New Hominids

27 Oct, 2025

Somewhere in the Black Hills National Forest of former South Dakota, an Unbound named the Howling Rustic was dissatisfied with the human population of Earth. Perhaps the humans would not worship it, or perhaps it found their worship insufficient. Whatever the reason, the Howling Rustic decided to introduce a new species of hominin which would glorify its name to its exacting standards. Thus the new hominids were made.

Although there is no single new hominid culture, all free new hominid groups share a history: their ancestors toiled in the Howling Rustic’s twilit domain until they managed to escape for more hospitable lands. That eldritch horror accelerates time around it, so that many generations pass in the Black Hills in the span it takes for one generation to pass in the rest of the world. The same amount of sunlight fell in these drawn-out years as fell in the rest of the world, so that land was dim and cold, relying on electric lighting and heating for their crops. Eventually, though, the circumstances were right, and thousands of the new hominids escaped, settling across the remaining free lands of North America.

When mundane humans first encountered the new hominids, most thought they had met primitive humans ripped from Earth’s past: Homo floresiensis, perhaps. Others believed the new people were hybrids between prehistoric humans and modern ones. These attitudes, and others, gave rise to various names: caveman, neanderthal, woodwoose, hobbit. While the new-comers did not how they were made any better than the mundane humans did, they insisted that they should be called new hominids.

The name new hominid is meant to suggest two things. First, whatever their origin, they're members of the family Hominidae, which includes humans along with great apes. The new hominids hope that a taxonomic perspective will remind mundane humans of their own status as animals evolved from apes. In fact, the word hominid once referred only to those members of the human lineage after the split with chimpanzees; although that is no longer scientific consensus, if they are not just a new kind of human, the new hominids at least want the mundane humans to know they are very close. The second thing the name is meant to suggest is that the new hominids aren't recovered from the past but are instead recently made: they are new hominids, not archaic or extinct hominids. Even if it turns out their genome was based on that of Homo floresiensis, they were modified and updated for modern North America. They aren't in any sense primitive humans.

Anatomically, the new hominids resemble modern humans more than anything else, but they have notable differences. Their body hair is coarser than humans', giving the impression of greater hairiness. They're significantly shorter than modern humans, with a new hominid mean height of 1.2 metres or 3’ 11”. For their height their legs are proportionately shorter, but their arms are proportionately longer, and they're typically poorer runners than mundane humans are. Like neanderthals, they have wider, barrel-shaped rib cages and a wider pelvis, giving them a somewhat stockier appearance. Their protruding brows and small chins resemble those of archaic humans well on their way to becoming modern ones. Where humans have an appendix, new hominids have a fully functioning cecum, allowing them to digest cellulose; although they're omnivores, they can survive on wholly herbivorous diets. In general, it's unlikely that a mundane human would confuse a group of new hominids for members of their own species after cursory inspection, and the inverse is also true.

New hominids seem cognitively similar to modern humans, and it's difficult to tell what behavioural differences are explained by culture rather than species, or how biology and culture might interact. One of the few examples of a cultural difference likely best explained by biology is their reduced interest in sexual exclusivity. New hominids tend not to couple up quite the way humans often do; instead, new hominids usually form romantic networks where each individual has two to four regular or semi-regular romantic partners. Most new hominid communities have the institution of marriage, but neither their men nor their women are normally monogamous. Although nearly all new hominid communities have some monogamous members, that's usually because they don’t care for any other prospective partners and not because they experience much sexual jealousy. Bisexuality is also much more common among new hominids, and few new hominid cultures have taboos against homosexuality. It remains unknown whether this is a difference in how new hominid brains are organized or whether it is the result of their polygynandry: having a wife is no impediment to a woman conceiving children if she also has a husband or two. In biological terms, if humans are mostly monogamous with some instances of polygamy, new hominids are polygynandrous with some instances of monogamy.

Despite their internal cultural diversity, new hominids in the Lakelands all draw on the same history: they or their ancestors left the Howling Rustic’s domain and migrated into more hospitable lands. They trace their culture back to grandparents or great-grandparents and what they brought with them out of that ancestral society or picked up along the way; even those new hominids born in the Lakelands, or whatever other territory the new hominids inhabit (and they now live as far west as Vancouver Island), claim their roots in that exodus. In recognition of these origins, most new hominids at least pay lip service to Amilsjatda, the animistic religion they brought out with them, even if they don’t embrace it whole-heartedly. Even those who practice other religions typically observe part of its funerary rite, saving and ornamenting the bones of deceased friends and family. They also brought out of the Black Hills Forest their own language and two genetically-engineered domestic species: sheep-goat hybrids they call bvabu and the silkgrass plant, a hardy, inedible grass which they stew to extract the long silk-like fibres in its stalks and leaves. Beyond these similarities, new hominid culture can broadly be divided into four types: farming, mining, herding, and fishing. All are present in the Lakelands, though the herding new hominids are far less common than the others.

Farming New Hominids

Farming new hominid communes often resemble mundane human rural settlements in their crops and agricultural methods, though they tend to rely equally on hoes and garden crops as they do on ploughs and field crops. They say they're descended from the farming estate, which held the lowest rung in the hierarchy of the Howling Rustic’s dictatorship. In contrast to these origins, farming new hominids most often hold and work their fields in common, ordering their towns along democratic socialist lines.

A particularly notable example of their sedentary culture is new hominid earthwork architecture. Farming new hominids often build sod houses and outbuildings reminiscent of the “soddies” built in the Canadian and American prairies in the 1800s and early 1900s; even in the Lakelands, where wood is plentiful, a farming new hominid’s timber-framed house is likely to have a sod-covered roof and to be dug partially into the ground. Sometimes they might plant a garden on top of their houses and public buildings in lieu of grass. Farming new hominids also to store food and goods in cellars, and stone-lined tunnels often connect the houses of extended family networks or of particularly friendly neighbours; what appears to be a few detached hovels may well turn out to conceal an underground complex built piecemeal over a few generations. Larger new hominid settlements might have moats and earthwork walls rather than the palisades, metal fences, or stone walls other people might build, and moats can do double duty as repositories for the new hominid’s extensive drainage systems. Their public buildings might also share this sort of construction, and tend to have many rambling additions rather than second stories. In general, they prefer to keep their buildings low, build down and out instead of up, and conserve land by putting gardens and walkways on building roofs. In regions where a high water table prevents this kind of architecture, new hominids might copy the designs of their sapient neighbours, repurpose pre-Arrival buildings, or use concrete and wooden pilings to seal basements and shore up foundations.

Of course the farming new hominids are not all farmers; instead, in the way of any farming settlement, their agricultural production supports a variety of industries, like carpentry and smithing, tailoring and entertainment. Like many rural communities, new hominid farming settlements are typically friendly with travelers but suspicious of new residents who might disrupt the status quo, and in general tend to be peaceable. When they take up arms, they prefer hunting rifles, slings, and melee weapons adapted from farming implements, like dirks, polearms, and sickles. Adventurous farming new hominids are more likely to get into minor mischief or start unsanctioned humanitarian projects than they are to take mercenary work.

Mining New Hominids

Like their farming cousins, mining new hominids are sedentary, but they gain the bulk of their food from trade with other peoples, complementing it with garden vegetables and game hunting. Mining new hominids instead build their communities around resource extraction sites: quarries, mines, gravel pits, salvageable ruins, or timber stands. They also usually process the extracted resources in their towns or cities with forges, smiths, masons, machine repair shops, sawmills, and so on. As they tell it, their ancestors came from the artisan and labourer estates of the Howling Rustic’s system, one group known for the quality of their work and the other known for the hazards of their labour; though the mining new hominids stress how scarred and short-lived their ancestors were, they cherish the skills they have inherited.

In imitation they say of their ancestors in the Black Hills, mining new hominids typically make their homes and public buildings underground or behind thick stone or cement walls: in upper reinforced mine shafts, on one face of a quarry, inside concrete bunkers. They are therefore also the most likely new hominids to invest in and maintain electric generators and electrical lighting; smoke makes fire a dangerous source of light and heat underground. Like their farming culture kin, they hold their housing and industrial facilities in common; however, their community governance tends to follow more centralized forms of socialism, and sometimes they have less scope for personal property than their farming kin.

Because they rely on other communities for food, mining hew hominids establish trade routes and sign trade agreements with as many of their neighbours as they reasonably can. They are especially eager to purchase necessary materials for brewing and distilling, and a common mining new hominid strategy for attracting travelling merchants is the operation of pubs and beer gardens on the edges of their settlements. Despite their reputation as hard-bitten and demanding, they're also known to welcome refugees and exiles, and to readily raise their longarms, warhammers, warpicks, and axes in defense of their allies.

Herding New Hominids

In contrast to the other two cultures, the herding and fishing new hominids are nomadic. Neither group traces their history to particular estates in the Howling Rustic’s society, though they suggest they come either from the managerial estates, from the estateless, or (in the case of the herders) the warrior estate. Either way, their culture is derived as much from what they learned in exodus as from what they brought out of their original lands.

Herding new hominids raise sheep, goats, bvabu, pigs, and more unusual livestock, and might ride ponies, drive refurbished pre-Arrival motor vehicles, or simply walk. They most often live in tents built of hide, canvas, or plastic tarpaulin, and they carry their few possessions with them, but some use camper trailers and others maintain networks of shacks or hideouts in pre-Arrival ruins for itinerant use. Most travel in large caravans some of the time and in smaller family groups the rest of the time; the new hominid practice of polygynandry means that such a family group can be much larger than a mundane human might expect, however. They tend far more toward anarchist or libertarian politics than their sedentary neighbours do, and while they don't have any notion of land ownership, they have a strict sense of private property regarding livestock and any goods a person might carry. There are no permanent herding culture towns in the Lakelands, though rumour has it there are a few in the former Canadian Prairies.

Herding new hominids often meet strangers with distrust, not hospitality, perhaps fearing the theft of their livestock. Honour and reputation are taken very seriously among them and caravans accept vigilantism, or naked vengeance, as a substitute for justice more often than other Lakelanders do. They carry handguns and cavalry swords when they can, and otherwise they typically use shortbows, whips, knives, crooks, and lassos if violence breaks out. Because of repeated conflicts between the herding new hominids and the settlements they encounter, more than a few Lakelands think of the herders as little better than raiders; their enthusiasm for facial piercings and ornamental scarification also contribute to the stereotype. Although that perception is of course unfair, it has been exacerbated in the last twenty years by a notorious new hominid caravan that has taken to banditry.

Fishing Hew Hominids

Like the herding culture, the fishing new hominids are nomadic and believe in private property but not land ownership; unlike the herders, they do not manage their own livestock but instead travel along rivers and lakes, fishing as the seasons dictate. Although some fishing new hominids walk, ride, or drive, and while many of them camp ashore in tents, many others travel along waterways in houseboats. From time to time they might settle for a few years in one place, building up a rudimentary fishing settlement; often a family of fishing new hominids will remain stationary in order to maintain a series of locks, a portage, or equipment too big to move but necessary for a fishing-related industry. Otherwise they remain mobile.

Fishing is seasonal and not always productive enough to feed the entire culture, so fishing new hominids often learn other trades which can be practiced on boats or in temporary winter settlements, and exchange the goods they make with the people they encounter in their travels. This leads to an open and friendly culture and, like the farming new hominids, they tend to avoid violence. Some carry shotguns to scare off dangerous beasts, those who don't will probably, if they have no other choice, improvise with what they have at hand: fishing spears, weighted nets, cleavers, fillet knives, boat hooks, paddles, or skillets. Because groups aren't tied to a particular herd of livestock, they're also not as tightly bound together; so long as an individual has a boat, a tent, and a spear or pole, they can travel by themselves for little while, or drift between groups for the purposes of gossip, apprenticeship, or courting. It’s through this travel that most new relationships are formed and most knowledge is distributed.

Of course, having a few established settlements can make it easier to flirt, spread news, and learn trades. There are probably not quite two dozen permanent fishing new hominid settlements in the entire world, most of them on the shores of lakes good for ice fishing, and each of these towns is an important centre of justice, archives, and ceremony for the fishing new hominids of a very wide region. Festivals held in these communities are the highlight of the year.

Sample New Hominid Communities

New hominids of all cultural types live in towns, villages, and city-states built by other peoples, either in a foreigners quarter or interspersed among the general population. Here they must accustom themselves to different laws and norms, often ones with unfamiliar views on marriage and property. As is usually the case with cultural minorities, they adapt their practices as best they can without openly breaking the law, and hope that no one changes the laws to block the loopholes they find or to make their cultural adaptations impossible. However, many others have built settlements of their own, such as the three below.

Brandeehaab
Brandeehaab is a village commune of about 225 people, all farming new hominids descended from, or married into, a single family network (what other cultures might call a polycule) that escaped from the Howling Rustic's empire into former Michigan. It was built originally around a few derelict farm houses and barns that has since been supplemented by several sod-roof longhalls and outbuildings. Ditches and low mounds circle the original site, while a second loop of earthworks encloses a cluster of later additions as the settlement grew. Two gates break these barriers, wide enough to admit plows and threshers for the surrounding fields and gardens that the commune residents work. Corn, beans, silkgrass, and great plantain¹ make up their field crops, while their garden crops mostly include potatoes, turnips, cabbages, and gourds, with some pumpkins and carrots as well. Several residents are also expert pipemakers, and they bring their wood, gourd, and clay smoking pipes for sale and trade to markets throughout the region.

There is no inn or tavern, but travellers are welcome to stay for a night in one of the longhalls and share in a community meal, though if they want more than that they'll need to trade goods and labour for it. These visitors are unlikely to notice it, but Brandeehaab is deeply divided. Although most farming new hominid family networks are fairly small, made up of between three and six people and their children, eleven people made up the network that settled Brandeehaab. Their surviving children are now the village's elders, and they broke into two feuding factions in early adulthood. They also inherited their parents' habit of large rambling family networks, and the town is now split between two clusters of loosely-connected family networks, one residing within the original settlement and the other within the newer walls. The feud between these two families is ongoing, and is just as lively in the youngest generation (though a few teens have secret relationships across family lines). Dirty looks and pointless town hall arguments make up most of the conflict, but every so often youth from each side try to steal heirloom pipes from the other.

Langoonsitee Oort
Before the Arrival, Lagoon City was a boating community on the shores of Lake Simcoe, run through with twisting canals so all of the wealthy residents could have a dock in their own backyard. Now it's Langoonsitee Oort, a new hominid town and regional centre of fishing culture, occupying the town's once-lavish and now run-down houses. It contains genealogical records for all surrounding new hominids, including herders, and it hosts many major Amilsjatda festivals, especially the feasts for the folk heroes Fleessu Rist, Pfajtrod Rist, and Swandentun Rist, and the animal saints Zun Rildzee, Zun Tstawla, and Zunnandur. Hospitality, boat-building, and fish processing are the town's primary economic drivers, though its markets attract artisans of the various goods its nomadic visitors might need. Many of these artisans will stay and take on short-term apprentices who come to Lagoon City specifically for that purpose.

Visitors come to Langoonsitee Oort for more than the festivals and markets, however: it's also a centre of fishing culture jurisprudence. Aaljis Tsaddwoll, a retired jurist, lives here now after a lifetime on the road; he was well-known for his method of settling many legal definitions, especially those of "dit" (food), "dronjatsid" (abandon), "ngaandzonud" (confluence), and "walsaang" (campsite). The town is also home to many of his former students, and would-be legal scholars travel from across the Lakelands to learn from one of them, though of course they usually hope to catch a conversation with the renowned jurist himself. Fishing new hominids will travel many days to Langoonsitee Oort to have a legal dispute settled, and so will more than a few herding new hominids, as the only herding culture jurists east of the Veil call it their home.²

Mun Dzaadzhazad
A massive concrete bunker is built into the mouth of a copper and nickel mine north of Sudbury that was opened only a few years before the Arrival. The bunker is home to the mining new hominid commune that built it after they claimed the then-abandoned mine and cleared it of monsters. Calling itself Mun Dzaadzhazad, the commune now digs for copper and nickel and processes it in their bunker's dedicated facilities. The new hominids rely heavily on trade routes for their food, hunting when they can and growing only a handful of vegetables and herbs. Fortunately, plenty of merchants will bring food to the commune in exchange for their mineral goods, as well as the barley, oats, and potatoes needed for Mun Dzaadzhazad's brewery and distillery. The commune has a "surface town" clustered around the bunker for these traders and other visitors, with a tavern, a beer garden, a large inn, a stable, a druggist, warehouses, a church, and the aforementioned brewery and distillery. The new hominids themselves do not spend much in the surface town, however, preferring the electrically-lit and -heated living quarters of the bunker. The exception is the church: although most of the town still practices Amilsjatda, about a third have converted to Presbyterianism, and they go up to the surface for Sunday morning worship in the tidy stone church that the commune had allowed some missionaries to build there almost fifty years ago.

When the mine was originally claimed, strange beasts stalked its depths, transformed by a dreamzone in the very bottom of the shaft. Mun Dzaadzhazad has trained exorcists and monster hunters proficient in fighting underground and, while the mine is safe to work – or, at least, safe from supernatural threats – that's only because well-equipped teams regularly patrol its tunnels. To keep these hunters' skills honed, they send squads out to track and kill any monsters and ephemeral spirits threatening their trade routes and the nearest communities. Nearly everyone in those parts admires these bands of beast-slayers, clad in bright helmets and heavy armour, bearing their rifles and hammers, and accompanied by both animist and Protestant abjurers; many a Mun Dzaadzhazad child aspires to their glittering ranks.

Sample New Hominid Character

Linnidt Ongenzeeld
Archival Scholar and Thief (High Concept)
Far Too Fussy (Trouble Aspect)
New Hominid (Peoples Aspect)
Sweet-Talks In Three Languages (Other Aspect)
Computer Savvy (Other Aspect)
Hard to Keep Out (Other Aspect)
Top Skills: Antiquities, Burglary, Deceive

Most people who meet young Linnidt Ongenzeeld, with her slight frame and monocle, think she's a reserved scholar, friendly and capable but most at home in a library. They aren't wrong, exactly, but they're missing an important detail about her life: she's also an accomplished burglar who steals valuable documents from archives, offices, and, indeed, libraries. She was born among herding new hominids who ranged on ponies through former Wisconsin's scrubland, abandoned fields in the process of natural reforestation. Her parents (her mother and two of her mother's husbands, either of whom could be her biological father) noticed her intellectual mind and enrolled her in a town school to develop her potential. Although she found town life stultifying at first, her studies more than made up for it, and she went on to Lakehead University, one of the few places of higher learning left in the Lakelands. There she became a student of the historian Mark Rossiter and went with him on many trips to secure valuable primary resources for study. As he got older, she increasingly took over acquisitions, and began experimenting with less forthright methods than the ones he taught her.

Linnidt has coppery brown hair, a splash of faint freckles across her nose, and wide hazel eyes – though her left eye looks wider than her right through her monocle, which corrects severe short-sightedness. She's normally about 3' 6", but she wears heels and styles her hair in a high ponytail to get a bit more presence. In her mid-twenties, she comes across as very friendly and kind, but preoccupied with affairs of the mind and more than a little unsure of herself. None of that's an act, but she does deliberately exploit the way people underestimate her, flattering and sneaking and lockpicking her way into private collections, mercenary offices, and even rival institutions so she can steal valuable documents. Technically a freelancer, she passes everything of historical interest to her former teacher or alma mater, and sells the rest to any Lakelander willing to pay. She won't, however, sell anything to foreign parties or to anyone she suspects is connected to the Unbound. Linnidt sends half her profits to her parents' caravan, and spends the rest on necessities, books, and her boyfriend and girlfriends in Thunder Bay.

The preview picture for this post is owned by Vadim Morozov on Unsplash (19 July 2021).

As always for my Lakelands posts, everything in this post is provisional and subject to change.

#new hominids #post-apocalyptic #the Lakelands