Related species

[Enterprise1701]

I was trying to compile a list of all the sentient species (or in some cases, subspecies or supra-ethnic groups which consider themselves distinct) in Star Trek which are direct biological relatives. I thought it could be fun to discuss how Star Trek treats interstellar speciation, which the novels have gone into much further length from canon.

Vulcans
Romulans
Remans
Watraii (Vulcan's Soul)
Kenisians (TOS - Crisis of Consciousness)
possible cousin: Zami (ENT - Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel)
possible cousin: Mintakans (TNG - "Who Watches the Watchers?")
possible ancestor: vulcanoid Arretians (TOS - "Return to Tomorrow")
possible descendant: Chenar (DTI - Watching the Clock)

Andorians and Aenar

Caitians and Kzinti/Ferasans

Edosians and Triexians (TAS - "Beyond the Farthest Star" et al. and New Frontier)

Lurians (DS9: "Emissary" et al.) and Baladonians (TNG - "The Next Phase" and TTN - Absent Enemies)

Rilnar and Zahl (VOY - "Year of Hell, Part 1" and VOY - A Pocket Full of Lies)

Humans
Neyel (TLE - The Sundered and TTN - The Red King)
Possible descendant: Zcham (DTI - Watching the Clock)

 

[Christopher]

I tend to think the Ocampa are also likely descendants of the Vulcanoid Arretians (which I assume to be Henoch's people). Whereas I figure the more humanlike Arretians (Sargon and Thalassa's people) are probably the ancestors of telepathic races like Betazoids and Deltans -- and maybe Bajorans, assuming the weird, never-explained power of Bajoran monks to read people's paghs by grabbing their ears is some sort of psi ability rather than just cold reading dressed up with mumbo-jumbo.

I suspect the Talarians from "Suddenly Human" (and The Struggle Within) are some sort of Klingon offshoot, perhaps seeded by the Preservers or some similar group. They're pretty similar, a warlike people with bumpy foreheads.

 

[Extrocomp]

Andorians and Theskians (TNG - Metamorphosis)

Caitians and Kzinti (TOS - Log Five)

Vulcanoids
Fri'slen (ENT - Kobayashi Maru)
Garidians (TNG game - A Final Unity)
K'tralli (TNG - Blaze of Glory)

Humans
Herans (TNG - Infiltrator)
Vesbians (TOS - Devil's Bargain)

Halanans, Ramurans and Terrellians all have the same double-pointed ears.

Brunali and Species 10026 have the same vertical ridge on their forehead and nose.

As far as I know, Edoans and Triexians were never said to be related. They are just two three-legged species that sometimes get confused for each other.

 

[Idran]

and maybe Bajorans, assuming the weird, never-explained power of Bajoran monks to read people's paghs by grabbing their ears is some sort of psi ability rather than just cold reading dressed up with mumbo-jumbo.

We saw one of the Prophets do it to Sisko in the vision from "Sacrifice of Angels" and specifically comment on his pagh; that might be a sign that it's a Prophet-related thing? (It could be them doing a thing Sisko is familiar with the way the rest of those visions go too, but it was the Kira prophet that did it, not a vedek or Winn prophet, so I think it could go either way.)

I suspect the Talarians from "Suddenly Human" (and The Struggle Within) are some sort of Klingon offshoot, perhaps seeded by the Preservers or some similar group. They're pretty similar, a warlike people with bumpy foreheads.

We do have prior reference to seeded Klingons from the Errand trilogy, which could be circumstantial evidence in favor of that.

 

[Stevil2001]

I tend to think the Ocampa are also likely descendants of the Vulcanoid Arretians (which I assume to be Henoch's people). Whereas I figure the more humanlike Arretians (Sargon and Thalassa's people) are probably the ancestors of telepathic races like Betazoids and Deltans [...]

Is there something that indicates there are multiple Arretian species? (It's been a long time since I saw "Return to Tomorrow.")

 

[Enterprise1701]

On that note I guess I'll also put in my list of long-lost colonies:

humans:
North Star (ENT - "North Star" and TTN - Sight Unseen)
Magna Roma (TOS - "Bread and Circuses" and The Fall - The Poisoned Chalice)
Amerind (TOS - "The Paradise Syndrome")
unnamed planet (VOY - "The 37's")

 

[Enterprise1701]

For that matter, I've never liked the idea that Arretian colonists could have survived to the modern day to become human, Vulcans, etc. Assuming that, for instance, Earth's fossil record is more or less the same in Star Trek as in real life (pending future discoveries beyond 2016), wouldn't it make more sense for humans to have evolved naturally?

I tend to think the Ocampa are also likely descendants of the Vulcanoid Arretians (which I assume to be Henoch's people). Whereas I figure the more humanlike Arretians (Sargon and Thalassa's people) are probably the ancestors of telepathic races like Betazoids and Deltans -- and maybe Bajorans, assuming the weird, never-explained power of Bajoran monks to read people's paghs by grabbing their ears is some sort of psi ability rather than just cold reading dressed up with mumbo-jumbo.

I thought that was just some religious woo.

Is there something that indicates there are multiple Arretian species? (It's been a long time since I saw "Return to Tomorrow.")

Sargon and Thalassa were said to be from a rival faction to Henoch's. DTI - Watching the Clock has extrapolated this to mean that the Arret Empire was composed of two main cooperative species.

 

[Extrocomp]

For that matter, I've never liked the idea that Arretian colonists could have survived to the modern day to become human, Vulcans, etc. Assuming that, for instance, Earth's fossil record is more or less the same in Star Trek as in real life (pending future discoveries beyond 2016), wouldn't it make more sense for humans to have evolved naturally?

The novel Spock's World implies that Vulcans evolved naturally on Vulcan. There is a chapter from the POV of "Wanderer", the first Vulcan to invent language.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Vulcanoids
Fri'slen (ENT - Kobayashi Maru)

Hmm. Should they count as a species in their own right or something more like Liberated Borg? The Fri'slen don't even independently reproduce, do they?

As far as I know, Edoans and Triexians were never said to be related. They are just two three-legged species that sometimes get confused for each other.

Hmm. I guess that is so, and I misremembered.

The novel Spock's World implies that Vulcans evolved naturally on Vulcan. There is a chapter from the POV of "Wanderer", the first Vulcan to invent language.

There's a depiction I prefer, though Spock's World is not compatible with the modern novels.

 

[Christopher]

We saw one of the Prophets do it to Sisko in the vision from "Sacrifice of Angels" and specifically comment on his pagh; that might be a sign that it's a Prophet-related thing? (It could be them doing a thing Sisko is familiar with the way the rest of those visions go too, but it was the Kira prophet that did it, not a vedek or Winn prophet, so I think it could go either way.)

Prophet visions are symbolic. The original idea was that it was the observer's own mind that was providing the personas and settings from their own memory as analogies, the only way the human mind could interpret the profound alienness of the wormhole aliens. For instance, Sisko saw their aggressive element as Locutus on the Saratoga viewscreen, their inquisitive element as Jake at the fishing hole or the ballpark, etc. The wormhole aliens weren't choosing the visions; as they told Sisko, it was his own mind that kept bringing him back to Jennifer's death. So the vision is filtered through the observer's own life experience and expectations. Sisko experienced it as the Prophet grabbing his ear because that was something he'd seen Bajoran clerics do when reading a pagh, so that was the image his brain assigned to that event. (Although the original concept of the wormhole aliens was compromised badly when the later writers decided to treat them as literal gods and made them enormously more ordinary.)

But I just find it frustrating that they never addressed the question of what the ear-grabbing thing really is. Do Bajorans actually have some kind of psi powers? That's a big thing to leave dangling.

Is there something that indicates there are multiple Arretian species? (It's been a long time since I saw "Return to Tomorrow.")

That's my own extrapolation as presented in Watching the Clock. Spock said in RtT that the Arretians' colonization could explain anomalies in Vulcan prehistory, suggesting that they're the ancestors of Vulcanoids; but I've always figured that the Arretian diaspora could explain the origin of the many more human-looking aliens, and I'd already suggested in Ex Machina that the Fabrini were Arretian-descended. So I had the idea, why not have two species? After all, I resist the lazy racial essentialism that Trek tends to fall into, the kneejerk assumption that every species is monocultural and every culture is single-species. There's no reason an interstellar culture couldn't have members of two or more species. So making Arret a multispecies civilization let me reconcile the origin theories.

For that matter, I've never liked the idea that Arretian colonists could have survived to the modern day to become human, Vulcans, etc. Assuming that, for instance, Earth's fossil record is more or less the same in Star Trek as in real life (pending future discoveries beyond 2016), wouldn't it make more sense for humans to have evolved naturally?

Anne Mulhall did explicitly say in "Return to Tomorrow" that "our studies indicate that life on our planet, Earth, evolved independently." So the episode itself ruled out the Arretians as humanity's ancestors (thank goodness -- I loathe the ancient-astronaut "life here began out there" cliche).

The novel Spock's World implies that Vulcans evolved naturally on Vulcan. There is a chapter from the POV of "Wanderer", the first Vulcan to invent language.

It's possible that the Vulcans could be a hybrid of the Arretian settlers and an indigenous humanoid race. Long ago, I had a theory that the smooth-headed Klingons were a hybrid of native Klingons and Arretian settlers, while the bumpy-headed Klingons were the unhybridized indigenous species.

 

[Extrocomp]

Caitians and Kzinti/Ferasans

Kzinti and Ferasans are not the same species. Kzinti females are non-sentient, while Ferasan females are fully sentient.

However, Kzinti and Ferasans seem to be mutually exclusive. Worlds of the Federation says the Caitians are a Kzinti colonization group, while STO says the Caitians are a Ferasan colonization group.

 

[Jinn]

STO says the Caitians are a Ferasan colonization group.

Wasn't it the other way around, or am I just misremembering?

 

[Christopher]

Kzinti and Ferasans are not the same species. Kzinti females are non-sentient, while Ferasan females are fully sentient.

The topic is related species, so they don't have to be the same species. Indeed, in The Ringworld Engineers, IIRC, we saw that the Kzinti population that had been seeded on the Ringworld had sapient females. Apparently Kzinti males genetically engineered the females into a subsentient form, and the ones on the Ringworld were seeded before that happened.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Vulcanoids
Fri'slen (ENT - Kobayashi Maru)

Hmm. Should they count as a species in their own right or something more like Liberated Borg? The Fri'slen don't even seem to have independent reproductive capabilities of their own.

Kzinti and Ferasans are not the same species. Kzinti females are non-sentient, while Ferasan females are fully sentient.

However, Kzinti and Ferasans seem to be mutually exclusive. Worlds of the Federation says the Caitians are a Kzinti colonization group, while STO says the Caitians are a Ferasan colonization group.

The Ferasans would have been named "Kzinti" if not for legal issues. And not withstanding that more than a century has passed in-universe since TAS for a species with genetic engineering capability, STO has taken several liberties on the specifics of some species.

Wasn't it the other way around, or am I just misremembering?

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Caitian
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Ferasan

 

[JD]

I was actually just wondering how many different races split off from the Vulcans when the future Romulans left. Going the this thread there were even more than I thought, although I guess it's possible some of those were set up by the Preservers or through other means before the Sundering.

 

[flandry84]

I have always had the idea that the Nova Romans(Bread and circuses) were probably of human stock,lifted and relocated much like the 37's.

 

[Enterprise1701]

I was actually just wondering how many different races split off from the Vulcans when the future Romulans left. Going the this thread there were even more than I thought, although I guess it's possible some of those were set up by the Preservers or through other means before the Sundering.

Well the Remans and Watraii all split off from the same proto-Romulan exiles/colonists. As for the Kenisians, the characters in Crisis of Consciousness are not certain, citing a forgotten pre-Time of Awakening adventure/colonization expedition or the Preservers as two possibilities. Splintering from the Romulans is also mentioned, with Enterprise crewmembers noting similarities between the Kenisian language and weapon aesthetic and their Romulan counterparts. The story focuses on matters of the present, so it's left a mystery.

 

[Jinn]

http://sto.gamepedia.com/Caitian
http://sto.gamepedia.com/Ferasan

The STO Wiki suggests that the group known as Ferasans in the 25th century were genetically engineered and forced the group now known as Caitians to leave their home world, after being augmented so in a sense you could say that the Caitians are the "original" species, though the Ferasans remained on their original homeworld.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Thanks to a fun scene in "The Lost Years" novel, the Arcturian clones (of ST:TMP) would seem to be related to the bulbous-nosed, large-eared alien whom McCoy meets in the bar in ST III. I have often speculated about the possible connection between the bar alien and TMP's Arcturians, due to JM Dillard's novel, in which an Arcturian has identical speech patterns to the bar alien. And they have similar ears and noses, I reckon. The droopy skin flaps (TMP) are an attribute of cloning?


Arcturians all? by Ian McLean, on Flickr

 

[Extrocomp]

The novel Spock's World implies that Vulcans evolved naturally on Vulcan. There is a chapter from the POV of "Wanderer", the first Vulcan to invent language.

It's possible that the Vulcans could be a hybrid of the Arretian settlers and an indigenous humanoid race. Long ago, I had a theory that the smooth-headed Klingons were a hybrid of native Klingons and Arretian settlers, while the bumpy-headed Klingons were the unhybridized indigenous species.

While looking through the Wanderer chapter of Spock's World, I noticed an interesting sentence:
They were hominids, of a kind that would have been familiar to any modern xenoanthropologist; perhaps "seeded" on Vulcan by that strange peripatetic species called the Preservers, perhaps not.

I don't understand why the origins of the Vulcan race is such a mystery. If they aren't native to Vulcan, then their DNA won't match most other life-forms on Vulcan.

I found some more examples of related races:

Ferengi and Dopterians (DS9 - The Forsaken)

Sivaoans and Eeiauoans (TOS - Uhura's Song)

Devernians and Aronnians (TOS - Where Sea Meets Sky)

Lyrans and Mirak (Starfleet Command: Volume II: Empires at War)

Humans and Centaurians (Worlds of the Federation)

Humans and Tiburons (Worlds of the Federation)

Centaurians and Neural natives (Worlds of the Federation)