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random-thought-depository · 1 year ago

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OK, here's that write-up for catgirl humans I said I'd do, though in developing them I've moved away from the catgirl concept and toward imagining a species that might be less misleadingly called "bearfolk," so I think I'll just call them bearfolk from now on (at least until I decide on what they'd call themselves).

Bearfolk are a species for my sci fi setting. In the setting, they're one of maybe seven or ten sapient species descended from proto-humans transplanted to other planets by aliens in the Pleistocene for reasons I haven't decided on yet (and which may or may not be a mystery to humans in-universe). The ancestors of the bearfolk were transplanted to a world which has a long (tens to hundreds of thousands of years) cycle in which the axis obliquity changes from less than 10 degrees to more than 60 degrees and back again.

As well as the periodic climate changes, the bearfolk world had another environmental difficulty: many of the plants were poisonous or otherwise not nourishing or poorly nourishing to humans, and many of the small animals were poisonous or venomous. That left big animals as the best available food source, and pushed the ancestors of the bearfolk into relying on big game hunting as their primary food source (though it is important to note that the bearfolk never became pure carnivores; when they developed civilization the backbone food production system of their civilization was the same as ours; edible seed and tuber crop cultivation).

The proto-bearfolk at this stage were not very technologically sophisticated, and probably not yet fully sapient. Their primary big game hunting technique was to attack animals with stabbing spears. Unfortunately, this was quite dangerous against larger fauna, so the early proto-bearfolk suffered a high young adult mortality rate. This created a selection pressure for increased size, increased strength, increased resilience against injury, and increased intelligence. The biggest, strongest, toughest, smartest proto-bearfolk were more likely to survive their hunts long enough to reproduce, so over time the species started to get bigger, stronger, tougher, and smarter.

The proto-bearfolk got a stroke of genetic bad luck. Some of the changes that increased their intelligence mildly degraded their fine motor coordination (maybe the evolution of their sapience involved the cerebellum shrinking to make room for an expanded neocortex?). The effects were not very debilitating, and in the short term getting a little clumsier but smarter was a net-positive trade-off for survival, so these genes propagated and increased in frequency. But in the long term this had the effect of making them poor shots, which delayed the development of projectile weaponry. It didn't help that a lot of their prey were protected by natural armor, requiring relatively precise targeting of weak spots to take them down; this was much easier from close range. It also didn't help that limited ability to eat from the base of the food chain limited the proto-bearfolk population, and the very adaptations that made them better megafauna-killers (increased size, muscle mass, and brain power) also increased their caloric needs and further limited their population; this tended to make technological progress quite slow even given full human-level intelligence. As a result of these factors, the bearfolk remained locked into taking down prey in close combat with stabbing spears, and exposed to the selection pressures that generated, for a long time.

As their size, brute strength, resilience against injury, and intelligence all increased, fewer of the proto-bearfolk died on the hunt and they were able to tackle bigger and more dangerous prey, as well as more effectively compete against rival predators. Eventually they became one of their planet's apex predators, regularly taking down megafauna much bigger than themselves. The end result of this process was a sapient species significantly bigger and much heavier and stronger than Homo sapiens.

The other important selection pressure bearfolk got that we didn't is their ancestors experienced at least one of their planet's high obliquity eras. During these eras much of the planet experienced more than a month of continuous darkness in winter. This created a selection pressure for ability to operate in darkness, specifically for improved night vision, improved senses of hearing and smell, and increased reliance on senses other than vision.

So, modern bearfolk...

They have much better night vision than Homo sapiens, better hearing, and a better sense of smell. They tend to rely more on senses other than vision. One noticeable external anatomical difference is their earlobes are bigger and more conical than ours and have some mobility, to capture sounds better; they're not exactly cat ears, but they might look a little like that.

They're pretty big, and have much more muscle mass than Homo sapiens. I haven't decided exactly how big. My "not all that different from us" model is they're not all that much taller than us (average height six-foot-something), but much more heavily built, with much more muscle mass. If you want to imagine what a bearfolk looks like, a strongman like Hafthor Julius Bjornsson is a good place to start. Note that this is my "well, let's assume they're small enough their furniture wouldn't be too awkward for us and vice versa so shared social events and work-spaces would be relatively easy" model; I might make them bigger. As you might extrapolate from this description, they're very strong. Put the bearfolk equivalent of a moderately in-shape yoga mom in the Olympics and she might win a gold medal or ten.

They've retained more "primitive" hominid features inherited from the common ancestor; they have Neaderthal-like "chinless" jaws, heavier brow ridges than us, and a more robust skull. They're a bit like Neanderthals in combining these "primitive" features with a brain that's, if anything, bigger than ours. I think this would fit with them having evolved toward even more robustness instead of gracility. One exception to this is bearfolk males have lost male-pattern facial hair; this might be because it was easier to clean blood and other animal fluids off a hairless face, or it might be just a result of genetic drift.

Increased sharpness of the incisors and canines fits my mental image of them, but realistically I don't think it's plausible: knives and controlled fire are some of the oldest human technologies, and once you have them there isn't much selection pressure for tooth anatomy changes. Maybe it's a side effect of selection for some other trait, like the long hairs on the legs of big horses?

Despite their prehistoric specialization as mostly-carnivores, they never lost the human capacity to eat a wide variety of foods. Nowadays they eat more seed and tuber crop derived foods than meat, for the same reason we do.

A quick skim of a Wikipedia article says Hafthor Bjornsson took 8-10,000 calories a day to maintain his peak strongman physique, which would suggest if bearfolk have a similar physique they'd need to eat a lot. Then again, I'd guess an Earth human has to work out a lot to maintain that kind of muscle mass, whereas bearfolk would more-or-less just have it by default, so that might help. Even so, I'm pretty sure all that extra muscle would take a lot of extra calories and protein to maintain.

Ideas about bearfolk society and stuff:

Bearfolk population densities were pretty low in their ancestral environment; limited ability to eat from the base of the food chain and high individual caloric needs limited their population. Compared to Homo sapiens with equivalent technology and in similar environment, their social groups were smaller and more dispersed. On the one hand, this meant less selection for hypersociality. On the other hand, dangerous cooperative hunting selected for strong bonds within the group (nearest available Earth analogies: war buddies).

Translate this into modern times... On one hand, they tend to be less comfortable and more stressed when dealing with crowds and social interactions with people they don't know well. On the other hand, they tend to have strong bonds with romantic partners and close friends (the two are heavily overlapping categories in their society). They tend to have little taste for socializing in dance halls and big parties and the like, preferring small intimate gatherings with friends. Accordingly, their shared social spaces tend to be more set up to facilitate the latter kind of socialization. I think they might seem kind of autistic to us.

In terms of social structure, they actually have a lot of similarities with bonobo-like humans. Like bonobo-like humans, they tend to form large co-operative child-care units with lots of alloparenting. Like bonobo-like humans, they often rely on clubs, friend groups, extended family, worker cooperatives, group homes, etc. for cooperative child-care services that in our society would normatively be performed by the nuclear family. Like bonobo-like humans, they tend to live in group homes. In bearfolk this reflects patterns of social organization that were originally adaptations to the high young adult mortality rate of the hunter period (in bonobo-like humans they were partly responses to the higher risk of orphaning resulting from their age-mediated reproduction patterns, so there is some similarity there).

Thinking about sort of situation their society might have regarding gender and sexuality... Regarding gender, I think the short answer would be that bearfolk have a lot less of it than us:

Both sexes were hunters and heavily selected for large size and great strength. Sexual dimorphism is much lower than ours; bearfolk women aren't much smaller than bearfolk men. Native animal, bacterial, fungal, and viral parasites have difficulty infecting them because of how different they are from native animals physiologically, so pre-industrial child mortality was much lower than on Earth - in their hunter period young adult mortality was high, but it would have been greatly reduced by the development of effective projectile weapons, animal domestication, or agriculture (I haven't worked out which of those they got first). Childbirth is less strenuous to them because of how big and robust they are (I guess their babies might be a bit bigger than ours, but the difference is smaller than between sapiens and bearfolk adults). As I said earlier, they tend to form big cooperative child-care units and do lots of alloparenting. All this tended to reduce the degree to which their society treated men and women as different types of being with different rights, responsibilities, and roles.

Bearfolk men and women don't look very different. Bearfolk women have similar physique to bearfolk men, are only slightly smaller, and have small breasts. Bearfolk don't really have gendered clothing, or at least don't have much of it (at minimum, I guess menstrual pad equivalents are a kind of gendered clothing and they'd have those); men and women mostly wear about the same things (they tend to favor practical clothing). Bearfolk don't have the "women as the decorative sex" thing; they sometimes wear fancy clothing and jewelry of various sorts, but this isn't a gendered thing in their society, it's simply an attempt by the individual to look nice and/or advertise their high social status.

Perhaps because it has so little gender, Bearfolk society basically never stigmatized homosexuality.

Regarding sexuality more generally, I like the idea that Bearfolk are simultaneously a more and less sexual species than Homo sapiens, depending on how you look at it.

On one hand, they tend to have low libidos and be basically demisexual. One easily visible manifestation of this you might notice if visiting their planet is they don't do stuff like put suggestive images in advertisements and they don't have "sexy" fashion. I also think they wouldn't make much erotic art, and what they do make along those lines would look kind of weird to us; like, e.g. their movies might have sex scenes when they're character-significant, but I think they'd be shot pretty differently from ours. Casual sex, hook ups, and sex work would be much less prominent institutions in their society, since most of them would usually be uninterested in sex with strangers. Similarly, I think visual porn with minimum story wouldn't really be much of a thing in their society (but they might have more appreciation of romance novel and smutfic type things and have an equivalent literary tradition).

Side note: while they don't have "sexy" fashion and this does tend to result in generally modest clothing (at least in cooler climates), they also don't have much of a nudity taboo, and are quite chill about seeing each other nude in settings like public bathing facilities. These are to some extent two sides of the same coin; it doesn't occur to them that there might be something inappropriate about a bunch of strangers being naked together in a public bath or sauna or on a beach cause to them there is nothing potentially sexually arousing about this situation.

On the other hand, their society is polyamory-normative. They have a similar thing to bonobo-like humans going on where clubs, friend groups, small worker co-ops, etc. are often also polycules. They do tend to form very close, strong, intimate life partnerships with small numbers of people, but, 1) these are usually "open relationships," 2) they are often between three or four or more people instead of just two.

I think in the ancestral environment bearfolk romantic relationships (both homosexual and heterosexual) would have had a kind of Sacred Band of Thebes flavor. Not sure if or how this would influence their present society.

Also a major exception to bearfolk demisexuality is I think in the ancestral environment they'd have had inbreeding-avoidance behaviors like a woman who wanted to get pregnant sometimes waiting until she was nearing ovulation and then going to a neighboring group hers was on OK-to-good terms with and basically getting consensually gang-banged by the adult males of the other group, so that genes would be exchanged. They might have some modern practices distantly derived from such behaviors.

That reminds me, I think having a better sense of smell than us might have led to them getting a functional equivalent of modern birth control very early, similar to what happened with bonobo-like humans; they might be able to smell physiological changes associated with ovulation.

On a sad note, I think a high young adult mortality rate in the ancestral environment might lead to them getting less selection pressure for long lifespan, and hence being less long-lived today? They might have something kind of like the bonobo-like human late menopause relative to lifespan, but whereas bonobo-like humans got it by having really late menopause, bearfolk might have it just cause they kept a more chimp-like life cycle; adult by 15, menopause at 50 which is already elderly for them, usually dead by 70. :( On the other hand, high young adult mortality rate would mean the people who did manage to survive to older age were even more precious as teachers for the next generation of hunters and basically living libraries, so there'd be kin selection pressure for long lifespans that way. Also I could see them developing toward a pattern where reproduction and mothering tends to be done by older females who are past their prime as hunters, so they might get selection pressure for longer lifespan, later menopause, and slower female fertility decline that way (this arrangement would be something a little bit like our gender roles, but age-mediated!).

#my main SF setting #bearfolk

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