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Precursors

They left our planets long ago
The Elder Race still learn and grow
Their power grows with purpose strong
To claim the home where they belong
— Rush, 2112

A standard fixture of much science fiction and fantasy: an ancient race whose culture and knowledge rose to its pinnacle in ages long past but which is now extinct. In science fiction settings, they are usually considered the first race to have gained sentience in the universe or galaxy, giving them a noticeable leg up on everybody else. At their height, they are usually rumored to have been capable of doing (and have done) just about anything, up to and including creating intelligent species and reworking entire worlds with a snap of a finger, and almost any strange and persistent mystery in the story's 'verse is usually laid at their feet. They may have been sufficiently advanced, or just much better than everyone else with technology/magic, but either way they left their mark, a mark that remains to this day.

Then they vanished into myth, leaving behind nothing but tantalizing ruins and rare, sometimes incomprehensible artifacts. Just why, no one knows. Perhaps they Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence, or were wiped out by a disaster or war, or maybe they just relocated en masse to somewhere else where they haven't been found yet.

Whatever the reason, they set the stage for the modern world, left behind a few MacGuffins and surprises for the heroes and villains to find, and then got conveniently out of the way. And then there are the times where they themselves are the reason everything's gone to hell, and they intend to keep it that way.

Sometimes the Precursors can be rediscovered; usually nobody — especially not the Precursors themselves — is happy with that.

Bonus points if Earth Humans are Precursors and their incredibly human descendants try to rediscover their heritage — or, conversely, if Earth Humans are the only descendants. If Humans are the Precursors and everyone's scared of them, that's Humans Are Cthulhu.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books
  • In the Marvel Universe, the race of giant Celestials have influenced many planets, including Earth. They wear strange suits of armor, giving the impression that they are mechanical, but that's not the case. They also test races and civilisations according to their standards to see who are worthy. In addition, there are also the Elders of the Universe, a loose associations of beings who all are The Last Of Their Kind, and who hail from the first intelligent races to develop in the universe. They are less active, though, since they are all obsessed with one narrow hobby which appearently is the only thing that keeps them from dying of sheer boredom. The Grandmaster may be interested in the gaming and gambling habits of various lesser races, for instance, but couldn't care less about any aspects of their culture that has nothing to do with his obsession with games.

Film
  • One of the most widely known Precursor stories is 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they are also (presumably) Energy Beings who guided human evolution.
  • In Alien Vs Predator, the Predators are retconned to being responsible for teaching humans how to build Pyramids.
  • The Star Wars universe has several features that are attributed to Precursor-like races, whether they are real Precursors or just people in the Unknown Regions is, well, unknown.

Literature
  • In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the Magratheans seem to hit all the key points of the trope, although they also subvert it in that they're capitalists who disappeared because the bottom had dropped out of the custom planet-building market, and they went into Suspended Animation until the Galactic economy recovered enough to provide them with customers again.
    • They actually weren't that old in galactic terms. A lot of the backstory was ridiculously ancient history when they got started in the business, most obviously the Krikkit Wars.
  • The Ancients of Piers Anthony's Cluster series.
  • Isaac Asimov's Robot Detective/Foundation universe played with the idea that humans are the Precursors, wherein Earth was in a small band where it was more radioactive than most planets (thus resulting in a higher rater of mutation and thus, faster evolution), but not so radioactive that life couldn't survive there.
  • In David Brin's Uplift universe, every intelligent race in the galaxy was Uplifted (engineered to sentience and given access to the Great Library) by a previous one, save the first. The Progenitors (self-evolved, now extinct) are considered the next thing to gods. A race's clout in the galactic hierarchy is in part determined by how close they are to having been created directly by the Progenitors. Then along come the Humans, who have discovered hyperdrive and reached the stars alone, with no patron race and a complete fossil record that indicates they evolved naturally. It's practically heretical! It doesn't help matters (from the galactic standpoint) that humans have already Uplifted chimps and dolphins, too....
    • In the first novel set in the Uplift Universe, Startide Rising, the first dolphin-captained Earth ship discovers what is assumed to be a fleet of the fabled Progenitors, and must try to return to Earth while being hounded by bickering alien battle fleets after the transmission of their findings is intercepted; the most active (and warlike) of the alien races/alliances are not happy that the wolfling Humans might have the key to the fate of the Progenitors (which could prove most or all of their belief systems wrong. The idea that humans may be the descendants or direct product of the Progenitors is also examined.
  • CJ Cherryh's Morgaine Cycle, dedicated to Andre Norton, features a protagonist who — ironically — is on a mission to destroy a Stargate network, which was created originally by copying a single artifact (left on a long-dead world by Neglectful Precursors) to establish each new node in the network.
  • Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series has humanity and its allies expanding into a significantly used universe, with a wide variety of species at various stages of development from primitive to superadvanced to completely extinct. Several of these, most notably the Xunca, the Tar-Aiym, and the Hur'rikku, had a profound impact on the earlier history of the galaxy and left numerous artifacts lying around after they variously departed or went extinct.
    • The Xunca are actually still around, but they packed up and moved to a different galaxy to avoid an encroaching Cosmic Horror that the modern day protagonists now have to deal with.
  • The Cthulhu Mythos, by H.P. Lovecraft and others, features the Elder Things, who colonized the Earth two billion years ago and sowed the seeds of all advanced life on the planet. Among the many monstrous elder races of the Mythos, the Elder Things are portrayed as less alien and less inimical than many. They feature most prominently in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and are sometimes called the "Old Ones" (but that term is notoriously ambiguous in the Cthulhu Mythos).
    • In Whispers in the Darkness, the Mi-Go are hinted at being even older, possibly coming from outside the known universe.
  • In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Footfall, the aliens who invade Earth are actually at a caveman level of social development; the Forerunners left carved blocks on their planet which detail everything from simple metallurgy through advanced laser weapons and Bussard ramscoops. As a result, there are many technological paths they never even thought of.
  • In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, there are two sets of precursors. First there were the Thrintun (AKA "Slavers"), who seeded the galaxy with the ingredients of life so it would grow and evolve into unique delicacies for them to eat (being hypnotic slavers, they were defeated by the Tnuctipun in the inevitable Turned Against Their Masters, and they took all sentient life with them. Talk about bad parenting). Then there were the Pak, a race of more recent aliens with three life stages (child, breeder, Protector) only sentient in the third stage, and programmed to be homicidal to anything that could conceivably threaten their descendants (mutations were not recognized). Earth was a Lost Colony of them who couldn't advance to Protector stage when their supply of tree-of-life root ran out due to a lack of thallium in Earth's soil. They left behind lost colonies and random apelike animals all over, including the Ringworld, which they had built and abandoned.
  • Andre Norton worked with this trope in both her science fiction and fantasy novels.
    • She wrote a lot of space opera novels featuring relics of various lost civilizations, collectively called "Forerunners". She was one of the early developers of the abandoned-gateway-between-worlds idea that the Stargate films and TV series are based on; one of her Forerunner cultures left behind such a network, which younger species, including humans, have started to explore.
    • In her Witch World fantasy novels, humans migrated to High Hallack centuries ago only to find that the Old Ones had been there before them; these Neglectful Precursors left behind quite a few ruins and dangerous artifacts.
  • Frederik Pohl's Gateway and its sequels set many of the standards for this trope. Humanity has stumbled on an space station abandoned by the local Precursors, the Heechee, and try to use the Faster Than Light Travel spacecraft left behind to search for alien artifacts to reverse-engineer. The destinations are pre-programmed and can only be accessed randomly, making exploration a dangerous crapshoot. Some of the survivors return rich; many return dead, if they return at all.
  • In the Carl Sagan novel Contact and the movie based on it, an unknown ancient race of aliens built the "cosmic subway system" of wormhole transportation used to bring a single human to meet the successor aliens who inherited the system.
  • In Charles Sheffield's Heritage Universe novels, the Builders left behind artifacts the size of planets — e.g. Cocoon, the first such artifact discovered by humans, was so named because that's what it looks like if you're far enough away from the planet it surrounds. A whole discipline of Adventurer Archaeologists exists to study Builder artifacts.
  • In the Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, the Wanderers may or may not be still active, but they fit this trope closely enough because the humans only ever find the traces of their continued and enigmatic work. They seem to be "progressing" the other civilisations, but their activities often enough utterly screw over local civilisations, though it might be for their ultimate good in some way anyway.
  • From the perspective of the modern day, the Elves of Tolkien's Middle-Earth are a Precursor race.
  • Iain Banks' Culture novels are practically littered with Precursors, numerous advanced civilizations that existed in aeons past until they variously died off, Sublimed, or just plain mysteriously disappeared. These Precursors are the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, since most of Banks' protagonists themselves belong to a civilization that can casually travel across the galaxy, build gigantic habitats in space, and use the fabric of the Universe itself as a weapon — and they are occasionally awed by the Precursors.

Live Action TV
  • From Babylon 5, the "First Ones", who have all mostly emigrated "beyond the rim of the galaxy," although some remain lurking about in known space; especially Lorien, the "First One," literally the first sentient being in the galaxy. Not to mention the Vorlons and the Shadows, which drive the main plots of the entire series.
  • Doctor Who sometimes paints the Time Lords like this, with the widespread presence of Human Aliens attributed to their, or more specifically their leader Rassilon's, xenophobia. They were even worshipped as gods on at least one planet, until their technological gifts backfired. Then they had a few nasty wars (particularly with the Great Vampires), and they retreated to their home planet.
    • The unseen race who caged The Beast also qualify.
      • Bonus points for having done this before the beginning of time.
  • Of course you can't forget the Ancients from Farscape either. In fact, it seems that the Precursors are so often called "the Ancients", that would be just as good a name for this trope.
  • Red Dwarf postulates that all life originated on Earth; after three million years, there are many variations on sentient life — creatures descended from genetic experiments, animals that evolved into sentient humanoids, self-sustaining races of androids, "pan-dimensional liquid beasts," etc. etc. etc.
  • The Stargate network from Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis was created by one such race, named (creatively) the Ancients, though they later are discovered to have called themselves the Alterans (or the Lanteans, after the planet on which Atlantis resided).
  • From Star Trek, the Preservers, the Iconians, and possibly the members of the "First Federation" mentioned in the original series episode "The Corbomite Maneuver".

Real Life
  • The originator of this trope may be Atlantis, which was first recorded by Plato and is thought to be an allegory he dreamed up to serve his conception of a utopian society. So, you know the drill...
  • One serious solution proposed for Fermi's Paradox (in brief: The universe is at the very least not hostile to life, and it's big enough and old enough that we humans shouldn't be alone, so why haven't we encountered any other intelligent species in some way?) is that we humans are the Precursors — we are the first intelligent race. Or at the very least, our elders are too recently emerged to have expanded universe-wide yet.

Table Top Games
  • In the Forgotten Realms, a saurian race ruled the world in the days when the world was warm. They are not entirely gone, though...
  • GURPS Space, a sourcebook for GURPS, includes Precursors as a potential element a gamemaster might want to weave into his game world.
  • The Ancients of the Traveller Tabletop RPG.
  • The Old Ones in Warhammer (both fantasy and 40k) created most sentient races. In Fantasy they just left, never to return, but in 40k their backstory is given out in more detail. Apparently they had a massive, galaxy-shaking war with another old race, the Necronty (which later became the robotic Necrons), and created many races to help them fight. They (as well as most life in the galaxy) were nearly wiped out in the aftermath of the war, when the psychic disturbance caused by the massive amount of warp-fueled power used by them and the races they created caused the reality to tear apart and horrible creatures to spill through.
    • These may or may not be the same race, and the two collapses may be parts of the same event. The 7th edition Warhammer core book and Lizardman book hint heavily at this, and the 40k Necron book suggests using Lizardman models to represent the last refuges of the Old Ones.

Video Games
  • Assassins Creed has subtle nods to some kind of Precusor civilization, in the form of various ancient artifacts the Templars are hunting for.
  • In EVE Online, we are the precursors. We used the EVE wormhole to travel to the Galaxy of EVE, but when the wormhole collapsed, so to did civilization in EVE, and as new civilizations formed, their origins faded into myth and legend.
  • The Zilart of Final Fantasy XI. A few of them still remain but most of them are relatively insane and/or genocidal. Only two Zilartians favor the current civilizations at all, and one of them Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence.
  • The "Ancients" from FreeSpace fit this trope, although for once we actually get a detailed history of their annihilation at the hands of the Shivans. (They recorded this so that later races would be warned not to piss the Shivans off... or, having failed that, would have some insight into the Shivans' weaknesses). The Shivans themselves qualify as Precursors in some respects: while not extinct, their technology is far more advanced than humans' and they've been that advanced for at least 8,000 years. There are Epileptic Trees both in-game and out about the origins of the Shivans (whether they were created as weapons by an even older race), and exactly how long they've been at their xenocidal mission (one character muses that there might be multiple Precursors extending far back in time, each annihilated by the Shivans when they grew too powerful and the later ones founding empires on the ruins of those that came before). None of this has been confirmed nor denied by the authors.
  • In the Halo universe, the Forerunners are very much a precursor race, who have left behind artifacts such as the titular "halo" rings, and whose fate seems to be either of the vanished or wiped out variety, perhaps a little of both. Oddly, humans seem to have a unique connection to them — only a human can activate the Halo's final weapon. This connection is explained in the final game... sort of.
    • Note: Backstory of the Forerunners reveals that they were preceded by a race of long-lost superior beings they called "The Precursors".
  • Homeworld 2 featured the aptly-named Progenitors, who left behind various relics including several Wave Motion Guns which the player and the enemy fight for control of.
  • In Iji, the Komato are the ancestors of the Tasen, and, although it's not clear how close they are to humans, first evolved on Earth, leaving without a trace some time before the halocene period.
  • The Jak and Daxter franchise has an ancient race called "The Precursors". They leave deep-voiced oracular statues and various giant robots scattered about, and depict themselves as glowing Energy Beings, but that's just a Wizard of Oz act; they're really Ottsels, otter-weasel things like Jak's sidekick Daxter. In fact, he becomes one because all eco contains their essence.
  • In The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Ooccooo are suggested to be the Precursors of the Hylians —as one Adventurer Archaeologist tells us, the goddesses may have made the Ooccoo first, then the Ooccoo made the Hylians before retreating to their city in the sky. Some fan-speculation surrounds these creatures, probably not the least because of their incredibly bizarre appearance.
  • In the Marathon series, made by Bungie, a race of ancient vanished beings called the Jjaro serve essentially the same role the Forerunners do in Halo.
  • The Protheans in Mass Effect, at least until Dr. T'soni joins your party and suggests that they probably weren't the actual precursors. Turns out she's right, as the real precursors are the Reapers, which are robotic Cosmic Horrors that are out for everyone's blood.
  • In Metroid, although they raised Samus to adulthood and had extensive contact with faraway races like the Luminoth, Elysia, and even the Federation, the Chozo have vanished from all known space. Their entire legacy consists of decayed ruins, cryptic messages for Samus, and the odd upgrade module for her Power Suit. And, of course, the Metroids themselves.
  • The Ancients from the Might And Magic universe (at least when it was in the hands of New World Computing) were creating various worlds out of the four elements and seeding them with life as part of a great experiment. Their true agenda is never entirely revealed but there are hints that they had a specific outcome in mind for most of their worlds, before the Creators and the Kreegan interfered.
  • The Myst series of games gradually reveals that the long-lost civilization of D'ni was actually located on Earth; its founders originally came from an alternate universe, but they founded a city Beneath The Earth.
  • Pac Man World 3 features the Ancients (possibly members or ancestors of Pac-Man's spherical race), about whose lives little is known, although their deaths comprise a well-known story 'of greed, of tampering with unknown forces, and of running and screaming and dying', to quote an in-game archaeologist. As it turns out, the Ancients were wiped out when they tried to siphon energy from the Spectral Realm (the Pac-Man universe's afterlife), which is exactly what the game's villain is trying to do in the present.
  • Appropriately for a series where ancient ruins are one of the most populous level types, the Sonic series is jam-packed with different precursors, whose ancient weapons/relics/monsters set the stage for the world-threatening terror of the game. Interestingly enough, although absolutely all of them are shown to have possessed and utilized the series' recurring MacGuffins, none of them claim responsibility for creating any of the Emeralds.
    • Not to mention in Chronicles a race referred to as, well, The Precursors.
  • In the Star Control games, there is a race explicitly called "The Precursors" which vanished but left behind many artifacts and installations across the galaxy. The wondrous second one is notable for containing artifacts and mysteries which are not explained away with the Precursors. The third one attributes everything to them to the point of Retconning previous reveals, though since the game's not all that impressive the fans don't much care.
  • In StarCraft the Xel'Naga take this role, although the reason for their disappearance is less mysterious than most...or so it seems at first...
  • The Star Ocean series plays with this trope. The games are filled with Out of Place Artifacts, mystical technologies such as the time gate on the apparently sentient planet Styx, and near the middle of the third game, there's even a precursor-like group of beings called the Executioners who rain havoc upon ALL the races of the galaxy. It turns out that the universe is actually a video game called the Eternal Sphere, and all the Precursor like artifacts, including the Executioners, were planted by the programmer.
  • Sword Of The Stars' Morrigi are actually still around — and very smug about it — but until the last expansion, they had to quietly limp into hiding thanks to the efforts of the rather less nice variety of Precusors.
  • In the Thief series, the Precursors had much more sophisticated technology than does the present-day civilization; in the second game, this sets the plot in motion when a Mad Scientist / Sinister Minister gets hold of some.
    When we looked at the relics of the Precursors, we saw the height civilization can attain.
    When we looked at their ruins, we marked the danger of that height.
    — from the Keeper Annals
  • Warcraft lore features the Titans, who created all the worlds in the universe and seeded them with life, then left to go pursue their unimaginable goals, leaving all kinds of stuff behind. One of them, Sargeras, is also the Big Bad of the mythology. There are strong hints throughout the lore that they may be coming back some day (possibly in a future expansion).
  • On Filgaia, the world from Wild Arms, a race of Precursors left behind a vast array of Lost Technology. In the anime series Twilight Venom it was revealed that the precursors were from Earth, but left due to the annoyance of Random Encounters.
  • The Steltek, from Wing Commander Privateer. Arguably they were Precursors of the neglectful variety, though they did make an effort to clean up after themselves once made aware of the problem.

Web Comics
  • In the furry webcomic Jack, the furries that currently live on Earth are the descendants of furries created in a lab by humans, making humans the Precursors. They were wiped out in a war started by the first furry, Jack. The furry version of the United States government knows about furrykind's origins, and is (probably wisely) keeping it a secret.
  • In Order Of The Stick, where the inhabitants of the First World did go extinct before the dawn of history, but were annihilated entirely by the coming of the Snarl, forcing the gods to build the present Second World from scratch. Thus, while they may or may not have been powerful, the First World's peoples didn't leave behind any knowledge, artifacts or descendents.

Western Animation
  • In Gargoyles, the First Race, while never directly referred to in the show, has been revealed by Greg Weisman to have preceded the Three Races.
  • Slight subversion: the inconceivably ancient Morphin Masters of Power Rangers themselves worshipped their "Ancient Ancestors" who watched down on them... Apparently from Rita's similarly super-ancient lunar palace.
  • In Shadow Raiders, a mysterious race created world engines (if not the planets themselves). This allowed the natives to not get consumed by the Beast Planet. One has to wonder who they were and why they did it.

Music
  • In the The Sword song, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians", the Precursors are humans from roughly the current era. After a presumably nuclear war screws up the planet, the survivors idiotically decide that they need to find and launch more of our missiles.

Web Original
  • Open Blue has the Jormungand Imperium, a once glorious empire that prospered thanks to their god. When a new religion started encroaching on the fringes of the empire and the local Church Militant did nothing to stop its growth, aforementioned god turned his back on them while they were in the middle of a war with invading barbarian hordes. Suffice to say, it led to their gotterdammerung, and their blessed weapons and artifacts being scattered across the world for the present nations to search for.

Real Life
  • Medieval and Renaissance Europeans often thought of the Roman Empire this way. Adventurer Archeologists in Central Asia often thought of the various Silk Road Civilizations this way, too.
  • This is also a favorite theme with Conspiracy Theories, where the role of the Precursors is filled by ancient, vanished technological empires like Atlantis or Lemuria, or by alien visitors who founded humanity's ancient civilizations (the Pyramids are particularly prone to built-by-aliens claims).

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