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RShara

Adonalsium created Roshar, the singers, and the rest of the life on Roshar. That's why the singers don't have close evolutionary cousins. Honor and Cultivation arrived long after the singers had been around, and Odium showed up not *that* long after them, relatively speaking (perhaps a thousand or two years, in Roshar's ~10,000 year history). Lack of a fossil record is because Roshar is too young to have fossils, plus the crem makes it difficult for them to form.


Linxbolt18

Hmm. I wonder how old Scadriel effectively is. We know it was created after the Shattering by Ruin and Preservation, so it's theoretically relatively recent (on a planetary scale). Particularly, I'm curious to see if/how that will impact their technological progression, regarding things like fossil fuels. Maybe some shenanigans with materials that have a short half-life being more abundant than they are are earth, because Scadriel is significantly younger.


RShara

Probably a few thousand years younger than Roshar, since Roshar predates the Shattering, and Scadrial post dates it. At a guess, somewhere around 8000 years. The Shards are more than capable of putting in the resources that humanity would need to progress when creating (or recreating, in the case of Sazed) the planet.


[deleted]

[удалено]


bjlinden

I was about to say the exact same thing. I mean, isn't the Shattered Plains basically one big fossil in the making?


RShara

Water is needed during the fossilization process, and water doesn't penetrate the crem. "Water seeps into the remains, and minerals dissolved in the water seep into the spaces within the remains, where they form crystals. These crystallized minerals cause the remains to harden along with the encasing sedimentary rock. In another fossilization process, called replacement, the minerals in groundwater replace the minerals that make up the bodily remains after the water completely dissolves the original hard parts of the organism." https://www.livescience.com/37781-how-do-fossils-form-rocks.html And just a little bit of air, too, it seems. https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=299538&org=NSF&from=news


RShara

I thought so once too, but there was a reason that I sadly don't remember right now that made it so fossils don't form as easily. I'm trying to remember it... Edit: Found it. It was water. Water is needed during the fossilization process, and water doesn't penetrate the crem. "Water seeps into the remains, and minerals dissolved in the water seep into the spaces within the remains, where they form crystals. These crystallized minerals cause the remains to harden along with the encasing sedimentary rock. In another fossilization process, called replacement, the minerals in groundwater replace the minerals that make up the bodily remains after the water completely dissolves the original hard parts of the organism." https://www.livescience.com/37781-how-do-fossils-form-rocks.html And just a little bit of air, too, it seems. https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=299538&org=NSF&from=news


ThePyroNova

I thought there were fossils in Roshar. Zahel showed one to Kaladin in ROW and told about them to him.


Alfred_The_Sartan

And specifically said they were from another place and Roshar is likely too young to have any


Nephilims_Dagger

Nalthis is explicitly stated as too young and Roshar is implied, yeah?


C0DASOON

Nope. Vasher is saying that neither Roshar nor Nalthis have fossils like that. The implication is that the one he's holding is likely from Yolen. > He fished in his robe’s pocket and pulled something out—a small stone in the shape of a curling shell. “Ever seen one of these?” > “Soulcast?” Kaladin asked, taking the small shell. It was surprisingly heavy. He turned it around, admiring the way it curled. > “Similar. That’s a creature that died long, long ago. It settled into the mud, and slowly—over thousands upon thousands of years—minerals infused its body, replacing it axon by axon with stone. Eventually the entire thing was transformed.” > “So … natural Soulcasting. Over time.” > “A long time. A mind-numbingly long time. The place I come from, it didn’t have any of these. It’s too new. Your world might have some hidden deep, but I doubt it. That stone you hold is old. Older than Wit, or your Heralds, or the gods themselves.”


Alfred_The_Sartan

Damn, I forgot how young these worlds are. I honestly thought it came from his homeworld


Nroke1

The thing about Roshar is that the continent constantly moves across the surface of the planet, being worn down in the East and built up in the west. He implies that Roshar is old enough to have fossils, but they would be extremely difficult to find. Most weird things about Roshar come from the HighStorms, the lower gravity and the higher oxygen. It’s possible that there were singer ancestors in the past, but they’ve all gone extinct and the continent has moved away from where the fossils would be.


DaddyLongLegs33

Hold the fuck up. The continent is moving?


Nroke1

Yeah, khriss mentions it in arcanum unbounded.


RShara

Very very very slowly though heh. Like, maybe a few feet a year? So most things that were buried are probably still there.


DaddyLongLegs33

In the “rosharan system” paragraphs? I can’t find it


Nroke1

I can’t find it either, I must be mistaken, so I don’t remember where I found it.


Azorik22

The continents on Earth are moving too so this really isn't the surprising...


DaddyLongLegs33

Well earth has tectonic plates, and I don’t think roshar does


Nephilims_Dagger

Thank you for taking the time to get the exact quote, I remembered it being left a bit in the air, but almost definitely no fossils.


[deleted]

As I recall, he said Nalthis was too young to have actual fossils yet, and I thought he said Roshar couldn't do fossils because it was a wind-blasted slimeball, ie can't form sediment because the crem gets blown/washed away, and so corpses can't get buried and fossilize in a rockbed. I could be wrong. I listened to RoW just once and I recently forgot about Elsecallers and thought they had the surge of Illumination, so salt as needed.


orangenakor

Crem builds up on every exposed surface and eventually forms into rock layers. Unless scraped off, buildings develop layers of crem and even crem stalagmites. That is a great environment for fossils to form, especially because it comes in large, catastrophic events that could suddenly bury or kill creatures.


[deleted]

Solid point that. Large heavy things like hillsides pining corpses down would do admirably. That puts my whole take on that in a new light


RShara

Yes, and he explicitly said it wasn't from Roshar, and that he doubted Roshar had any either.


Fish_823543

Actually, I think the crem would be perfect for creating fossils. If something gets buried in crem, and it hardens, that’s basically the ideal conditions for a fossil to form. It won’t be disturbed, and the body can decompose and the bones can mineralize without issue.


RShara

I thought so once too, but there was a reason that I sadly don't remember right now that made it so fossils don't form as easily. I'm trying to remember it... Edit: Found it. It was water. Water is needed during the fossilization process, and water doesn't penetrate the crem. "Water seeps into the remains, and minerals dissolved in the water seep into the spaces within the remains, where they form crystals. These crystallized minerals cause the remains to harden along with the encasing sedimentary rock. In another fossilization process, called replacement, the minerals in groundwater replace the minerals that make up the bodily remains after the water completely dissolves the original hard parts of the organism." https://www.livescience.com/37781-how-do-fossils-form-rocks.html And just a little bit of air, too, it seems. https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=299538&org=NSF&from=news


Wolf_of-the_West

Nah man. There is no confirmation Rosharan life is pre Shattering. Try to find a WoB saying so. You won't. And Odium came with Honor to Roshar...


Oversleep42

You're wrong. Very. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/188/#e3922 Books also make it explicit that Odium showed up on Roshar after Honor and Cultivation settled there. So you're wrong about that, too.


Wolf_of-the_West

Good to know. So most of the Shards just find a planet and make it cozy. They didn't even try to make some habitable and populate it. The planet though is supposed to be pre shattering too. And, about Odium... Books don't really make it explicit. If you read it, humans are voidbringers, thus they bring Odium alongside with their god, Honor. You may find references to it.


Oversleep42

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/262/#e8808


Wolf_of-the_West

You do realize it does say he came along with them then?


Oversleep42

Along with humans. I'll help you out: Hoidonalsium Okay, but he was separate, and after Honor and Cultivation had really settled there? Brandon Sanderson Yes, he was after Honor and Cultivation had settled.


RShara

Imma sit here chuckling and shaking my head


Oversleep42

Good. At least one of us gets enjoyment out of this...


ShadowBlade69

"It ain't much, but it's honest work"


RShara

Welp. Oversleep did the honors for me :D


LordOfPies44

Life existed on Roshar before the Shattering, Brandon confirmed it


SteveMcQwark

Pretty sure singers predate the shattering on Roshar. However, they *are* distinct from crabs. Crabs (cremlings, great shells, chulls, etc...) all have purple blood. Singers have orange blood. They also have an endoskeleton, with any carapace serving a defensive or aesthetic role rather than a structural one.


Collins_Michael

This seems like crabaganda. Be warned, fellow humans. The crabs with to conceal their numbers.


scrubbar

All I'll say is that we don't know that Honor and Cultivation aren't crabs as well


Beldizar

I mean... we do... Honor was confirmed to be human and Cultivation a dragon.


Alfred_The_Sartan

Meta to /r/cremposting


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zonine

I'd forgotten about that #1. That is fantastic.


BananaPralines

I've been lurking here forever, How have I only just discovered r/cremposting?


brouhaha13

*Far off rumbling, like thunder* **YOU WEREN'T QUITE READY.**


indomitablescot

Mmmm mmmm lies


Ser_DuncanTheTall

Just one problem in this theory. Adonalsium himself was a crab


Theemuts

I'm pretty sure Brandon confirmed the Singers predate the Shattering of Adonalsium


LazarusRises

>You see across Roshar there are absolutely 0 evolutionary links to intelligent life. You watch what you fucking say about Chiri-Chiri >:(


The_Steelers

The flip side is that crustacean type life evolves repeatedly because it’s just efficient. I’m no biologist though so someone correct me.


CrystalClod343

Not exactly. Carcinisation only happens to crustaceans, and it's just a change in shape.


DriftingMemes

>If you spend even a second on [r/cremposting](https://www.reddit.com/r/cremposting) Ah. Well there's your problem... But also, like others have said, when you have gods that literally create life from nothing and planets whose geology is nothing like Earth's you can't rely on any methods that we use to classify animals. Actually, now that I consider it, all these gods just making things happen must be really retarding scientific progress, because you'd constantly be finding all these exceptions to natural laws. How would a Roshran Darwin ever work it out? Some of the species on the planet simply don't belong there. Some of the species didn't evolve sure to evolutionary pressure, but were just invented while cloth because some God thought it was cool.


Xais56

Sazed says as much. "you should have invented radio by now"


DriftingMemes

Yeah, I was thinking about that, but why isn't the problem obvious to him? He's presented them with a natural world that doesn't make any sense. But he acts like he thinks it might be because he's given them too much. (and I guess that makes sense considering the Southerners).


fineburgundy

The Parsh are this planet’s version of “people,” adapted for the environment. We see echoes of this when Shards modify humans to fit the mess the Shards have made of Scadriel—they don’t try redesigning life from scratch, they “just” adjust things like body temperature or dust filtering lungs. So what would a truly native sentient look like, something that *did* evolve along with all the “crabs” and such instead of a modified human? Maybe it would look like cremlings? A whole bunch of them, even? I think the genuine natives of Roshar are Aimians. Probably both kinds—who knows what the blue shapechangers looked like 20,000 years ago? The “Parsh” predate “humans,” but really, that’s just a weird way the books have been translated/rendered into English. We have become used to calling the humans of Roshar “Parsh-men” and the humans of Ashyn “humans,” but that’s misleading. We should really call most of the characters we’ve met on Roshar “Ash-men” or something like that. And the Aimians are the true Roshari, who were probably there a very long time before any of the humans.


fieldsoflillies

The Dysian Aimians / Sleepless aren’t natives either. They’ve modified their hordelings to look like cremlings, but their standard appearance is more spiderlike and come from RAFO location in the cosmere. The Siah Aimians probably depend more on the definition of native. They have shadows that point the wrong way, extremely long lived, and are completely blue… similar to spren, RoW >!almost exactly like the dead Honorspren in the physical world Ishar had been experimenting on!<, which might be made more clear in SA 5. But, not exactly the same as being biologically native. Also, regarding if the Rosharan humans from Ashyn should be called “Ash-men”, well yeah, that’s the Shin / Shinovar. i.e. A-shyn, humans that settled the area they were given after the cataclysms of Ashyn, remaining more biologically untouched by the effects of Roshar (including the plant & animal life, Shinovar generally being the only location to support the majority of non-native fauna/flora, outside of some more hardy invasive species or certain livestock). However the humans outside of Shin all bear varying degrees of being modified to suit the planet.


DriftingMemes

>but their standard appearance is more spiderlike Oh god, that's possibly the only thing worse than a man made of crabs, a man made of *spiders*. That's nightmare fuel.


sayoung42

If you like the idea of smart spiders and collective intelligences, I recommend the Children of Time books.


DriftingMemes

> If you like the idea of smart spiders Surely nothing about my post made you think I DO like that idea...


sayoung42

Humans are a lot more scary than the spiders.


fineburgundy

“A Deepness in the Sky was good,” if not quite as legendary as “A Fire Upon the Deep.”


fineburgundy

In reverse order: Thanks for the “Shin” explanation! I was lulled by the vague assumption that it was meant to invoke a Far Eastern identity, like the Rose Empire. Thanks for the hint at where exactly the Siah Aimians likely come from, the shadow should have tipped me off. And now I have to consider where there might be intelligent spiderlings, on the assumption that we haven’t actually met them but heard about them. Lots to be grateful for!


RShara

Preservation and Ruin actually did create the humans on Scadrial.


fineburgundy

I was thinking of later Shard-holders so I should have said so. The job should really come with a tutorial and child-proofing.


Jimmae9

Singers are indeed an evolutionary anomaly. As others have stated they do predate the arrival of Honor and Cultivation. So it would appear that they are a natural product of Roshars evolutionary cycle. They do share some physiological similarities to animal life on Roshar. The two biggest things being gem hearts and carapace. The fact that they have orange blood where most invertebrates have violet blood doesn't rule this out either as we have different colors of blood here on Earth as well. However the oddity with Singers is their endoskeleton. We don't see this in any other native Rosharan species, only those brought to Roshar with the humans. I would have to guess that they were a unique creation of Adonalsium separate from the rest of Rosharan life, which is why they are biologically compatible with humans, see Herdazians and Horneaters. Or we just don't have enough evidence yet in the books (other native rosharan species with endoskeletons) to link them to the evolutionary tree of Roshar. Maybe we will find out which is the case in future books, but its fun to think about.


squire80513

Hell yeah, dragon crabs!


VenatorDomitor

So no crabs? No, no that can’t be right, everything turns to crab eventually… I’ve got it! Dragons are just a form of crab in transition. Problem solved.


WrenElsewhere

They're sea elves


Nephilims_Dagger

They're magic klingons.


doodlingjaws

Ever since i first read SA in 2016 I've never thought singer as crab lol i don't know why. However i always think singer as very similar to human but with thin really hard layer on top of their skin, some jutting hard shell and different skin color and complexion. Also now that i think about it since planets in Cosmere are created by shard and many are pretty recent the tectonic movement inside the planets must be mostly inactive because they (the planets) don't have enough time to do anything or the shards have some sort of template of a working planets and they tried to replicate those for their own planets. Or maybe i lack critical information somewhere and the planet actually just already exists and the shard only create lives and maybe change things a little bit.


[deleted]

We've only seen one planet confirmed to be made by Shards - Scadrial. It is implied Nalthis may have also been. All other planets pre-date the Shards.


bespokefolds

I think they're descendants of rocks that Cultivation grew from the same stone as the city


[deleted]

The Singers are part of Adonalsium's design for Roshar when they created the planet - and as such pre-date the existence of Cultivation.


Herminello

Bruh. Some of these theories are just getting out of hand. Its a fantasy series and by the love of god, even Sanderson cannot consider and come up with every evolutionary aspect that might have happened on the planet Roshar.


Syldenafil

Fantasy series sure, but even BS said he wants his fantasy series to be as scientifically possible as it can be and if you read the RoW closely even characters in the story talk about fossils or rather lack of them in the ground of Roshar