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I haz a maniraptoran sophont!; And I let them name themselves!
Topic Started: Feb 12 2010, 10:05 AM (1,036 Views)
Margaret Pye
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They're narrating the story. They're the only sophonts in the story's universe. Of course they call themselves "humans". (Not sure what we should call them to avoid confusion. Icarosapiens?)

General

Humans are gracile beaked theropods. Adult females average about 60 kilograms with an empty stomach, adult males about 45 kg. They’re derived enough that it’s hard to tell their phylogenetic affinities beyond “deinonychosaurian”: as a matter of fact, they’re secondarily flightless descendants of very early birds.

They’re built rather like troodonts, with lanky cursorial legs and an extremely long tail (equal to snout-vent length). The tail base bends 90 degrees in any direction. The rest of the tail contains no muscle and so cannot bend actively, but it’s whippy and springy rather than stiff and can be passively bent into a semicircle (necessary to reach the tip for autogrooming.) The long arms fold in maniraptoran style, but have exceedingly flexible shoulders with 180-degree arcs of movement in any direction, and they've evolved a ball-and-socket wrist joint that flexes, extends and swivels. Hand claws are short and blunt and usually filed to be shorter than the fingertip. The three fingers are of equal length and thickness, and the first and third are both opposable.

Humans are effectively two-toed. The first toe on each foot has been completely lost. Much more recently, the deinonychosaurian scythe-claws were superseded by stone knives and shrivelled away, leaving a long skinny hyperextendible toe tipped with a tuft of contrast-coloured vaned feathers. This is used in threat displays.

The most unusual part of a human is the head. They have a larger head and shorter, thicker neck than would be expected in such a slender theropod, with extremely weak toothless jaws, large forward-pointing eyes in a rather flat face, and an enlarged braincase taking up most of the skull. The beak is short, curved and hawklike, but disproportionately small and narrow for the size of the head. On the other hand, the mouth opening is huge: the gape extends literally from ear to ear, like a nightjar’s, and the twig-thin lower jaw opens up to 120 degrees.

Humans are mostly covered in thick soft down, which varies wildly in length depending on climate and genetics. They have a few erectile vaned feathers for display purposes: tufts on the wrists and vestigial scythe-claws, an owl-like “eared” crest, and a large diamond shape on the end of the extremely long tail. They have very long, erectile down along both arms, generally longer in females and independent of the length of body feathers. Fingers and palms of hands are naked: backs of hands may have short down or fine non-overlapping scales. The extent of leg feathering varies, and the same skin on the same individual can actually switch within a few weeks between down and fine scales, without changing colour. Rikhien Aheesa, who came from a cold-adapted racial background and habitually went barefoot in the Arctic winter, used to have fluffy feet and no visible scales whatsoever (then he moved to a temperate climate and moulted spectacularly – every surface was covered in off-white fluff for weeks.) Janet Fitch, heat-adapted and used to heavy manual labour in a tropical climate, used to have naked thighs like an ostrich.

Ecology/behaviour

Humans are carnivorous. They’re not hypercarnivores – they can digest fruit and seeds – but they can stay perfectly healthy on a totally carnivorous diet. The fragile beak is useless in food processing: they use their hands, usually with tools, to reduce food to bite-sized chunks which they then swallow whole. They eat all parts of their prey, except the large intestine of large animals: small bones are swallowed, digested and absorbed, large bones are smashed into small ones, and keratinous parts are blithely swallowed and regurgitated in pellets. While they prefer fresh meat, they’ll eat festering maggot-infested carcasses with no more distaste than a sentient ape would show towards stale dried-out bagels. They have very distensible stomachs and will regularly eat a quarter or a third of their body weight, digest it overnight, and then live off stored fat for several days.

Their recent non-sapient ancestors were basically the coelurosaurian equivalent of spotted hyaenas: highly social in a complicated political way, intelligent and opportunistic, and equally skilled as cursorial megapredators and durophagous scavengers. Said critters looked pretty human, except with a bigger head and enormous macaw-looking beak, three-inch scythe-claws, and a two-inch sharply hooked claw on each thumb (but still with dextrous, blunt-clawed second and third fingers.) Unlike hyaenas, they had the manual dexterity to channel their intelligence into simple tool use (throwing rocks at ornithopods, whacking them with big sticks, throwing rocks at members of other packs and whacking them with big sticks…) Hand-brain feedback cycle ensued, and eventually they got good enough at tool-making that their beaks and claws were superseded, became a waste of resources, and evolved to near-nonexistence. They hung onto the l337 marathon-running skillz, though – a fit human could hypothetically chase anything on this mammal-dominated planet to exhaustion (although they'd have a hard time catching some of their world's ratite-analogues).

Since the ancestral pack structure had most of the healthy adults pairing off and breeding, and the dominant pair were first-among-equals rather than a wolf-style alpha pair clearly defined and set apart, humans don’t have wolf-style “pack instincts.” Certainly some are dominant over others, and certainly they have a powerful hard-wired urge to cooperate with and protect their relatives, but nothing that would seem unusual to a good old bald chimpanzee.

They do still have predatory instincts, even though almost everybody nowadays eats domestic livestock. They like to chase things that run away, grab small things that move fast, and throw projectiles. A lot of their sports and dances are easy to psychoanalyse as a mock hunt with one of the participants imitating prey. Rural humans also tend to be keen on actual predation, especially chasing fast, inoffensive herbivores to exhaustion and finishing them off with a knife (guns are just no fun).

They’re not particularly aggressive towards other humans – the bloodlust’s directed at non-sentient beings and usually away from people. They have murder and they have war, but if anything they’re less violent than omnivorous sentients (although they’re much more prone to cannibalism, particularly serial killers.)

Humans really aren’t fussy about their habitat. They originally evolved on the prairies of Keshiy, and they tend to prefer open country, but anywhere will do. Deserts? Swamps? The High Arctic? As long as there’s solid ground and meat, they’re happy. They don’t need much drinking water (bird kidneys y’know) and they don’t require technology to cope with extreme cold (they just grow more fluff), and what they can’t deal with naturally they will deal with by ingenuity. Swimming doesn’t come naturally to them, but they can invent it – and since they have a well-developed air sac system, they float.

Humans are diurnal, have practically no rods and so absolutely pathetic low-light vision, and tend to really hate the dark. They have excellent, sharp, full-colour (including ultraviolet and infrared) vision in daylight – it’s not quite hawk-standard, but they can read books from across the room. Their sense of smell is rather weak, but definitely exists. It’s mainly used for food selection. Their hearing is average.

Reproduction

Humans are, surprise surprise, oviparous. Healthy reproductive-aged females lay one grapefruit-sized egg every few months, pretty much regardless of their sex lives. Laying eggs is a pretty minor strain, on a par with what certain mammals put up with once a month.

They breed at any time of year, and have very little seasonal/cyclic fluctuation in levels of sex drive. They can store sperm for several weeks, in microscopic tubules at the vagina-uterus junction. Females have a large degree of control (mostly subconscious) over how much sperm they store from a given mating.

They have rather strange genitalia: obviously based on the single-orifice, retractable-phallus design of primitive birds, but with some odd variations. Sexual arousal in females causes part of the cloaca to prolapse, placing the vaginal orifice outside the cloacal orifice: in standard procreative sex, the vagina is directly penetrated. The phallus extends hydraulically to about a foot long. It has a canine-style bulb at the base, preventing disengagement: inflation and deflation of this bulb are under conscious control. The rest of it is covered in tentacle-like projections which have a hydraulic muscle arrangement allowing them to wriggle under their own power.

Incubation period is twelve weeks. They’ve never bothered to invent contraception: unwanted eggs (which, obviously, is most of them!!!) simply aren’t incubated.

Humans are rather precocial: they can walk clumsily within hours of hatching, start picking up on house-training within a week, and will hunt and kill mice and lizards at a few months. However, it still takes them a year or so to start talking – before that, they’re a bit like really friendly cats.

There are no obvious tertiary sexual characteristics. On average females are somewhat larger and coarser-featured than males, and have longer arm feathers, but there’s a lot of overlap and many individuals would seem androgynous without social context (ornaments, behaviour, whatever).

Nearly all societies are unfairly female-dominated, although in this day and age the more “enlightened” societies are doing a reasonable job of gender equality. Men are traditionally stereotyped as violent, irresponsible and unable to control their sex drives: they may be considered less intelligent, or just considered too impulse-driven and sex-crazed to be any use intellectually. They’re often considered “closer to nature” and more naturally spiritual and artistic. Traditionally “masculine” roles generally involve fighting in defense of loved ones (most non-commissioned soldiers are male, most officers are female) and/or being an ornamental sex toy. In most societies, men dress better and dominate the performing arts.

Humans are as sexually flexible as the more familiar mammalian sentients, but they seem to default to long-term pairs (small groups also work well, particularly groups of two or three females and one male). Unlike the mammals, they’re usually only mildly upset about their partners having extramarital flings. Absolute sexual fidelity is held up as an ideal in many societies, but not often attained in real life. Some societies hold that a man shouldn’t be tricked into raising children that aren’t his. Other societies hold that if a man can’t hold his wife’s attention then that’s his own fault.
Edited by Margaret Pye, Mar 17 2010, 08:09 PM.
My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont.
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colddigger
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Joke's over! Love, Parasky
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like in books where when they say a name of a place or a time but instead there is a line.

i think having their dialogue written in something that the reader can read only makes sense. you could mention that they actually speak in chirps, hoots, or belches if you want, but i think that if you want their term for 'people' to translate into 'human' then it's perfectly fine. translations like that happen between our languages all the time anyway.
Oh Fine.

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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

If there's a universal translator or something of that kind, the problems could be circumvented.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Margaret Pye
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There are no mammalian sophonts in this universe. There are monkeys up trees. Some of them have the basics of tool use figured out.
My speculative dinosaur project. With lots of fluff, parental care and mammalian-level intelligence, and the odd sophont.
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Empyreon
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Are you plausible?

Having them call themselves humans makes a sort of sense actually. Clearly, their language and culture will differ from our own on several points, but just as clearly, every word they say is being translated into English. So every time they refer to themselves as the "Thsalika'grar" (or whatever) the test is translated as "human", which has similar etymological roots as "earth". Thus, "Thsalika'grar" would have similar etymology that refers to "the people of the earth".
Take a look at my exobiology subforum of the planet Nereus!

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food for thought
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

MP, i meant to trranslate the narration so we could read it.

Etymological roots would probably define their language for us.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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