition. |
| 271 | ** The most ancient lore for githyanki and githzerai is that they are a human subspecies engineered by the illithids, which turned against them. Ironically, similarly ancient lore for the illithids is that they are also a mutated offshoot of humanity from the most distant future, who have traveled back in time to avoid the collapse of the universe into entropy. |
| 272 | ** Grimlocks are bestial, eyeless humans who have devolved in order to better survive in the Underdark. |
| 273 | ** 3rd edition introduced a wide array of human subraces; in addition to the returning Neanderthals, this edition introduced Azurins (humans with a particular knack for magic), Karsites (humans immune to -- and thus incapable of wielding -- all standard forms of magic), Illumians (humans evolved through the development of a unique arcane language, distinguishable by the arcane sigils floating around their heads), Aventi (bog-standard Atlanteans), Sharakim (cursed humans who look like orcs/small {{oni}}), Sea Kin (humans with aquatic fey ancestry), Elans (humans self-evolved through psionics), Maenads (humans with psychic powers and raging tempers), and Vashar (utterly evil humans descended from a failed, psychotic prototype human and his demonic lover). |
| 274 | ** The TabletopGame/{{Ravenloft}} setting is, in 3rd edition, home to Calibans; an orc-like race of deformed, mutated humans tainted in the womb by spiritual corruption or dark magic. |
| 275 | ** The TabletopGame/{{Eberron}} setting is home to Kalashtar, humans mutated by an ancient pledge that links them to a dream-spirit called a Quori. A sourcebook on the Kalashtar's homeland also introduces the Inspired, a subrace of humans created through breeding programs that mingled human, elven and fiendish blood to produce a species of humans specifically designated to lead an empire (and act as vassals) for the evil counterparts of the Quori who created the Kalashtar. |
| 276 | ** In ''Literature/{{Dragonlance}}'', gnomes, kender and dwarves are all offshoots of humanity, and also related to each other, created by powerful divine magic. Gnomes were originally human servants of Reorx, God of Artifice, Craftsmanship and Science, but angered their patron by misusing his gifts for personal reasons; he cursed them with stunted forms and blasted minds that would prevent them from ever using technology successfully again. Many years later, a great gnomish army would purse a divine artifact called the Graygem of Chaos, but on the cusp of seizing it, the Graygem would inundate them with its raw chaos and transform them all into new races; those dominated by avarice became the first dwarves, and those dominated by curiosity became the first kender. Because of these origins, humans are capable of [[HalfHumanHybrid interbreeding]] with all three races. |
| 277 | ** One of the minor creatures native to the ''TabletopGame/DarkSun'' setting is the Villichi; a mutant offshoot of Athasian humanity. One in 30,000 human [[OneGenderRace girls]] is born as a Villichi, a condition that grants them with unusually pale, borderline-albino skin, a very un-Athasian intolerance for sunlight on their skin, rapid maturation but a longer life (averaging 150 years), and a powerful innate affinity for PsychicPowers even by Athasian standards. Nobody is quite sure why humans randomly give birth to Villichi, but such spontaneous births are the only way that the Villichi race increases; Villichi are sterile. Consequently, whilst the race maintains a hidden fortress in the Ringing Mountains where the bulk of their people dwell, the small minority of Villichi master psionicists (10%) who develop an innate ability to sense the presence of their kind act as "Envoys", leading small bands of wrriors to traverse the wastes of the Tablelands to rescue their sisters and transport them home. Whilst largely peaceful and just wanting to be left alone, Athasians are well-aware that they will come down with swift, brutal vengeance upon anyone who harms a Villichi of any age, and as such even the most superstitious Athasian family is usually wise enough to leave their mutant daughter unharmed until her "big sisters" come to collect her. |
| 278 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Etherscope}}'': In this GrimDark GaslampFantasy setting, human subspecies replace the traditional fantasy races. Most of these are the product of the Eugenics League, a cabal of DieselPunk {{Evilutionary Biologist}}s focused on "positive eugenics" -- using genetic engineering to produce "better" strains of humanity. With baseline humans being dubbed "Beta" in the League's terminology, they have produced Humanity Alpha (selectively bred for superior grace, beauty and minds), as well as the "Transgenic Strains"; human subspecies genetically spliced with animal DNA to serve as workers, after a Communist revolution in Great Britain was put down in a massacre that bordered on genocide of the working classes. Three such Transgenic Strains exist; the Gamma (the first series, spliced with mouse genes and extremely rebellious), the Epsilon (spliced with horse genes, extremely docile and obedient workers) and the delta (spliced with dog genes; a midway point between the servility of the Epsilon and the independence of the Gamma). The Earth of ''Etherscope'' is also home to the Fey, an ancient human subspecies distinguished by its natural affinity for manipulating occult energy, which rose up to found the lost antediluvian civilization of Lemuria. |
| 279 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'': |
| 280 | ** Several sub-species of humans with specialized adaptations were created during the First Age. Some, like the winged Air People, were essentially art projects created by the more powerful and bored of the Solar Exalted, while other races were created to be slaves or soldiers of various types. |
| 281 | ** The basic view of ''Exalted'' is that pretty much anything descended from a human is a human; the main indicator of humanity in the setting is the presence of a two-part soul and the ability to exalt. As such, even if accumulated mutations and crossbreeding have left someone a bizarre cephalopod creature or they were the product of breeding with a [[EldritchAbomination Primordial]], they're still as human as anyone else if the meet the basic metaphysical requirements. |
| 282 | * Creator/GamesWorkshop games: |
| 283 | ** ''TabletopGame/{{Necromunda}}'': |
| 284 | *** While relatively uncommon in the hives of Necromunda abhumans, such as Ogryns and Beastmen, are still present and often work as bodyguards and bounty hunters. Due to the discrimination they suffer in regular Imperial society, many abhumans gravitate to the underhive where their superior physical abilities often make them popular hired guns. |
| 285 | *** The Scalies were a race of large, [[LizardFolk reptilian]] abhumans that accompanied the 1st and 2nd Edition Scavvy gangs. Of limited intelligence, Scalies were nonetheless popular with their comrades for their massive strength. |
| 286 | *** The 3rd Edition background for [[TestosteronePoisoning House Goliath]] mentions that, due to years stimm-abuse and selective breeding, many members of rival Houses consider the massive Goliaths to be a strain of abhuman. |
| 287 | ** ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'': |
| 288 | *** Space Marines start out as regular humans, but they are given so many modifications (artificially-grown organs with their own legion-specific genetic makeup) they become a separate species. As much as "species" applies to a group that can't reproduce, anyway. |
| 289 | *** There are a number of human subspecies called Abhumans who went down different evolutionary paths due to their environments. The most widely known are the [[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame Squats]] (descended from colonists of hostile planets who mostly lived underground), [[{{Hobbits}} Ratlings]] (a result of people living for millennia on worlds with soporific climates and rich harvests, plus lots of inbreeding), [[OurOgresAreHungrier Ogryns]] (the descendants of inmates of high-gravity prison planets) and {{Beastm|an}}en, as well as a number of more obscure and rare subspecies that show up here and there in the lore. With the exception of the Ratlings and Ogryns, most species of abhuman have lacked any presence outside of the game's background material since 1st Edition, as the Imperium of Man considers subspecies and mutants to be heretical due to deviating from the "pure form of Man", so they generally slaughter such people to the last man when they find them (they make grudging exceptions for Ogryns, Ratlings, and a handful of others due to how useful those groups are... and because hypocrisy is rampant in the Imperium from top to bottom anyway). |
| 290 | *** Most mutants in this setting are created through exposure to Warp energies. Psykers are one such mutant strain. These traits are generally not consanguineous but there is an exception; the Navigators of the Navis Nobilite. They form Houses where most Navigators are related by blood and, while obviously mutants due to their Warp powers and third eye, they are the only thing allowing for navigation in the Warp for faster than light travel. This makes them far too valuable to be purged as the Imperium usually does to all mutants. |
| 291 | *** In 9th Edition, the Squats fully returned after having been phased out over 2nd Edition and only receiving the occasional nod after, but revamped into the Kin of the Leagues of Votann. Now no longer simply having gone down a different path due to environmental pressures, the Kin are genetically altered clones that share a number of traits (such as being short and stocky) but otherwise can vary widely, and having emerged from the Dark Age of Technology relatively intact they have been able to maintain a technological society separate from the Imperium. A result of this is that the Imperium doesn't always realise that Kin they encounter belong to the ''same'' human subspecies, and so can end up classifying them in different categories from Abhuman (such as the "Squats" who've integrated into the Imperium as mercenaries and miners) to Xenos. |
| 292 | * ''TabletopGame/GammaWorld'': One early edition made so-called Pure Strain Humans too inherently tough to be plausible as BadassNormal, so a ''Dragon'' article suggested that they were actually a HumanSubspecies that had benefited from pre-war genetic engineering. Those humans who weren't DesignerBabies became the setting's mutants instead, some strains of which bred true enough to also constitute HumanSubspecies. A later edition made "stock humans" and "pure-strain humans" into different subspecies, with the former being mutated and mixed just a bit, while the latter generally exist because they're either living in vaults of some kind or their people have intentionally ''kept'' the blood pure. |
| 293 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'': |
| 294 | ** The Azlanti AdvancedAncientHumans gain a +2 bonus to all of their [[TheSixStats ability scores]], whereas standard humans only get the bonus to one. This is likely thanks to the aboleths, who genetically manipulated them and engineered the rise of their civilization. |
| 295 | ** The Azlanti had several descendants who diverged even further from their original forms, for a number of reasons: |
| 296 | *** The gillmen were abducted and augmented by the aboleths to survive the destruction of their civilization. While they look almost entirely human, they're amphibious, have gills on their necks and can't survive being out of water for long. |
| 297 | *** The munavri survived the shattering of Azlant itself and found themselves trapped in the Sightless Sea, a vast ocean deep BeneathTheEarth. They settled a number of floating jade citadels to defend themselves from the many horrific denizens of their new home and eventually evolved into a distinct species. They largely resemble albino humans, and are telepathic. |
| 298 | *** Other Azlanti sheltered into the shallower layers of Golarion's cavern systems. Some degenerated into the morlocks, barbaric brutes who live in primitive bands and are constantly warring with each other and everyone else; some came under the thrall of creatures from the Shadow Plane and became the mysterious Dark Folk, further split into several specialized castes of varying degrees of physical divergence from humanity; and others interbred with the underworld's many other species and became the mongrelmen, monstrous {{Beast M|an}}en with traits of almost every creature under the sun but also some of the Darklands' few peaceful and civilized natives. |
| 299 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}'': |
| 300 | ** The Coalition States have the Janissary project to create the next step of human evolution. |
| 301 | ** Psi-X Aliens are actually humans mutated by Desmond Bradford. |
| 302 | ** True Atlanteans are human, but have innate supernatural powers. |
| 303 | ** [[OurOgresAreHungrier Ogres]] are the ancestors of humans from the world of ''TabletopGame/PalladiumFantasy'', and are interfertile with humans -- crossbreeds are always ogres. |
| 304 | ** Amazons are related to humans but have innate supernatural powers and are all female -- they mate with human and ogre males to reproduce; the children are always amazons. |
| 305 | ** Most psychics are also implied to be human subspecies, especially Psi-Stalkers and Mind Bleeders who actually have somewhat distinct non-human physical traits. |
| 306 | ** In the "Skraypers" setting, two subspecies have naturally evolved/developed on the planet Seeron alongside ''Homo sapiens sapiens''; the Seermans (''Homo sapiens olecrus''), who have thick skin, bony protrusions on their elbows, brows, and chin, and latent psychic powers; and the Talus (''Homo sapiens talus"), who have short noses, high cheekbones, and more importantly, prehensile tails. Unlike nearly every other species in the game (except amazons and ogres), they are genetically human enough to interbreed with each other and baseline humans. |
| 307 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'': Metahumans (elves, dwarves, orks, and trolls) are classified as subspecies of humanity, which is perfectly logical since the races can all interbreed and the metahuman strains in fact came into existence when very startled human parents started having clearly inhuman babies. There are also the metavariants, which are further subspecies of the main metahuman subspecies -- for instance, gnomes are a metavariant of dwarf, dryads are a metavariant of elf, giants and minotaurs are variants of trolls and satyrs a strain of orks. Baseline humanity has one metavariant of its own, the nartaki, who are distinguished by having red, blue or yellow skin and four arms. |
| 308 | * ''TabletopGame/SkyrealmsOfJorune'' has humanity gain two subspecies as a result of living for generations on the mystical planet Jorune. They are the Muadra, a small and physically weak people but have the ability to manipulate [[PureEnergy the Ishos]]. Then there are the Boccord which are a people that are larger and stronger than regular humans. But as human offshoots, neither can use energy weapons unless they've been tampered. These powerful technological items were keyed for pure-strain humans. |
| 309 | * ''ComicBook/{{Slaine}}'': In the Mongoose [[TheRolePlayingGame rpg edition]], the Warped Ones (including Slaine himself) are a human subspecies descended from a time when primordial beastmen mated with humans from the Land of the Young and can revert back to that inhuman form when Earth power runs through them - this is the Warp Spasm. This bloodline is growing increasingly thin, so the only true Warped Ones are from the Four Tribes of the Earth Goddess though characters with the "Blood of Heroes" feat have enough traces of Warped Ones ancestry that they can sometimes do the Warp Spasm. |
| 310 | * ''TabletopGame/StarFleetBattles'': It's been explicitly established that several planets were 'seeded' with early humans (and other planets with other species). These include: |
| 311 | ** The Alpha Centauri: a matriarchical culture that is as close to 'pure' human as possible while still having an altered game mechanic. |
| 312 | ** The Rigellians: life on a UV-heavy world resulted in dark blue skin, but still can have children with the others. |
| 313 | ** The Deians: pale blue people with blonde hair and the [[PlanetOfHats hat]] of covermodels. |
| 314 | ** And maybe the Cygnans, who are pretty close to human, and are known to not be native to their own world. |
| 315 | ** And dozens of minor worlds, such as several seen in [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries TOS]]. |
| 316 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}'': Due to the [[{{Precursors}} Ancients]] [[TransplantedHumans seeding humans]] across the galaxy thousands of years ago there are many subspecies of "Humaniti" such as golden-skinned elfin Darrians and high-gravity adapted Bye-Ren. Though of the three major human races only the psionic Zhodani show any significant physiological differences, the Solomani (earth humans) and Vilani have interbred to such an extent as to be nearly indistinguishable (though Vilani originally were slightly taller and [[LongLived longer-lived]]). |
| 317 | * ''TabletopGame/VictorianaRPG'': Early editions simply used the typical fantasy terminology of "race" for the different humanoid species. In its 3rd edition, however, the term is replaced with "subspecies", since, A: different subspecies are still prone to the visual ethnicity indicators that a real-world human uses as the basis for "race", and B: Charles Darwin argued that the ability for all these races to interbreed with each other (and humanity) marked them as distinct branches of the ''Homo sapiens'' species. They even gained distinct Latin species names in this edition (although the non-core species from 2nd edition were out of luck); thus the existence of ''Homo Sapiens Bestius'' (BeastFolk), ''Montis'' ([[OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame Dwarfs]]), ''Aetheris'' ([[OurElvesAreDifferent Eldren]]), ''Noctis'' ([[OurGnomesAreWeirder Gnomes]]), ''Furpes'' ([[{{Hobbits}} Huldufolk]]), ''Magnus'' ([[OurOgresAreHungrier Ogres]]) and ''Agrestis'' ([[OurOrcsAreDifferent Orcs]]). Humans in this world are called ''Homo Sapiens Communis'' rather than ''Homo Sapiens Sapiens'', as a result. |
| 318 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Mindjammer}}'': Since its whole premise is being ''transhuman'' space opera, these fill the role of what normally be HumanoidAliens in most other SpaceOpera settings. During the First Age of Space, Earth sent numerous slower-than-light ships across the galaxy. Over the next 10 thousand years, the colonists often had to genetically modify themselves to the new environments, resulting in a wide variety of sub-species that are broadly human despite sometimes looking radically different. |
| 319 | [[/folder]] |
| 320 | |
| 321 | [[folder:Video Games]] |
| 322 | * ''VideoGame/AnarchyOnline'' has four playable subspecies, referred to in the game as "breeds": the Solitus, a JackOfAllStats breed descended from modern humans, the Atrox, a genderless breed specializing in high strength, the Opifex, a breed adapted for stealth and high agility, and Nanomage, a breed developed for high intelligence. There were also some failed specimens that escaped labs and entered the wilds. |
| 323 | * [[AllThereInTheManual The manual]] of ''VideoGame/ArcanumOfSteamworksAndMagickObscura'' speculates that elves, orcs and ogres are all subspecies of humans who were mutated into new races by exposure to large amounts of magic. |
| 324 | * ''VideoGame/{{Armada}}'': 10,000 years of space travel divided mankind into six sub-species. |
| 325 | * ''VideoGame/ChroniclesOfElyria'': The equivalent of races are the Tribes, twelve human subspecies that diverged due to evolutionary pressure from their home biomes, with the exception of the [[HumansByAnyOtherName Neran]]. |
| 326 | * ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'': The four races of Men in Tamriel are all different enough to have unique racial abilities and innate proficiency in certain skills. Three (the [[HornyVikings Nords]], [[HumansAreDiplomats Imperials]], and [[MageSpecies Bretons]]) all share a common ancestor in the [[{{Precursors}} Nedes]], one of the indigenous human tribes (or a collective name for those tribes) of Tamriel. Each of them diverged from each other through [[TrueBreedingHybrid hybridization]]: the Nords descend from the Atmorans, who were Nedes with strong [[OurGiantsAreBigger giant]] admixture; Bretons arose from the Direnni Altmer taking Nedic concubines; and the Imperials arose from all three -- Nedes, Nords, and Bretons -- mixing in the cosmopolitan heartland of Cyrodiil. Additionally, the races of Men and [[OurElvesAreDifferent Mer (Elves)]] also share a common ancestor even further back in history known as the Ehlnofey. Each race of Men and Mer can interbreed and produce viable offspring, which [[UnreliableNarrator (supposedly)]] [[UnevenHybrid almost entirely takes after the mother]], averting AllGenesAreCodominant. |
| 327 | * ''VideoGame/EscapeVelocity'': The Vell-os in ''EV Nova'' are descendants of an Indian[[note]]never stated if American or Asian[[/note]] tribe led by a prince named Vell-os. They have various psychic powers, which they used to leave Earth for deep space circa 980 AD. They also have an organ that produces nanites which complement their powers. |
| 328 | * ''VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyVBeyondTheMyth'' explicitly refers to all party members, be they [[HumansAreAverage Earthlain]], [[OurElvesAreDifferent Celestrian]], [[LittleBitBeastly Therian]], or [[{{Hobbits}} Brouni]], as humans. |
| 329 | * ''VideoGame/EverQuest'' has 4 human races: The baseline human, the large barbarians, the scholarly erudites and the dragon touched drakkin. |
| 330 | * ''Franchise/{{Fallout}}'': |
| 331 | ** Super mutants, "[[UltimateLifeForm perfect]]" humans created by the introduction of Forced Evolutionary Virus. They're nearly ten feet tall, possess SuperStrength and SuperToughness, are LongLived and immune to radiation and most diseases. However, the FEV sees the half-chromosomes of reproductive cells as damaged and "repairs" them, meaning the Super Mutants are sterile. Also, radiation damage before infection makes them pathetically stupid. |
| 332 | ** Ghouls, zombie-like former humans with radical biological changes. Ghouls have no skin and little soft tissue, but their exposed flesh has hardened. They are less susceptible to drugs, healed by radiation, and functionally immortal. While not explicitly addressed, it is implied that they are too physically damaged (remember, no soft tissue) to reproduce. |
| 333 | ** Since virtually all humans whose ancestors were affected by radiation have some degree of mutation, [[BigBad the Enclave]] uses that as a justification to say that they (remnants of the United States government who were hiding out in an oil rig when the bombs fell) are a different species from the "mutants" of the wasteland. They view the emergence of this new species as a threat, and make plans to deal with that. |
| 334 | * ''VideoGame/ImperiumGalactica 2'' reveals during the [[HumansByAnyOtherName Solarian]] campaign that the various races you meet and fight with for dominance have all evolved from [[LostColony lost Solarian colonies]], even those who look nothing like humans. The Kra'Hen are decidedly alien, as they are stated to have come from another galaxy. Strangely, the first game had many actual aliens. The difference can be explained as either a completely different universe or that the aliens were exterminated by TheEmpire and their worlds settled by modified humans. |
| 335 | * The barbarians in ''VideoGame/KingsRaid'' are considered to be their own species, separate from humans. The males are characterized by their hulking builds, imposing height, and their SuperStrength. While females (such as Yanne) possess a slender build, they are considerably taller and have more muscle density compared to an average human female. |
| 336 | * ''VideoGame/{{Killzone}}'': The Helghast, who adapted to the harsh environment of a DeathWorld they were exiled to. |
| 337 | * ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'': The Hylians are a human subrace distinguished by their PointyEars, allegedly allowing them to hear the gods. It's rumored that they're descended from the gods themselves, [[spoiler:which is proved to be partially true in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword Skyward Sword]]'' -- they're the Lesser Goddess Hylia's chosen people, and the royal family is directly descended from Hylia's human reincarnation]]. There's also the Gerudo (first introduced in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime Ocarina of Time]]''), a [[OneGenderRace mostly female]] warrior race of dark-skinned redheads who rely on marrying men of other races to reproduce, the males of which are born once a century. The Sheikah also gradually emerged as one: originally characterized as a "tribe" rather than a fully separate race, ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild Breath of the Wild]]'' establishes that they are fairly distinct from Hylians and other humanlike races, as evidenced by traits such as MysticalWhiteHair, being LongLived, and having a natural affinity for {{Magitek}}. |
| 338 | * ''Franchise/MassEffect'': In an in-universe Alliance News Network article, a lost colony of human colonists are discovered in Alpha Centauri, having set off in 2070, nearly a century ''before'' mass effect technology was in use and alien life was discovered. Naturally they're a bit freaked out by meeting modern humans again and a later article reveals that one of them was captured by Cerberus for experimentation, due to some of their naturally occurring genes being now virtually extinct in regular humans. |
| 339 | * ''VideoGame/OxygenNotIncluded'': The Duplicants you order around in the game appear to be one of these, modified for ease of fabrication, duplication and colonization. They're [[MadeOfIron quite hardy physically and biochemically]], quite tireless and generally less susceptible than usual to the pitfalls that come from hostile environments. However, they have a variety of superficial faults (such as the lack of noses) and some deep-set mental issues that come from both fabrication and being "born" mature, which makes them prone to [[TooDumbToLive profoundly stupid behavior]] even among the most learned sorts. |
| 340 | * [[AbsentAliens There are no aliens]] in the ''VideoGame/{{Rimworld}}'' universe; instead, ''[[DownloadableContent Biotech]]'' adds various genetically engineered human sub-species called xenotypes, ranging from furred nudists with a knack for taming animals, to fire-breathers specialized for desert life, to {{Super Soldier}}s, to [[OurVampiresAreDifferent sanguophages]]. |
| 341 | * In ''VisualNovel/RisingAngels'', there are various other species alongside humans around which were created from them by way of genetic engineering. These include a SpaceElves, a [[WolfMan wolf-like species]] (with [[AsianFoxSpirit Kitsune]] as a sub-species), [[OurAngelsAreDifferent an angel-like species]], a [[OurDemonsAreDifferent demon-like species]], and others. Actual aliens [[AbsentAliens don't appear to be around]]. There's [[FantasticRacism bigotry around]], not all of it in one direction. |
| 342 | * ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'': Two types arise once the required technology and facilities are developed: |
| 343 | ** Homo Superior: equal parts technology and biology, it uses the best of both worlds. |
| 344 | ** Genejacks: genetically engineered to be the perfect worker, with strong body and little brain. It probably won't surprise you to know that [[TheSociopath Chairman Yang]] of the [[DirtyCommies Human Hive]] was behind their creation. |
| 345 | * ''VideoGame/StarOcean'': Hinted at; at least ''some'' of the HumanAliens are actually descendants of human AncientAstronauts from the lost continent of Mu. |
| 346 | * ''VideoGame/SinsOfASolarEmpire'' has the Advent, post-humans that are very, VERY angry about their expulsion by the rest of the humans. |
| 347 | * ''VideoGame/StarControl'' has the Androsynth, who are cloned from humans and TurnedAgainstTheirMasters, as they were essentially slaves. |
| 348 | * ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'': A one-off character guide reveals that Mario (and by extension Luigi) is actually "Homo nintendonus", rather than ''Homo sapiens''. This is never elaborated on or explained, though it may be responsible for some of their superhuman feats. |
| 349 | * ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsZ'': The backstory of ''Super Robot Wars Z 3: Jigoku-Hen'' reveals that [[spoiler:the [[Anime/ShinMazinger Mycenae]] and [[Anime/{{Gigantor}} Uchuu Maou]] are apparently humans that overcame the 12000 year loop and became higher beings through evolution. The role of higher beings is to guide their younger brothers (ie mankind) but Hades and his pals decided they wanted to rule the universe instead.]] |
| 350 | * In ''VideoGame/TheTaleOfALLTYNEX'' series, humans and Raiwat were once one species, but when a series of superweapons, the [=ZODIACs=], went [[GoneHorriblyWrong horribly wrong]], one faction decided to [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere bail out]] and settle on a faraway planet, Earth. Meanwhile, the folks who stayed on their home planet were forced to adapt to the harsh environments of their own planet caused by the ZODIAC units, evolve overtime into the anthromorphic Raiwat people they've become by the time they invade the Earth in ''VideoGame/RefleX''. |
| 351 | * ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChronicles'': The Valkyrur appear to have been a subrace of humans who developed an extremely advanced society in the ancient past and were worshiped as gods by the regular humans. They appear to have possessed albino like physical features, had superhuman physical abilities activated by rage, were the only ones who could operate their own technology, and could make themselves explode with the force of an atom bomb. |
| 352 | * ''VideoGame/VegaStrike'' has several in game and flavor materials, each has a faction consisting primarily of them. |
| 353 | ** ''Homo sapiens sapiens'' (duh) -- Purists. |
| 354 | ** ''Homo sapiens cyberis'', {{cyborg}}s -- Mechanists. Not quite true to the trope, but in-universe it would be considered proper scientific nomenclature. |
| 355 | ** ''Homo sapiens pluralis'', [[MentalFusion networked brain-to-brain]] even before birth -- Andolian. |
| 356 | ** ''Homo sapiens superioris'', humans visibly modified a lot, in a [[MadArtist weirdly artistic]] way -- Shapers. |
| 357 | ** ''Homo sapiens suprahomo'', genetically polished and cherry-picked, but not quite supermen -- Lightbearers, extinct as a consequence of Andolian and Shapers finding out about Spaceborn. |
| 358 | ** ''Homo sapiens cosmonatalis'', custom-made by Lightbearers as space station slaves -- Spaceborn. |
| 359 | * ''VideoGame/AVeryLongRopeToTheTopOfTheSky'': Lydians (who have wings) and Somnians (who don't). They are definitely biologically compatible, though, as Ivy's and Mint's existences demonstrate. |
| 360 | * ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}'': The game takes place in a future so distant that the modern-day era is practically forgotten, and biological engineering in the distant past gave rise to multiple varieties of humans. |
| 361 | ** The [[CloneArmy Grineer]] are a race of clones created to be slaves for the [[AbusivePrecursors Orokin]] thousands of years prior. Universally sterile, the Grineer rely on [[LostTechnology ancient cloning techniques]] to replenish their numbers, which only further damages their genome as genetic errors are propagated generation after generation; this has forced them to make heavy use of [[HollywoodCyborg cybernetic augmentations]] to repair their failing bodies, to the point where many of them look entirely inhuman, being little more than decaying organic heads mounted in mechanical harnesses. They see themselves as somewhat "apart" from the more conventional human beings inhabiting the planets of the solar system, their differences driving both an inferiority complex and a deep racial hatred of non-Grineer. |
| 362 | ** The [[SuperSoldier Dax]] were an Orokin-created [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy race of bodyguards and warriors]], endowed with great power and strength, but [[RestrainingBolt utterly incapable of raising steel against their masters]]. By the story's present day, they seem to have all been wiped out (except for [[LastOfHisKind Teshin]]), [[spoiler:having sided with the Orokin when the Tenno rebelled and killed nearly all of them. Most died in the insurrection, with the survivors presumably slowly dying off in the years after.]] |
| 363 | ** The Orokin themselves were very likely a distinct subspecies. Descriptions of them are vague, emphasizing mostly their immortality and unearthly, unsettling beauty, hinting that they were perhaps TheBeautifulElite taken to its {{Transhuman}} extreme. However, [[spoiler:if Ballas' appearance is anything to go by,]] their standards of "beauty" were very different from ours; [[spoiler: he looks entirely disturbing with his pupil-less all-white eyes, dark-blue skin and a monstrously elongated right arm]]. The game's primary [[WordOfGod concept artist]] said he was going for a "classical" Greco-Roman elegance in their appearance, as if the Orokin had ''designed'' themselves after the traditional image of gods. |
| 364 | ** [[PlayerCharacter The Tenno]] themselves [[spoiler:''used'' to be a large group of human children, until an FTL accident led to them all being exposed to [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace the Void]] and mutated into psionic warriors. Its not entirely clear how human they still are. The Warframes they psychically pilot, meanwhile, are people infected by an Orokin-engineered variant of [[TheCorruption the Infestation]], turning them into semi-robotic killing machines. ''They'' are definitely not human anymore.]] |
| 365 | ** Even the "regular" humans encountered (which seems to include the Corpus) show great distinction from modern humans, like near-universal lack of hair in males, [[RequiredSecondaryPowers enhanced agility]] exhibited by the hostages you rescue (they can keep up with the Warframes), and other general oddities. |
| 366 | * ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles'': |
| 367 | ** ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles2'': There are several varieties of "human" living in the world of Alrest. Lefterians, Ardainians, and Tantalese all appear to be "normal" humans, but the Gormotti have cat features like fur and claws, the Urayans have pale greenish skin with occasional scales and sometimes fin-like ears, and the Indoline tend to have bright blue skin, are tall and lanky, and have extended lifespans. |
| 368 | ** ''VideoGame/XenobladeChronicles3'': Most of the humanoid species from the previous ''Xenoblade'' games appear, but interbreeding and evolution has made many of them significantly more like humans than they were in their previous appearance. It's most notable with the Machina and the Blades, who have lost their respective height and beastliness compared to other races and now share their respective metabolism and mortality. |
| 369 | [[/folder]] |
| 370 | |
| 371 | [[folder:Webcomics]] |
| 372 | * ''Webcomic/AlienDice'': [[spoiler:The Rishan]] are humans abducted by aliens who have had superficial genetic modifications made to them. Sometimes, true humans will be born to [[spoiler: Rishan]] parents. |
| 373 | * In ''{{Webcomic/Aurora|2019}}'', some human populations have been influenced by the [[ElementalPowers elements]] over the generations, with their physiology adapting to the elemental energy of whichever habitat they're living in. Some, like those influenced by fire or lightning, are rather similar to regular humans with a few unique physical traits and abilities that aren't immediately obvious. Other subspecies barely look human at all; stone-influenced populations have traits ranging from jewel-toned hair to metal skin, and the water-influenced Sekrai possess fins and live exclusively in the ocean. |
| 374 | * ''Webcomic/GiftsOfWanderingIce'': The Mute tribe is a human subspecies of Neanderthal origin. |
| 375 | * ''Webcomic/QuantumVibe'': The future features innumerable different types of humans stemming from advances in cybernetics and genetics. Nicole specifically reads a piece about the Belt-Apes, large stocky humans genetically altered for optimum labor efficiency in the Asteroid Belt. |
| 376 | * ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'': The Purps are a lab-grown, photosynthetic variant with, as the name might suggest, purple skin. |
| 377 | ** Parodied with the Gavs. All the Gavs are portal-clones of the creator of ''Webcomic/{{Nukees}}'', but considering that there are 950 million of them, they effectively outnumber nearly all other human sub-genera and many entire species.... |
| 378 | * In the distant-future setting of ''Webcomic/{{Serix}}'', humans have been genetically modifying themselves to adapt to new environments for so many generations that baseline Homo Sapiens are considered extinct. While many members of "neo humanity" still look like the humans of today, more out-there subspecies exist, such as [[https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/serix/part-2-6/viewer?title_no=130410&episode_no=27 Homo Ulyphos.]] |
| 379 | [[/folder]] |
| 380 | |
| 381 | [[folder:Web Original]] |
| 382 | * ''WebVideo/{{Astrobiologica}}'': An offshoot of the humans living on Xea emerges with stockier bodies, thick fur, extra lungs, and large eyes adapted to survive the orbital winter when the planet is far from both stars. They look an awful lot like blue koalas. |
| 383 | * ''Website/OrionsArm'': Something like 80% of life (at least within the Terragen Sphere) is descended from humanity, but intentional modifications have caused so much divergence that two human descended terragens can be less alike than a human and a tree. |
| 384 | * ''Website/SCPFoundation'': |
| 385 | ** [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-140 SCP-140]] describes the Daevites, an ancient human civilisation in Siberia, northern Iran and Mongolia. They were [[AlwaysChaoticEvil a wicked people]] who practiced slavery, cannibalism and human sacrifice, and their government centered on the "daeva", a [[ReligionOfEvil theocratic]] aristocracy who possessed increased longevity and BloodMagic, and whom the Foundation's researchers eventually determined to diverge from modern humans that they constitute a separate subspecies in and of themselves. The actual SCP object is [[TomeOfEldritchLore a book detailing their history]], and the book writes itself on contact with suitable fluid that can be used as ink ([[CouldntFindAPen including human blood]]). [[RealityWritingBook As more is written, the Daevites retroactively survive longer in history]]; when the book was first discovered it said the Daevites were wiped out by Qin Kai, but the book now says they were wiped out by Genghis Khan, ''1400 years later''. Here's the real horror: there's more than one copy of the book out there and the one the Foundation has is continually being updated. The Foundation fears that should the Daevites' civilization survive past a certain point in history, it will have catastrophic consequences for the world. [[note]]However, an [[DependingOnTheWriter alternate interpretation,]] [[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6140 SCP-6140]] eventually reveals that [[spoiler:[[SubvertedTrope the Daevite civilization is not only populated by actual humans]], but is also actually a peaceful, civilised democratic socialist republic (it's even recognized by the U.N.). All the stories about their cruelty, stagnation and blood magic were all made-up by a deeply disturbed British historian who took a single historical event and blended it with Daevite mythology and his own prejudices. As the problems of cultural misappropriation, racism, Orientalism, under-representation/deliberate exclusion and silencing of minority voices, and history revisionism is still very much TruthInTelevision, it's quite a cutting and sobering RealitySubtext.]][[/note]] |
| 386 | ** [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-752 SCP-752]] is a collection of genetically engineered humans referred to as Eudaimoniacs. While physically identical to humans, their social structure is [[HiveCasteSystem more like that of bees or ants than any mammal]]. Originally created to be a perfect utopia of altruistic people, their advancement came at the cost of their humanity, with lesser members working themselves to death. Their creators surrounded the cavern they call home with a shield that blocks all forms of radiation in the hope that it would ensure they never learn of the outside world. The Foundation has worked to ensure the shield is never breached, otherwise the 10,000 Eudaimoniacs inside would begin competing with humanity, leading to [[HumansAreNotTheDominantSpecies an SK-class dominance shift]]. |
| 387 | ** [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-3288 SCP-3288]], "TheAristocrats", describes a strain of humanity originally descended from the House of Hapsburg, survived to the present day by [[TheMorlocks living in underground sects]]. They originated from the Hapsburgs attempting to use sorcery to counteract the effects of [[VillainousIncest extreme inbreeding]] so that they could [[RoyalInbreeding keep their bloodline pure]], which was only partially successful. Though nominally human, they are subject to a number of horrifying mutations including [[MoreTeethThanTheOsmondFamily supernumerary teeth]], abnormally long arms and fingers, ungodly physical strength despite appearing severely emaciated, and a compulsion towards cannibalism. [[DominantSpeciesGenes Their "blood" is dominant over other humans]] -- in an instance where SCP-3288 impregnates an ordinary woman, the offspring will be another instance of SCP-3288. A captured instance proudly claims that they will eat and rape all of humanity until only they are left. This is probably what got them reclassified as Keter. |
| 388 | ** A small number of SCP documents have mentioned something called Homo ignotus ("unknown humans"), an extinct species closely related to humans that the Foundation wants to make sure ''stays'' extinct, but so far, they have not been described so it isn't known why they are so dangerous. Supposedly, creating even a single specimen of them would cause a disaster. |
| 389 | * ''WebOriginal/{{Vilous}}'': The three main races of the setting, Sergals (furry {{Shark M|an}}en), Agudners (basically {{fauns|AndSatyrs}}), and Nevreans (BirdPeople) are all considered separate species and cannot interbreed, but they actually are all descended from a common ancestor race of humans (or HumanAliens) and they still refer to themselves as humans even though none of them resemble humans anymore. |
| 390 | [[/folder]] |
| 391 | |
| 392 | [[folder:Western Animation]] |
| 393 | * ''WesternAnimation/Ben10'': The Osmosians are [[spoiler:[[TheReveal revealed]] to be a [[HumanAllAlong human subspecies]]]]. |
| 394 | * ''WesternAnimation/Primal2019'': There are several human or humanoid primate species in this world. The main one is Spear, a neanderthal-like human. There is also a group of witches which appear to be a distinct species, much shorter, all appearing aged with black eyes. Heading towards the more ape-like end of the spectrum, we have a species of skinny, white-haired humanoids with ape-like proportions, a society of highly intelligent ape-men and seeming human-ape hybrids who wield tools. |
| 395 | * ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': In the episode "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS12E16ByeByeNerdie Bye, Bye, Nerdie]]", Lisa's attempts at figuring out why the new girl at school [[BullyBrutality relentlessly hunts her down and beats her to a pulp on a constant basis]] leads her to discover that bullies and nerds are respectively a predator and prey sub-species [[SpaceWhaleAesop and all it takes to prevent bullies from attacking you is to mask your prey pheromones]]. |
| 396 | * ''WesternAnimation/StarVsTheForcesOfEvil'': Star Butterfly, and the other "[[AmbiguouslyHuman human]]" inhabitants of Mewni are a human subspecies known as "[[HumanAliens Mewmans]]". |
| 397 | * ''WesternAnimation/YoungJustice2010'': There are three human subspecies in the form of: Metahumans (Homo Meta), humans that have the power to use magic (Homo Magi), and Atlanteans (Homo Mermanus). |
| 398 | [[/folder]] |
| 399 | |
| 400 | [[folder:Real Life]] |
| 401 | * The human ancestors ''Homo erectus'' actually ''did'' have several subspecies, and provide a strong counter-argument to racial theory by giving an example of what subspecies in a human species would actually ''look'' like. The different subspecies are so obviously different that for a very long time their remains were believed to belong to almost a dozen different hominid species; this was only resolved with genetic testing. Meanwhile, anthropologists can't even tell the "races" of modern humans apart from skeletons. |
| 402 | * It was long debated whether Neanderthals were capable of interbreeding with ''Homo sapiens sapiens'' or not. The sequencing of the [[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/710.full Neanderthal Genome in May 2010]] effectively settled this debate. Yes, they could, and there was a little interbreeding; however, the populations generally remained separate: the amount of Neanderthal DNA disseminated to humans on the Eurasian continent is estimated to be as little as 1 to 4%. Modern Africans, on the other hand, have no Neanderthal DNA, as ''Homo sapiens'' who remained in Africa never encountered any Neanderthals. |
| 403 | * ''Homo sapiens idaltu'' or "Elder human" was an actual human subspecies that lived in Eastern Africa between 160 and 150 thousand BC. |
| 404 | * Possibly ''Homo floresiensis'' (sometimes called "Hobbit Man"). The jury is still out on whether they were a separate species, or if the specimens discovered were merely microcephalic humans. If ''floresiensis'' is legitimate, it's still to be seen whether it's a subspecies of ''Homo sapiens'' or a completely different species from another branch of the family. Neanderthals (and Denisovan humans, to a degree, at least they left DNA) on the other hand have left more remains to go on. They were pretty closely related to us and there is (some) evidence for small amounts of interbreeding. |
| 405 | * Possibly the Denisova hominin (a.k.a. Homo denisova, H. altaiensis, or H. sapiens denisova), a potential extinct species or subspecies of archaic human who may have mated with modern humans as recently as [[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/our-mysterious-cousins-denisovans-may-have-mated-modern-humans-recently-15000-years-ago 15,000 years ago]]. |
| 406 | * The pseudoscience of racialism (sometimes also called scientific racism, race realism, or human biodiversity) is founded on the idea that the various ethnicities of the world are genetically distinct human subspecies (which isn't actually true; modern humans are a pretty genetically uniform creature and scientists can't even tell an African skeleton apart from a European or Asian skeleton at all). While racism - the belief that one or more of these groups are "superior" or "inferior" to one or more others in some vague, undefined way - is a separate idea, the two groups do overlap much more frequently than either would have you believe. |
| 407 | * While the concept of race and subspecies in modern humans is soundly rejected by scientists, certain populations do have a large genetic distance for the sheer reason of not being in contact with others for eons. Ironically, even though they look "black" and are often referred to as such, UsefulNotes/AboriginalAustralians are genetically more removed from Africans than Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans are. This is because their ancestors did not intermix with other humans in great numbers since they arrived at Australia circa 70,000 years ago, therefore keeping their genes distinct, while the others are descended from more recent emigrants from Africa mixing with the older ones (humans did not come out of Africa all at once, but rather in waves). |
| 408 | * One racial theory that used to be popular was that Khoisan and pygmy peoples were different subspecies than most black Africans and therefore the rest of humanity. This idea even held some sway among people who generally believed that all living humans were part of the same subspecies. While there is a grain of truth to this (both groups genetically diverge quite a lot from other human populations--due to isolation for at least tens of thousands of years, same reason as Aboriginal Australians), the idea of them being ''that'' different has since been discredited. |
| 409 | * Although many scientists agree there's no serious evidence that the [[OurCryptidsAreMoreMysterious cryptid]] known as BigfootSasquatchAndYeti actually exists, [=ZooBank=], the organization that registers scientific names for species, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot#Scientific_view accepted a registration for Bigfoot in 2013]] -- ''Homo sapiens cognatus'' ("cognatus" is Latin for "relative"). Should solid evidence for Bigfoot ever turn up, this will be the accepted name scientists use for them, although obviously it's open to change after actual study of Bigfoot determines how closely exactly it's related to ''Homo sapiens sapiens''. |
| 410 | [[/folder]] |
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