[Johnny1A.2]

MULTISAPIENTS continued...

The proto-multisapients had survived the I. devoraris threat, and other dangers, by going in a different direction than the early proto-humans. They had refined their telepathic faculties, linking themselves ever more closely together, or rather, this was the result of ongoing selection processes.

This was effective on one level. A typical hunter-gatherer group of proto-multisapients could coordinate their activities far more closely and precisely than any comparable group of H. habilis, and later more effectively than any comparable group of H. erectus/ergaster. As the proto-human line grew in individuated intelligence, the proto-multisapients grew in the efficiency and reliability of this mental linkage. The proto-human line had become almost entirely latent psionically, the proto-multisapient line was highly active psionically, but individually less intelligent…with caveats.

The advantage to the mental linkage of the proto-multisapients was that they could coordinate far more effectively and efficiently than any group of proto-humans. They could do so mostly without spoken language, as well, making them more stealthy and also able to communicate silently at some modest distance in combat. Additionally, the ‘collective’ emphasis of this adaptation meant that a given proto-multisapient was much readier to risk life and limb for the group than a typical proto-human.

As a result, on their own territory, in a confrontation between comparable groups of proto-humans and proto-multisapients, the latter would almost always win. Generally, for a group of H. erectus to have a chance against a group of proto-multisapients, they needed to outnumber them by a factor of at least three, and be competently led and have prepared well beforehand. To be reasonably confident of success, it was better to outnumber the enemy by a factor of four or more.

Naturally, such odds, and the high cost of failed attempts, meant that it was rarely worth while for early proto-humans to invade the territory held by their distant relatives. The risk reward ratio was simply not worth it, unless matters were desperate or circumstances very, very unusual. As a result, even though the two groups thrived in similar environments and preferred similar niches, the proto-multisapients were rarely troubled by their distant cousins.

On the other hand, however, there was a high cost to this adaptation as well. The functional upshot of the shared consciousness of bands of proto-multisapients was that they were not only less intelligent than proto-humans on an individual basis, but as time passed, it became less and less meaningful to talk about ‘individual’ proto-multisapients at all. Over the course of a million years of evolution, they came to be reflections of their group, each individual member of the tribe had the same personality as the whole group, like a fractal pattern, or a hologram. Each member of the tribe was the tribe, and there was little if any discernable difference in personality between the members, and as the generations passed, this tendency grew ever the more so.

This made their advantages greater, but it also meant that these advantages accrued primarily to the group, as the individual became less meaningful. Since their thought processes were shared between multiple brains, an ‘individual’ of the tribe became literally less intelligent when out of range of the collective. When operating as a group, a tribe of proto-multisapient hunter-gatherers could display intelligence rivalling that of the proto-humans, and use that intelligence with greater precision, coordination, and efficiency, at the group level.

The converse of this, though, was that a lone proto-multisapient encountering a hostile lone proto-human was up against an opponent who was physically comparable and mentally superior in most ways, with greater skills and greater creativity and usually greater will, because this last trait also decreased when a proto-multisapient was away from his or her tribal group.

This also meant that proto-multisapients had great difficulty with certain actions that were trivially easy for proto-humans. A tribe of proto-multisapients could scarcely send out lone scouts or spies, for example, because their competence would dwindle away as they left their group behind. In an emergency or combat situation, the proto-multisapients could not hide their children and breeding-age females away from the danger, because such separation could cripple the abilities of the group. This, in turn, meant that when things did go badly wrong for such a tribe, they could be wiped out more completely and irrecoverably than would be the case for a proto-human tribe.

Expansion into new territories had to be done as a group, and that group had to be large enough to maintain full intelligence and ability. This in turn meant that generally, such expansion only happened when a tribe grew large enough to ‘fission’ into two new tribes, which might happen when the numbers reached several hundred people.

Because their groups could not readily spread out, when resources became scarce the carrying capacity of the local area might easily be overloaded by a proto-multisapient tribe, even in situations in which their rivals would simply spread their foraging out to cover more territory.

Also, because their overall intelligence and ability hinged directly upon the size of the tribe, if disaster did befall the group, the survivors would be less intelligent and able for a long time, until the population of the group could be brought back to former levels. The common proto-human tendency to capture the children and women of another tribe simply did not work for the proto-multisapients. They might capture proto-multisapient females from another tribe and use them as breeders, but they could never assimilate them and would have to keep them under constant control, and two tribes of proto-multisapients could not readily ‘merge’, since the mental fusion was bloodline-dependent.

As a result of all this, though groups of proto-multisapients usually won direct battles with groups of proto-humans, when things did go the other way, it could and usually did require decades for the proto-multisapients to recover, while their rivals might do so in just years.

Thus, it is not any great mystery that, even if they could not easily dislodge the proto-multisapients from their home territories, the proto-humans spread far and wide more easily than their rivals.

To be continued…