One of the nice things about being in charge sometimes is making your own hours.
Well, kind of. See, you can come and go all you want but work still has to get done in the end. The big way of getting around this is farming out as much as possible or as little as you want. It comes down to personal choice in the end. That's kind of what led to this moment. See, in the end, being named department head of the first Gardevoir research facility by the Kalosian collegiate boards meant that I could dedicate resources specifically to studying Gardevoir.
People have been trying to order and classify the natural world since antiquity. However, with the Dark ages of old, the effort was all but abandoned for a number of years before being taken up again by Serious scholars during the Renaissance. Although some of the early naturalists recognized the significance of fossils, the classifications which eventually arose were based on living organisms. Carolus Linnaeus, a naturalist, produced the most successful early animal classification scheme, and the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae became a model for the field. Linnaeus's system was hierarchical in nature. With the most morphologically similar animals grouped into species, similar species grouped into genera, the more similar genus grouped into orders, and similar orders grouped into classes, all embraced within the kingdom Animalia. The animal Kingdom is formally termed the Metazoa ("higher life"). Additional levels within the taxonomic hierarchy have been erected for certain highly diverse groups, and, as relations among the phyla have become clearer, the level of superphylum has been increasingly used between the kingdom and phylum more than 300 years, the names that most scientists used for taxa were based on the linnaean hierarchical system. They remain the names most in use for groups today.
A century after his works, other scientists published their hypothesis of evolution by natural selection. At the heart of their proposal was the idea of descent with modification: When organisms resembled one another, it was because they were historically related and had inherited their shared traits from common ancestors. If that were the case, the linnaean Hierarchy had been formed through evolution along branches in a tree of life. Such a tree would display the genealogical relationships among organisms, exactly as a family tree does for related humans. Shared morphology does not necessarily reflect a shared evolutionary history, howere; many organisms resemble one another because they have evolved similar morphological solutions to similar problems of adaptation. These morphologies appear to Homologous when in fact they are really analogous; that is, similarity is due to common function, but they have independent origins. Thus, general morphological resemblances may fool us into assuming a closer kinship than is actually the case. o cope with this, scientists proposed an improved system for identifying branches in the tree of life. This system, called cladistics or phylogenetic analysis, uses a tree rather than a hierarchy as a basis for classification and has become widely adopted. In cladistics, branching order inferred from the distribution of shared characters is of primary importance, and a variety of sophisticated statistical approaches to establishing branching order have been developed. Neither hierarchy or tree cope well with continuous evolution along the branches of the tree of life, however, and in identifying units along branches as taxa, we must break the continuum in some way. Thus, we must impose our own definitions of discrete units within what are actually historical continua. Every living animal has an ancestry tracing back along a continuous pathway that leads down along the branching pattern of the tree of life, through node after node, to the first animals and, of course, even further back into the world of unicellular organisms.
These basic principles are important to understand the context of proposals people have supported. When the subject of humans and Gardevoir come up, they are referring to the phylogenetic order that Gardevoir and humans share. Does the branch occur at H. Sapien idalatu? Or does it occur back to Denesovan? These questions have begun to flourish and seem to occupy the forefronts of research and articles concerning studies. Being thrust to something of a forefront, my contributions were but simple paving stones for what was to follow. I had the luxury of not having to be directly involved unless peer review work required my input to ensure that my original data was being represented properly. That is, that the numbers and figures cited, were what was in fact reported.
There was a nice little side note to this as well. Administrating a super small office, where there were all of 5 or 6 people working on this project, and most were sub contracted from other research venues, meant that there was very little direct paperwork involved. After all the expenses for day to day running of the operations was taken care of, that left about 3 months and 29 days of open time. For the most part though, there was very little save reviewing paper work and setting up guest research opportunities.
Since the subject of in-situ Gardevoir research was a new field, there was the predictable push back from members of the scientific community who argued that there was very little to actually learn. These were the old folks who were set in certain ways and beliefs. The types who argued that Modern Bird type pokemon were entirely different than old Dinosaurian pokemon. However, this has been something of an ongoing debate that has shifted with time as new data is explored.
In terms of Gardevoir development, a major point of interest was a morphological similarity that was discovered in regards to the collarbone. Further, 3-5% of the DNA of most humans within the Hoenn region is shared with Gardevoir, which is higher than other regions such as Kalos, which has a 1-2% similarity. This is different than genetic likeness though. That describes if Gardevoir and humans are able to interbreed, the amount of DNA question comes back to shared DNA. I.E. Common ancestry. Kind of like how one can determine their ethnicity or heritage. One might be 1/3rd Kalosian, 1/3rd Kanotiese, and 1/3rd Hoenese. In this case, the DNA ranges suggest that the Denesovan humans are the most recent common ancestor, which also included Neanderthals and , though with some drift, as was to be expected of such a wide geographical range.
This is all very interesting in its own rights as it might show that the interbreeding of sapiens (Us,) and Denesovan humans eventually gave rise to the lineage from which Gardevoiran lineages eventually arose. It would certainly explain the interbreeding and the slight morphological changes noted. That is the digit deletions and the inclusion of the core. Though very little is known of Denisovans, a complex evolutionary history of Gardevoir from Fossil specimens have yet to be described. So much is in flux. Especially when very little is known about denisovians as well.
What this means though, is that Hoenn islanders (And surrounding Polynesia), have more in common with Gardevoir due to the high rates of Melanesian people in the region. Studies of the genomes of People in this region so far have hinted at the Denisovan origin and thus, Gardevoir origin. Svante Pääbo claims that ancient human ancestors of the Melanesians interbred in Asia with these humans. He has found that people of New Guinea share 4%–6% of their genome with the Denisovans, indicating this exchange. The Denisovans are considered cousin to the Neanderthals. Both groups are now understood to have migrated out of Africa, with the Neanderthals going into Europe, and the Denisovans heading east about 400,000 years ago. This is based on genetic evidence from a fossil found in Siberia. The evidence from Melanesia suggests their territory extended into south Asia, where ancestors of the Melanesians and Gardevoir developed. Melanesians of some islands are one of the few non-European peoples, and the only dark-skinned group of people outside Australia, known to have blond hair. The blonde trait developed via the TYRP1 gene, and is not found in European blonds. Given all of this, the early history of Humans and Gardevoir are truly some of the most interesting debates going on.
A major reason for the morphological differences might be found in the same variances found in Melanesian and Polynesian peoples today. The isolation results in specialization that allows for certain traits to independently evolve and be selected for across the wider population. In this case, the mass lost might have originated from the lack of predators and the strengthening of familial bonds. That most all polynesian people share a similar strong familial bond indicates that the basis of the evolution might be found in the same emotional centers which are enhanced for familial emotional attachment. Given this, it is likely that such evolutions came about as a result of the selection of emotional bonds over evasion given that they had no particular predator.
Frankly, the debate has kind of excited me. The most recent requests are some of the more interesting types too. One, for instance, is seeking archaeological permission to conduct limited digs in non living areas to scan for evidence of previous habitation. This research proposal has already begun receiving a lot of push back as it currently seems to be that Gardevoir are Nomadic in nature, so finding evidence of past habitation would be more difficult due to the search being accidental in nature. However, any findings would massively change the technological understanding and development theories that already exist.
A major push back though was a counter proposal that flitted upon my desk (And was tossed into the trash can by Amelia saying they already received their response) that argued that Gardevoir weren't even a homo sapien clan, so development of technology wasn't even a point. It detailed things like sediment records being too incomplete to draw an accurate picture of technology use by Gardevoir, much less pottery that was specifically theirs.
Things like this led to the understanding that field research on other Tet Zes would be needed. That's where Sycamore came in, and that's what began a more interesting trip. A trip which would take me to the tropical regions of Kalos, and allow me to reconnect with a long lost aspect of my past that I wasn't even fully aware of completely by accident.
But maybe we should back up at least to when the idea was put forth a bit rather than examining the particulars...
End Introduction section.
Ok first bit of more serious writing in a while that wasn't primarily concerned with plot.I wanted to try a slightly different formula here for the "Beach episode" of sorts. This story is going to be a mix of gardevoir study (What you read above, for instance) and story itself. To begin this story, I began digging out resources to reference. In addition, if I make reference to actual research, I want to try something a little different and include it as something of a citation.
So with that said, here is the list of works cited for this particular introduction:
Language and Modern Human Origins L.A. SCHEPARTZ YEARBOOK OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 3691-126 (1993)
Earliest evidence of modern human life history in North African early Homo sapiens Smith et al (2007)
Energetic Competition Between Neandertals and Anatomically Modern Humans froehle et al (2009)
Robert Bakker "Dinosaur Heresies" 1986
Douglas H Erwin "The Cambrian Explosion" 2013
Brown, David (25 March 2010), "DNA from bone shows new human forerunner, and raises array of questions"
Krause, Johannes; Fu, Qiaomei; Good, Jeffrey M.; Viola, Bence; Shunkov, Michael V.; Derevianko, Anatoli P. & Pääbo, Svante (2010), "The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia", Nature 464 (7290): 894–897,
Sawyer, Susanna; Renaud, Gabriel; Viola, Bence; Hublin, Jean-Jacques; Gansauge, Marie-Theres; Shunkov, Michael V.; Derevianko, Anatoly P.; Prüfer, Kay; Kelso, Janet; Pääbo, Svante (11 November 2015). "Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences from two Denisovan individuals" Yes, this is the beach episode. It's going to be a bit of a multi chapter affair. I'm keeping the chapters between 2000-4000 words per chapter as those are a bit easier to get done and allow for a bit more leniency when it comes to time consumption. The longer chapters MIGHT be 6K but 2-4K feels like the most reasonable levels to be working at for a bit.
Hello from the Coral Cays of Florida by the way.