On the Alleged Common Ancestry of the Principal Races

A related error, and one somehow even more persistent among educated men who ought to know better, is the proposition that the five Principal Races descend from some vanished ancestral people: a hypothetical progenitor from which Human, Elf, Dwarf, Aesir, and Gremlin are said to have diverged in remote antiquity. The theory possesses all the usual attractions of a bad idea. It is simple, grand, difficult to disprove to the satisfaction of its adherents, and sufficiently ancient in tone to flatter anyone repeating it into believing himself engaged in profound thought.

Its proponents generally begin with the observation that all five races possess two arms, two legs, bilateral symmetry, forward-facing eyes, grasping hands, and broadly comparable arrangements of the major organs. This is presented as though five thinking peoples could not possibly arrive at similar practical anatomy without sharing a grandmother. One might as reasonably conclude that horses and wolves descend from a recent common ancestor because both have four legs and an inconvenient tendency to bite when mishandled. Similar problems produce similar solutions. Upright posture frees the hands, and forward vision assists depth perception. As for the centralised skull, it is simply a convenient place to keep the brain, nature being repetitive because useful designs remain useful.

The differences, moreover, are not superficial variations laid atop a common frame. Dwarven skeletal density, Elven connective tissues, the extraordinary cardiovascular demands of the Aesir, and the notoriously eccentric digestive and endocrine systems of Gremlins are not the sort of distinctions one produces merely by making an ancestral population somewhat taller here and somewhat hairier there. They are foundational arrangements, and a competent anatomist presented with the internal structures alone, without face, skin, ear, or stature to guide him, would have little difficulty determining the race from which a specimen originated.

The archaeological argument fares no better. Every few decades some expedition announces the discovery of a jaw, femur, burial mask, or badly eroded statue which is triumphantly declared to possess “features intermediate between the races.” Upon examination, these marvels invariably prove to be one of three things: an ordinary specimen distorted by disease, an ordinary specimen distorted by burial, or an ordinary specimen distorted by the ambitions of the man who found it. The celebrated Varlund Skull, once hailed as possessing both Dwarven and Human characteristics, was eventually shown to be the cranium of a Human adolescent afflicted with severe mineral deposition. Professor Varlund continued defending his interpretation for eleven years afterwards, which tells us rather more about professors than it does about ancestry.

The Aesir are especially inconvenient to the proto-race enthusiast. One is expected to believe that the same ancestral stock which ultimately produced a Gremlin of scarcely three feet also produced a people commonly exceeding eight, with a thoracic volume, bone structure, and oxygen requirement so markedly distinct that an Aesir physician must modify several ordinary Human instruments simply to obtain meaningful readings. Faced with this difficulty, the theory does what such theories always do: it retreats into greater antiquity. The supposed ancestor is moved another ten thousand years into the past, then another hundred thousand, until it becomes so remote, so physically undefined, and so obligingly unevidenced that no conceivable discovery could contradict it. At that point one has ceased doing natural history and begun composing theology in a poorly fitted laboratory coat.

The five races do possess commonalities, of course. We speak, reason, construct cities, bury our dead, wage wars for foolish reasons, and devise ever more elaborate explanations for things already adequately understood. These similarities are real and worthy of study. They do not, however, require us to invent an imaginary ancestral people merely because some scholars find independent origins aesthetically untidy. The universe has never demonstrated the slightest concern for aesthetic tidiness, and scholarship embarrasses itself whenever it assumes otherwise.