The shape of it
The picture everybody carries is a line. One thing becoming another, in order, arriving at us.
What this account describes has a different shape, and it happens twice.
First it branches. The reptilians destroyed the Lyran world, and the Lyrans scattered instead of fighting. Refugees, in every direction, across the whole galaxy. From that dispersal came the Pleiadians, the Orions, the Sirians, the Arcturians, and the rest of the humanoid races, each of them settling somewhere and becoming its own people.
Then it gathers. Those races came here, and what formed on this planet were the Lemurians and the Atlanteans.
Both of them were hybrid peoples themselves. Each is called a root race, and each contained seven sub-races with their own countries and their own periods. Finyet says the Atlanteans were more than one species, welcomed here from different parts of the galaxy.
And both stayed open to the galaxy the whole time they existed. Ships arrived, people came and went, and material kept entering. Lemuria and Atlantis were junctions rather than closed countries, and the exchange ran for millions of years.
Then it gathers again. Local hominin stock from Africa. Over twenty extraterrestrial races, with something like seven of them major: Pleiadian, Orion, Sirian, Arcturian, Lyran, Anunnaki, and the reptilian lines. The two resident peoples, Lemurian and Atlantean, each of them already a mixture. And later the parahumans, crossing with us across hundreds of thousands of years.
All of that came together into one species.
And ours closed
The gathering that made us went further than any of the others, because we killed everybody else.
We killed the Neanderthals. We killed the Denisovans. Five more parahuman peoples went the same way, and they survive now only as fragments inside living genomes. The Lemurians were reduced to remnants. The Atlanteans lost their country and what was left of them departed.
So on this planet, whatever those peoples were, they exist now inside us. Their own kind continue out in the galaxy. Here, we are what is left of them.
Which makes this species the place where a very long branching came back together and stopped.
Accident or breakthrough
Both, and the reason sits in what was being asked for.
The operators wanted a workforce, and three things were wanted in it at once. Those three pull against each other.
The workforce had to survive here and multiply. Compatible with the air, the water, the gravity and the diseases of this planet, and able to breed replacements without supervision.
It had to be manageable. Which is what the closing of telepathy was for, and the disposition toward gods, and everything else the operators built in.
And it had to be aggressive enough to spread. A docile workforce stays where it is put. A workforce that takes ground has to want the ground.
That third condition is the difficult one, because aggression on that scale requires insensitivity. Insensitivity to the country being taken, so that stripping it registers as nothing. And insensitivity to the people being taken from, so that their loss arrives as information.
And the closing of telepathy supplied all of it. That one operation made the workforce manageable, because a people that speaks can be divided and misled. It made them insensitive to each other, because the pain of another arrives as words instead of as pain. And what replaced the telepathy was language, which on the evidence in the previous chapter came from the birds.
So one change produced obedience and ruthlessness together. Manageable upward, and pitiless outward.
Which is why it took so many attempts. Ten species in one valley, and hundreds of thousands of engineered beings in the Atlantean fields, and the seven parahuman peoples, and whatever else was made across a continent that dissolves bone.
Most of them met two conditions and failed the third.
And when all three arrived together in one line, that line spread across every continent and destroyed or absorbed everybody else, within two hundred thousand years.
Where that leaves us
We were made, in an occupied world, at the edge of it, out of material gathered from across a galaxy.
The making was finished around two hundred and fifty thousand years ago.
And the work continued.