Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-4830106-20130810030606/@comment-24891101-20140607195222

That would be my theory, if not for having the sneaking suspicion that the timeline of Remnant is much shorter than megayears. Things that factor into this impression:

Opening narration:

"...we are remnants, byproducts, of a forgotten past."

"Man, born from dust ... 'was born into an unforgiving world'"

This suggests that the Creatures of Grimm were there before man, and that man arose in a more mythologically sudden way, than by evolution, on Remnant. The Biblical allusion is clear.

Moreover, the explicit existence of souls beyond mere consciousness indicates a different metaphysics. In my book, the soul is equivalent to consciousness, self awareness, and represents merely some threshold for neural interconnectedness beyond which the architecture is self-aware. Because of the difficulty of pinning down that point in mankind's evolutionary history, and, more specifically, when we became smart enough to become an apex predator. At least culturally, it seems that the conflict between Man and the CoG is based on the presence and absence of the soul, so positing a human evolutionary history on Remnant is problematic. Man seems to have come into existence in the present form, such that they are, right off the bat, hunted by the CoG and smart enough to reasonably quickly find a weapon to counter them. I'm having difficulty seeing CoG not hunting say, H. erectus to extinction. And when would H. sapiens faunus have split, and whence the radical polymorphism?

From the beginning, I wondered whether actual animals existed, apart from the CoG. With no mention or presence thereof early on, it seemed more poetic, that man was born into a world where literally everything that moved was metaphysically bent on his extinction. With the advent of the Faunus, and the confirmation of the existence of animals, the picture grew more complicated. Still, the unnatural birth of Man seems likely, given the name of the planet, and the first bit I quoted. Man arose accidentally, and unintentionally. I'm sitting here half-awaiting the massive sci-fi reveal, where the world suddenly gets much weirder (like the Elder Scrolls deuterocanon material, boy is that a wild ride) and the CoG are suddenly an alien experiment that yielded humans as well, or some crazy shit.

And I also have serious doubts about the applicability of biology to the CoG. They don't seem to be alive in the conventional sense. My thoughts on that are elsewhere.

Sorry for the disorganization.