After Man After Man - A one-off scenario.

 Hello again,

I have been a little quiet on here, from putting my backlog of Aion stuff and other things together into some coherent shapes in order to make them into project-websites. But I'm back in order to share with you a fun idea I recently had, that could go without being drawn.'

A much maligned but classic book in Speculative Evolution as a genre is Dougal Dixon's "Man After Man". Criticized as being rather unfeasible, and often downright uncanny, it is nevertheless influential in the genre of post humans, following in the footsteps of Olaf Stapleton, and inspiring the likes of Memo Kosemen. It was dogged by some issues of theft of intellectual property, of which there is some backstory that remains a closely guarded confidence among some people in this profession.

Regardless of that, it was an influential book in my upbringing as a child, an aspiring speculative-zoologist and creature designer. Thanks to my boyfriend I eventually got my own copy in good shape.

 But to the meat of this post. The final section of the book shows an irradiated and ruined earth in which very little life remains, and virtually none on the surface. Around thermal smokers at the bottom of the ocean, chemotrophic bacteria gives rise to an ecosystem of invertebrates that are fed upon by the very last of man's descendants. This is a blind creature descended from the merman-like Aquatics, having non-functioning eyes and sensing heat and light through a hypertrophied pineal gland. It is speculated by Dixon that after the earth heals, this creature may be part of a comeback of life that spreads from the ocean to land again. 

And so we set our scene.

10 million years after the final chapter of Man After Man, the world has healed sufficiently. The oceans teem profusely with growths of macro-algae and plankton, the isopod crustaceans, jellies and mollusks of the sea-floor smokers have left descendants throughout the oceans. On land is a burgeoning garden of terrestrial algae that varies from microbial mats to land-plants that convergently resemble the first liverworts and mosses, apart from growing much bigger. In freshwater-marginal habitats, the shores are encrusted with semi-terrestrial bivalves and anthozoa, and on land terrestrial isopod crustaceans, snails and slugs teem in the undergrowth, varying in size from as small as a full-stop to as large as a dinner-plate. Through this new Eden strolls a descendant of the last vertebrate, mammal, primate and human, the Adamite. Descended from merfolk-like, aquatic deep-water humans, its ancestors lack of lungs or nostrils has necessitated the gill system to become a new analogue of a lung. Atrophied eyes have atavistically become stronger and more complex, and a terminal anus in the same place that Homo sapiens once had, serves to void waste past a comical set of buttocks. The face is covered in mechanoreceptors, taste-buds, and temperature sensitive pits, and bristles with sensory whiskers, buried in its fleshy face is a large pineal eye passed down from its immediate ancestor. The forelimbs and tail-array of its ancestor have regained their function as a set of ambulatory limbs, more or less, and manipulation of food is done with a muscular set of nubs on the front of the mouth. No larger than a dog, and no smarter than a lemur, it scurries amongst the waist-high mosses and fungi, feeding on spore-bodies, microbial mats and invertebrates, which are processed with a generalized dentition consisting of piercing and cutting incisors, and molars with bunches of tall cusps.

This is the descendant of Homo sapiens, that was so long ago repurposed for the rewilding of the world, as an aquatic beast thriving for a time only to be wiped out when the descendants of civilized man made landfall once again on earth. Its immediate ancestor was among a few survivors in the ocean that overcame the near sterilization of earth's surface at the hand of Jimenez Smoot's descendants. Now, as the world has healed once again, this last of the vertebrates has potential to thrive and multiply, perhaps starting a whole new lineage of vertebrates. Is this man's last legacy?

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