I will add a qualifier to people mentioning humans came way later than Old Ones. In the Necron 3rd codex there's mention of the aeldari talking about humans as part of the Old Ones work they (the aeldari) let sprawl around, and in >!the Cawl book!< a C'tan refers to humans as something of the Old Ones.
My headcanon to reconcile that with the fact the Old Ones died off millions of years prior to humanity emerging is that they're referring to the earliest primate ancestors (timeline kind of roughly works out) (EDIT What I meant is the earliest mammals, biology isn't my thing) the Old Ones were messing with just prior to their extinction and from there the experiment just went on completely uncontrolled until it eventually resulted in humans (and from there eventually in psychic humans). After all we're talking about the people who made the Krork, some kind of genes for psykers that would remain in spite of any evolutionary pressures doesn't sound remotely impossible for them.
Issue is the ancestor of humans around at the time was not even a primate .primates had not evolved yet.
The war in heaven happens 65 million years ago, thats around the cretacous extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. The oldest evidence of a primate which was about the size of a lemur, was 55 million years ago.
At the time the old ones go extinct the existing placental mammals where bmore similar to marmots, squirrels, and badgers
>At the time the old ones go extinct the existing placental mammals where bmore similar to marmots, squirrels, and badgers
That's actually what I was referring to, biology not my specialty. There isn't a reason to assume their plan for Earth's creatures (whatever it might have been) required hominids. Maybe they wanted psychic scouts and saboteurs for their conflicts with Necrons and later Enslavers. Alternatively maybe they would have accelerated the process drastically, but with their extinction it went on its semi-natural route.
I have been leaning into a two other theories.
The Elder gods whatever they actually are really exist in the Lore, as we have evidence for Isha, Khaine, and Cegprach at least being real emtities. They also where active and free to
Till the birth of Slaamesh when all but three got eaten. Plus there is now another In Ynnead. The Aeaeldari are connected to the old ones. And theorn gods are warp entities created by Aeldari belief(which is likely a mythology whose origins lay in garbled stories of this Old ones).
So its been established since Eldrad appeared in the Heresy Novel Fulgrim, that he, the mpst powerful Farseer has realised the fates of Humamity and the Eldar are intertwined. This is why despite conflict between the two races they have allied really often against bigger threats like Chaos and the Tyranids even before the return of Guilliman where actual diplomatic relations came into being(Dawn of Fire Gate of Bones)where Guilliman In his role as regent formally receives a Ambassadpr who then stays with the Regents traveling court till the Plague Wars,12 years later(Dark Imperium Plague war)
Add what happens to Nurgles garden in Godblight, and a implication made about Mortariom's future I'm that novel and I am starting to think that if any godlike entity messed human evolution it may have been the Aeldari gods particularly Isha, this would explain the tie between the species fates that Eldrad realised as well as the Ctan shard on Sotha mentioning humanity is of the old ones, as the Aeldari where created by the old ones and humanity may have been uplifted by the W
aeldari Gods who to the ctan would seem connected to the Old ones.
The other option is a ctan, particularly if the Dragon of Mars is a shard of the Void Dragon because we know it was on earth after the War in heaven and per Mechanicum it influenced the creation of the Mechamicum.
or
That counter-argument relies on GW being good at numbers, and having access to the knowledge to that degree of accuracy in the 1990's - before Encarta95 was even released. Basically they'd need to know someone in the field or have access to the encyclopedia britannica. Personally I think that this level of inaccuracy is more than acceptable, and we know what they meant even if their numbers are out.
And maybe that's why Eldar call us Mon-Keigh, or "monkeys", as whilst that word isn't strictly what we would have been, and of course relates to a language millions of years from being invented, for the capability of GW writers in the 90's it's close enough.
I think the Old Ones tinkered with a lot of species. In my headcannon the psyker gene is not naturally occurring, but is artificial and invented. Maybe artificial to the Old Ones themselves. I think they injected the precursors to this and just let species evolve it out to see where they go. That's why we pretty much only have 3 psychic species (Eldar, Humans, and Orks). They were even careful enough back in the 90's to only give Tyranids psychic powers after ingesting Eldar DNA. Why would they need to write it that way?
So I think humans have a very low rate of psykers, and the Emperor fkd around with our genetics to create navigators and astropaths so we could make a galactic empire to stave off being snuffed out by an Ork Waaagh or something of that nature. To do that he set humanity on a course to have more and more psykers, and I think this event is the one described by Erda to JG. That's why he needed the webway so he could reverse that and stop chaos consuming. But the AI wars and Old Night set his timeline back, so he had to create the Primarchs and step forward himself (he refused before as he knew he'd be worshipped as a god and how that would change him). It's why he gets mad as he'll when Lorgar is just a bit slow. It's why he fkd off as soon as he thinks the crusade is as good as done.
All because the Old Ones didn't understand the power they meddled with in linking the immaterium to the materium. I think it's also why they created the Krorks to be so resistant to daemons / warp xenos (effectively every ork is a mini tap of warp energy, too small to be noticed or for anything to come through, and Ork psykers just channel that energy rather than drawing on the warp directly - sometimes when they don't even want to).
Well, that's my brain nonsense anyway.
A quick side note, Mon’Keigh doesn’t mean monkeys. It’s the name for a now long dead Xenos race of barbarians that almost wiped out the Eldar in their very very old history. Ever since then, Mon’Keigh has been an epithet applied to brutish and destructive things, in short the perfect word to describe humans.
On a meta level it absolutely *is* monkeys and I'll not be talked down from this position. It's the same sort of joke that came up in Xenology re: Eldar defecating via a crystalline, odorless spoor, their shit literally doesn't stink.
1) monkeigh specifically referred to a hostile xenos species the Aeldadi faced early on that almost wiped them out. Hence why after they wiped out the monkeigh in retaliation they reclaimed the species term as a catch all phrase for xenos
2) while it's definitely still possible for the psyker gene to be wholly artificial, its much easier to assume that it isn't. The Old Ones, for instance, actually used enuncia as their spoken language, and enuncia is capable of sending shockwaves through the warp. I don't see how this can happen unless psyker powers was so prevalent and natural among the old ones species that they're essentially all alpha plus psykers from birth
3) multiple sources of lore (6th edition codex, Master of Mankind, Mortis, etc) point to the Emperor knowing that Mankind was destined to go through a psychic evolution that was predestined and out of his control to stop
> 2) while it's definitely still possible for the psyker gene to be wholly artificial, its much easier to assume that it isn't. The Old Ones, for instance, actually used enuncia as their spoken language
Is it ever stated that they had anything to do with that? I only recall it mentioned in one of those inquisitor (Eisenhorn maybe) books and some of the HH stuff, I don't think they're brought up at all.
Read up on Deathwatch: the outer reach. It's a codex and it specifically states that the Aeldari know of Enuncia out of fear, as they know it as the old one Vernacular AND know of it's reputation as the language of unmaking
Humans did not have their souls augmented by the Old Ones. They kickstarted life on Earth, but Humans evolved by chance and with zero oversight. You are also forgetting that, for 25 thousand years, Humanity had close to no psykers. The most fleshed out Human subspecies, the Kin, is mostly psychically inert, requiring specific tailoring to create a variant that is psychic.
The Tyranids main psyker bioform, the Zoanthrope, was developed after the Hive Mind absorbed Eldar DNA. The species as a whole does not interact with the Warp in the same way Humans and Eldar do, they draw power from the Hive Mind, the sum of all Tyranids' counsciences, instead of the Warp itself (Orks are similar as the Waaagh is part of the Warp yet different, whence why its has different properties).
>Basically all sentient races in the universe has some from of psykers
Not when you consider all races that aren't the ones in tabletop. Hrud, Kroot, Vespid, none have known psykers (well, Kroot can but only after devouring psykers). The Nicassar are outright singled among the Tau Auxiliaries as the only species were psykers are common.
>or otherwise has some connection to the Warp
Tau have it too. They are not blanks. They are just on the lowest levels of the psychic scale.
Considering that the Hrud religion holds that their god was shattered by Slaanesh, I'd argue they *definitely* interact with the warp in some kind of why that isn't **too** different from other species
To a more conjecture point, MAYBE the Warp has something to do with their time powers but who knows - thats far too big a leap to completely make even if makes sense with what info we have
Here a ship “encounters” it in the warp
Darkness in the blood:
>Against all the laws that governed it, the empyrean lost its mutability. Blackness seeped from the rolling wall of shadow. The visions and images weakened, and then stopped altogether. There was a brief passage through warp space of a primordial calmness, smooth and bright as a moonlit pond, and then the flotilla plunged into the darkness. A new terror assailed Rhacelus. A vast, godlike mind turned its attention upon the ships, so puissant it quelled the fury of the warp. The hive mind was the truth of the tyranids. The Blood Angels believed the war beasts that plagued the universe were merely the material extrusion of something far greater, and that thing dwelt in the warp. The pressure of the hive mind’s regard was immense, crushing Rhacelus’ soul until it felt infinitely small. At great remove he felt blood trickle from the corners of his mortal eyes. Gold flashed ahead. Rhacelus fought to support the failing Navigators. With strength he could ill afford to share, he held them up, and directed their attention to the distant angel. The ships turned. Though the shadow in the warp blinded all eyes, its quelling of the tempest eased passage, if one only knew which way to go. Rhacelus saw the angel clearly, the Sanguinor, exemplar of their kind, a warrior out of myth, yet he was real, ever with them, the guardian of the blood. From across the unmeasurable distances of a dimension that obeyed no law but its own, the Sanguinor’s golden eyes looked into Rhacelus’ soul. He beckoned, then turned with a flash of brilliant wings. The hive mind’s awful presence waned. The fleet punched through the shadow, out into garish spirit shoals, then back into the black. They raced through the edge of the darkness, where it was shredded on swift currents. It was but a fragment of the power it had attained when Leviathan assailed Baal itself, but though this shadow seemed isolated and diminished, Rhacelus could sense its connections to further, greater parts, and felt the brooding presence of the alien god all around – withdrawn from its prize, wounded, yet still alive with dangerous malevolence.
And later in the same book Mephiston says he felt it move in the warp:
>`The hive mind did not hear the cry of the Ronenti cult. **I felt it move a little in the warp,** then the cry ceased, and it turned away. We were in time.’
Theres also the fact the Hive Mind has a soul, and is disrupted by blanks
>**The Sigillite listens silently. He is the second oldest person I’ve ever met. In this room, he looks every one of his some six and a half thousand years,** a tiny thing beside the two demigods. I make him uncomfortable. My presence negates his demigod mind as easily as I might pinch out the candle flames in front of me. He is shorn of his glamour, the psykana mask of health, wisdom and purpose I am told he manifests to those few he meets in person. In this room, he is a fragile thing, bird bones gathered in a tight wrapper of thin skin, hunched inside a worn robe. His eagle-staff, his rod of office, leans against the table as if it is too heavy for him to hold.
\- *Saturnine*
>My lord, Malcador, how old *are* you? I mean to say, I've been in your service for centuries since you become First Lord, and you've not aged a *day* in all that time. Even when my sight was failing for good I could tell.
>Well... you're cutting straight to the point now, eh?
>Time is not on my side, I'm not going to waste it being polite.
>'Very well then. **I am six thousand seven hundred and eighteen years, two hundred and forty one days, eleven hours eight minutes and fifty six seconds old.** And there are days when I feel it.
>That... is not what I was expecting to hear.
\- *First Lord of the Imperium*
The Emperor is. Other Perpetuals, some of which are older, remember him in very ancient times (Oll Person met him outside of Nineveh in the Assyrian Empire, maybe even earlier).
Malcador claims to be "only" 6 thousand years-old
Edit: the shamans is old lore whose validity is a matter of discussion. But even back when they were explicitily official, after them psykers disappeared for a very long time.
If the Shaman backstory ever does become complete canon I wouldn’t be surprised to get an explanation of “they carried out an immense ritual which pledged all of their power and the power of all Human Psykers past, present and future to the destruction of Chaos” and then a little footnote of (the ritual was strong enough to affect twenty thousand years of future history) just to crowbar the canon together.
On the other hand there's no evidence that the Old Ones didn't engineer Humans to have psychic capabilities; experimenting on us early in our evolution to see what happened. This was a species that measured time in millions of years, so far from something they were incapable of. And whilst we were left to evolve by ourselves that could be why humans are nowhere near to Eldar in terms of psychic affinity.
You are definitely right to point out the distinct lack of psychic species in the galaxy. The two notables we have, other than humans, are Eldar and Orks who were both created / adapted by the Old Ones. In fact, isn't it a little weird how few there are? Necrons have none. Tyranids only have it when they ingested Eldar DNA. Tau have none. Kroot again have to consume it from others. It gets to the point where you have to wonder why humans are so different. They were known to the Old Ones, and the Eldar refer to us from back at that time. Given how little it seems to occur naturally you could even hypothesise that psykers in our galaxy nearly only ever come from Old One engineering.
I was really surprised when I saw the Kin had psykers, and then intrigued that yet again we see how it's warp but not really the warp - using technology to channel warp energy rather than have a psyker with a direct connection. Yet again another species without psychic powers.
But maybe the humans are just special.
To add the first evidence of a mammal that can be called a primate in the fossil record is 55 million years ago.
Thats 10 million years after the old ones got genocided by the ctan and necrons
The olacental mammals at the time of the war in heaven that we are closely related to where similar to marmots.
Unless there is a old one that survived there is more likely that if any entity did effect humanities evolution it was either aeldari gods(maybe isha?) Who where millions of years away from becoming slaanesh first meal or a shard of one of the ctan
Or maybe Gork and Mork created humanity because the necrons went to sleep and the eldar where no fun ta krump
Humans did not just evolve 3 million years ago; we've been evolving for at least 500 million years, a long continuous chain right back to the beginnings of life on this planet. Old ones could have come in at any point during that time and messed with things. We need not have been hominids, or even primates at that time for them to have done it. It's like how birds are still dinosaurs; you never lose what you once were no matter how much you have changed in the intervening time.
Who knows how many species of various types they were experimenting on that went extinct, and how many (maybe like us) went on to be the dominant species of our planet.
Added bonus - it means a certain percentage of lemurs are also psykers.
> Added bonus - it means a certain percentage of lemurs are also psykers.
We do know they made the jokaero (the super-tinkering apes), so it's not as though something being kind of funny was going to stop them.
Great response. Only thing I'll add is that the Nicassar aren't the only psykers among the Tau. The Nagi, for instance, are considered psykers as they use their psychic abilities to enable a lot of their brainwashing abilities
You mean the Pariah Gene, and that bit along with a lot of 3rd edition Necron lore was retconned by the 5th edition. Now Blanks are something of a natural negative polarity to the psykers' positive polarity.
Just because it is from an older book, doesnt mean its retconned. In fact, almost all of the older necron lore is still perfectly fine and part of the lore.
The new necron lore has it very firmly established, that the Triarch Praetorians messed with multiple younger species. Nulls being a special genetic feature of humanity is also still very much established lore.
This is actually addressed in one of the Farsight books. Tau individually have weak souls, so weak that predators of the warp can’t really detect them most of the time. Hence why they’re able to warp travel without a gellar field and live. However as a collective they are incredibly powerful in the warp. This comes from a deamon of Tzeentch who possessed a member of the water cast while thinking about the species. That doesn’t mean that the Tau are off the gods radar, Khorn very badly wanted to take Farsight as one of his champions. Tzeentch was very interested in the race as a whole.
It’s literally just age of the species. Tau have only been sentient and somewhat in civilizations for 6-7,000 years.
Humanity is 40,000ish years ahead, and didn’t have psykers for most of that time.
Yea but where and how the emperor actually came to be is still quite muddled. Was it a handful of shamans doing a suicide ritual? Is he a one-off god/monster/force? Is he a DAoT super weapon designed to -think- they’re the god emperor?
Psykers are still incredibly rare in humans, 1 of billions. But with infinity-quadrillion humans around there are enough to notice/use/have a “place” in society. The equivalent ratio means there’s like 1-3 psykers in the entirety of the tau empire, which is totally possible (outside of nicassar etc).
Just spitballing the numbers here
[In prehistoric times there were only a few hundred thousand humans.](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c)
So, if the Emperor was the only one, that's actually a lot, given the number of humans. But, there were also druids, so it's actually pretty common compared to 40k, on a per capita.
*if he was even there
In most fields you exclude outliers when drawing conclusions, and regardless of backstory- the emp is a hardcore outlier. (No psykers even close to him, appeared vastly earlier than most psykers.. maybe, has no true backstory, is immortal etc)
There’s also the generally cloudy history of Tau, being discovered M34 in “Stone Age” like society. That could equate to prehistoric man, which wound give humans 200k to a million years head start on Tau as far as “souls” are concerned. The Tau have rapidly improved technology but my original “40,000 years ahead” may be drastically underestimating the societal head start humans have. 40,000 years before 40K (0AD) the pyramids are were thousands of years old and modern Homo sapiens had been around for 2 hundreds thousand+ years.
If you only have 5,000 humans, and you're looking for an event that's one in a billion, it's probably a bad idea to exclude the only event, even if it's an outlier.
It’s actually the reason why that event is an outlier and why we exclude it.
If* that event even happened.
If something happens once in 5,000 tests, then never again for multiple billion tests, then appears routinely every 2 billion tests- but at a level/scale entirely different from the original event- you would conclude the original event doesn’t fit the population and would be excluded. Any conclusions based on the subsequent events would have no bearing on the first/original, or vice versa.
Source: i am a doctor/scientist that deals with population statistics all the time 👍
I mean, I have a PhD in astrophysics, but I didn't think that was relevant to the discussion. In astrophysics you discount outliers because they're often due to equipment failure, which we don't have here because the Emperor isn't a sensor ghost. I don't know why you discount outliers in population statistics, but I'm sorry to hear you do. The very poor SHOULD be counted, imo. That you'd just write them off is upsetting. But, again, probably not relevant to this discussion about fiction.
Anyway, even if you don't count the Emperor because he is "too powerful" (which is silly since you're trying to determine the power of human psykers), you'd still have druids and the like. Malcador wasn't the first of his kind.
When did the Old Ones have anything to do with human souls? They were long gone by the time the first “humans” started walking around on two legs.
Tau just have very weak ‘souls’, as they are more closely linked with the material universe then they are the Warp.
The Eldar have very strong and bright souls, and have a much closer relationship with the Warp.
If an Eldar soul is a full ten course meal, then a human soul is a sandwich, a beer, and a packet of crisps. They are linked to the Warp but are still very much of the material universe.
A Tau soul would be three stale biscuits and a glass of water, they just don’t have a close enough relationship with the Warp to manifest psychic powers; it would be like trying to fill a bath using a water pistol- they don’t have ‘nothing’, but it not enough to actually do anything.
The first Tau codex seems to strongly hint at it with how a warp storm appeared that stopped the Imperium from exterminating the primitive tau, during the tau warring period the aun suddenly appear without explanation and smoothly unite everyone, and I think there's even mention of the tau eventually stumbling onto a damaged ship practically tailor-made to show them how to make their own.
(It was a common belief around then it was aeldari interference)
Since then this really hasn't been mentioned, so who knows what GW's stance is.
It's not confirmed.
There are multiple nods to this theory, but nothing definitive. And there will never be anything confirming or infirming it, as it's part of the mysteries of the setting.
Tau have "dense" souls that gives them a mild resistance to psychic powers, and more importantly Chaotic corruption, with the drawback of of having no psykers. Some humans [have the same trait](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/The_Assignment), though Tau are consistent in being, well, Tau level or thereabouts on that scale.
While it could be natural, somebody tampered with their society by introducing the Ethereals, which advanced them societally by centuries practically overnight, and set them up to advance technologically at a pretty high rate. Again, while the nature of their souls could be natural, they might have had a bit of biological engineering added into the mix by their interlopers.
Before you ask, no, we don't know who it was, or why. If it was one of the tabletop races, Eldar or Necrons would be the smart money, though it could have just as easily been one of the spooky minor xenos species that don't have a tabletop presence. The reason why looks fairly obvious from the 50,000 foot view: to set up a species who will build a star empire that's resistant to Chaos. It's fun to speculate if this was an experiment that went on too long, or a long term plan to manufacture an ally or a subject in the region, or to sow the seeds for the next galactic superpower to follow in Mankind's wake (because humanity is *always* doomed).
Though personally, I find the straightforward explanation to be boring. If we ever learn more about the primitive Tau's benefactors, I hope it's a huge curveball.
They haven't been around long enough to develop them. It took humanity thousands of years and routine exposure to the Warp via space travel to start developing psykers on any meaningful level, the Tau have started on the lower end of the psychic bell curve and are still playing catch up with Warp technology. Maybe one day in the far future, the Tau will exhibit the variance in psyker ability humanity does, but not for a long time yet.
Headcanon here: The T'au are a rogue Old One's pet project to "fix" the Necrontyr. That's why they're so dim in the Warp (as the Necrontyr were), why they're so technologically inclined, why they fall to infighting without the Ethereals' influence, even why their symbology shares similarities with the Necrons.
Keep in mind necrontyr numbers in the trillions. They were likely as populous as humans currently are, if not even more since they had even shorter lifespans which normally goes hand in hand with more offspring.
Once upon a time, humans had no psykers either, and when we started to exhibit our first, they remained so few as to be almost unheard of until the Age of Strife really took off.
The Emperor has been retconned to be the first and greatest psyker.
The only Perpetual that is older than the Emperor is Ollanius Perrson and he is at least 8,000 years older than the Emperor. Not a psyker in the slightest old mate Oll
Yeah, but there weren't that many humans in the past. [Only a few hundred thousand.](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c) So, just one is actually a lot on a per capita.
You're not wrong. In the early Bronze Age, when the Emperor was born, the human population would've been lucky to number over 10 million worldwide. And psykers would remain relatively rare occurances for another 25,000 odd years.
But all the same, the point is that once upon a time the human species had not expressed any psykers at all.
Do you have a citation where I could read that lore? Like a game book or something? Everything [I've read on the wiki's and in codexs](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ethereal) hint at their diamond shaped organ on their forehead admits a pheromone, and that's how they control. That and we'll reasoned logic arguments about the Greater good.
[Like, there is literally a book with a dissected ethereal talking about how smelly the diamond is.](https://images.app.goo.gl/oag3kBfdHW1rABp77)
I don't think the games are canon, or the necrons would still be trying to end all life and worshipping the C'tan.
Also, I remember playing those games, but I don't remember the tau being explicitly psychic. Just game mechanics, not in the game lore.
The games have to respect the canon precisely, otherwise they don't get the license. Still, the game being old, that canon might be outdated.
Of the tau, only the Etereals were psykers.
The necrons still try to end all life - but there are exceptions. Some still worshi the Ctan. I've read that one dinasty considers themselves alive, and the other races as abominations!
They completely re-conned the necrons after 4th. So, like, the 3rd edition codex was clearly canon when it came out (the first one I read) but isn't canon anymore.
The game is like that.
But, again, I'd really like it if you had a game video or something in which they said the ethereal's were psykers, because I remember playing the game through as tau, and I don't remember that part being stated.
Phil Kelly's Farsight books strongly suggest they're psykers (personally I prefer to ignore his stuff, but there it is). I'm not sure what books say it's hormonal.
Just a tidbit but I would say orginally tyranids did not have psykers they just got onto craftworlds went nom, nom, nom and poof the Zoanthrope strain was born.
I will add a qualifier to people mentioning humans came way later than Old Ones. In the Necron 3rd codex there's mention of the aeldari talking about humans as part of the Old Ones work they (the aeldari) let sprawl around, and in >!the Cawl book!< a C'tan refers to humans as something of the Old Ones. My headcanon to reconcile that with the fact the Old Ones died off millions of years prior to humanity emerging is that they're referring to the earliest primate ancestors (timeline kind of roughly works out) (EDIT What I meant is the earliest mammals, biology isn't my thing) the Old Ones were messing with just prior to their extinction and from there the experiment just went on completely uncontrolled until it eventually resulted in humans (and from there eventually in psychic humans). After all we're talking about the people who made the Krork, some kind of genes for psykers that would remain in spite of any evolutionary pressures doesn't sound remotely impossible for them.
Issue is the ancestor of humans around at the time was not even a primate .primates had not evolved yet. The war in heaven happens 65 million years ago, thats around the cretacous extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. The oldest evidence of a primate which was about the size of a lemur, was 55 million years ago. At the time the old ones go extinct the existing placental mammals where bmore similar to marmots, squirrels, and badgers
>At the time the old ones go extinct the existing placental mammals where bmore similar to marmots, squirrels, and badgers That's actually what I was referring to, biology not my specialty. There isn't a reason to assume their plan for Earth's creatures (whatever it might have been) required hominids. Maybe they wanted psychic scouts and saboteurs for their conflicts with Necrons and later Enslavers. Alternatively maybe they would have accelerated the process drastically, but with their extinction it went on its semi-natural route.
I have been leaning into a two other theories. The Elder gods whatever they actually are really exist in the Lore, as we have evidence for Isha, Khaine, and Cegprach at least being real emtities. They also where active and free to Till the birth of Slaamesh when all but three got eaten. Plus there is now another In Ynnead. The Aeaeldari are connected to the old ones. And theorn gods are warp entities created by Aeldari belief(which is likely a mythology whose origins lay in garbled stories of this Old ones). So its been established since Eldrad appeared in the Heresy Novel Fulgrim, that he, the mpst powerful Farseer has realised the fates of Humamity and the Eldar are intertwined. This is why despite conflict between the two races they have allied really often against bigger threats like Chaos and the Tyranids even before the return of Guilliman where actual diplomatic relations came into being(Dawn of Fire Gate of Bones)where Guilliman In his role as regent formally receives a Ambassadpr who then stays with the Regents traveling court till the Plague Wars,12 years later(Dark Imperium Plague war) Add what happens to Nurgles garden in Godblight, and a implication made about Mortariom's future I'm that novel and I am starting to think that if any godlike entity messed human evolution it may have been the Aeldari gods particularly Isha, this would explain the tie between the species fates that Eldrad realised as well as the Ctan shard on Sotha mentioning humanity is of the old ones, as the Aeldari where created by the old ones and humanity may have been uplifted by the W aeldari Gods who to the ctan would seem connected to the Old ones. The other option is a ctan, particularly if the Dragon of Mars is a shard of the Void Dragon because we know it was on earth after the War in heaven and per Mechanicum it influenced the creation of the Mechamicum. or
That counter-argument relies on GW being good at numbers, and having access to the knowledge to that degree of accuracy in the 1990's - before Encarta95 was even released. Basically they'd need to know someone in the field or have access to the encyclopedia britannica. Personally I think that this level of inaccuracy is more than acceptable, and we know what they meant even if their numbers are out.
And maybe that's why Eldar call us Mon-Keigh, or "monkeys", as whilst that word isn't strictly what we would have been, and of course relates to a language millions of years from being invented, for the capability of GW writers in the 90's it's close enough. I think the Old Ones tinkered with a lot of species. In my headcannon the psyker gene is not naturally occurring, but is artificial and invented. Maybe artificial to the Old Ones themselves. I think they injected the precursors to this and just let species evolve it out to see where they go. That's why we pretty much only have 3 psychic species (Eldar, Humans, and Orks). They were even careful enough back in the 90's to only give Tyranids psychic powers after ingesting Eldar DNA. Why would they need to write it that way? So I think humans have a very low rate of psykers, and the Emperor fkd around with our genetics to create navigators and astropaths so we could make a galactic empire to stave off being snuffed out by an Ork Waaagh or something of that nature. To do that he set humanity on a course to have more and more psykers, and I think this event is the one described by Erda to JG. That's why he needed the webway so he could reverse that and stop chaos consuming. But the AI wars and Old Night set his timeline back, so he had to create the Primarchs and step forward himself (he refused before as he knew he'd be worshipped as a god and how that would change him). It's why he gets mad as he'll when Lorgar is just a bit slow. It's why he fkd off as soon as he thinks the crusade is as good as done. All because the Old Ones didn't understand the power they meddled with in linking the immaterium to the materium. I think it's also why they created the Krorks to be so resistant to daemons / warp xenos (effectively every ork is a mini tap of warp energy, too small to be noticed or for anything to come through, and Ork psykers just channel that energy rather than drawing on the warp directly - sometimes when they don't even want to). Well, that's my brain nonsense anyway.
A quick side note, Mon’Keigh doesn’t mean monkeys. It’s the name for a now long dead Xenos race of barbarians that almost wiped out the Eldar in their very very old history. Ever since then, Mon’Keigh has been an epithet applied to brutish and destructive things, in short the perfect word to describe humans.
On a meta level it absolutely *is* monkeys and I'll not be talked down from this position. It's the same sort of joke that came up in Xenology re: Eldar defecating via a crystalline, odorless spoor, their shit literally doesn't stink.
From a meta perspective if anyone denies that it’s absolutely facetious
More like fecatious
That's the explanation for their backtrack yes, but come on, we all know this is just standard GW 90's naming :)
1) monkeigh specifically referred to a hostile xenos species the Aeldadi faced early on that almost wiped them out. Hence why after they wiped out the monkeigh in retaliation they reclaimed the species term as a catch all phrase for xenos 2) while it's definitely still possible for the psyker gene to be wholly artificial, its much easier to assume that it isn't. The Old Ones, for instance, actually used enuncia as their spoken language, and enuncia is capable of sending shockwaves through the warp. I don't see how this can happen unless psyker powers was so prevalent and natural among the old ones species that they're essentially all alpha plus psykers from birth 3) multiple sources of lore (6th edition codex, Master of Mankind, Mortis, etc) point to the Emperor knowing that Mankind was destined to go through a psychic evolution that was predestined and out of his control to stop
> 2) while it's definitely still possible for the psyker gene to be wholly artificial, its much easier to assume that it isn't. The Old Ones, for instance, actually used enuncia as their spoken language Is it ever stated that they had anything to do with that? I only recall it mentioned in one of those inquisitor (Eisenhorn maybe) books and some of the HH stuff, I don't think they're brought up at all.
Read up on Deathwatch: the outer reach. It's a codex and it specifically states that the Aeldari know of Enuncia out of fear, as they know it as the old one Vernacular AND know of it's reputation as the language of unmaking
There are a Lot more psychic Spezies.
I like this theory. It checks out with the prophecies on the exodite stone tablet mentioned in xenology
>they're referring to the earliest primate ancestors (timeline kind of roughly works out) No, it's still a difference of millions of years.
Humans did not have their souls augmented by the Old Ones. They kickstarted life on Earth, but Humans evolved by chance and with zero oversight. You are also forgetting that, for 25 thousand years, Humanity had close to no psykers. The most fleshed out Human subspecies, the Kin, is mostly psychically inert, requiring specific tailoring to create a variant that is psychic. The Tyranids main psyker bioform, the Zoanthrope, was developed after the Hive Mind absorbed Eldar DNA. The species as a whole does not interact with the Warp in the same way Humans and Eldar do, they draw power from the Hive Mind, the sum of all Tyranids' counsciences, instead of the Warp itself (Orks are similar as the Waaagh is part of the Warp yet different, whence why its has different properties). >Basically all sentient races in the universe has some from of psykers Not when you consider all races that aren't the ones in tabletop. Hrud, Kroot, Vespid, none have known psykers (well, Kroot can but only after devouring psykers). The Nicassar are outright singled among the Tau Auxiliaries as the only species were psykers are common. >or otherwise has some connection to the Warp Tau have it too. They are not blanks. They are just on the lowest levels of the psychic scale.
Considering that the Hrud religion holds that their god was shattered by Slaanesh, I'd argue they *definitely* interact with the warp in some kind of why that isn't **too** different from other species To a more conjecture point, MAYBE the Warp has something to do with their time powers but who knows - thats far too big a leap to completely make even if makes sense with what info we have
The strange thing is, is the hive mind is in the warp, and without the warp there is no synapse
Do we know this to be true? Idk enough about nids
Here a ship “encounters” it in the warp Darkness in the blood: >Against all the laws that governed it, the empyrean lost its mutability. Blackness seeped from the rolling wall of shadow. The visions and images weakened, and then stopped altogether. There was a brief passage through warp space of a primordial calmness, smooth and bright as a moonlit pond, and then the flotilla plunged into the darkness. A new terror assailed Rhacelus. A vast, godlike mind turned its attention upon the ships, so puissant it quelled the fury of the warp. The hive mind was the truth of the tyranids. The Blood Angels believed the war beasts that plagued the universe were merely the material extrusion of something far greater, and that thing dwelt in the warp. The pressure of the hive mind’s regard was immense, crushing Rhacelus’ soul until it felt infinitely small. At great remove he felt blood trickle from the corners of his mortal eyes. Gold flashed ahead. Rhacelus fought to support the failing Navigators. With strength he could ill afford to share, he held them up, and directed their attention to the distant angel. The ships turned. Though the shadow in the warp blinded all eyes, its quelling of the tempest eased passage, if one only knew which way to go. Rhacelus saw the angel clearly, the Sanguinor, exemplar of their kind, a warrior out of myth, yet he was real, ever with them, the guardian of the blood. From across the unmeasurable distances of a dimension that obeyed no law but its own, the Sanguinor’s golden eyes looked into Rhacelus’ soul. He beckoned, then turned with a flash of brilliant wings. The hive mind’s awful presence waned. The fleet punched through the shadow, out into garish spirit shoals, then back into the black. They raced through the edge of the darkness, where it was shredded on swift currents. It was but a fragment of the power it had attained when Leviathan assailed Baal itself, but though this shadow seemed isolated and diminished, Rhacelus could sense its connections to further, greater parts, and felt the brooding presence of the alien god all around – withdrawn from its prize, wounded, yet still alive with dangerous malevolence. And later in the same book Mephiston says he felt it move in the warp: >`The hive mind did not hear the cry of the Ronenti cult. **I felt it move a little in the warp,** then the cry ceased, and it turned away. We were in time.’ Theres also the fact the Hive Mind has a soul, and is disrupted by blanks
For 25 thousand years, not million years.
fixed
I thought Malcador and the Emperor were older than 25k. Didn't humans have druids and the like dating all the way back?
>**The Sigillite listens silently. He is the second oldest person I’ve ever met. In this room, he looks every one of his some six and a half thousand years,** a tiny thing beside the two demigods. I make him uncomfortable. My presence negates his demigod mind as easily as I might pinch out the candle flames in front of me. He is shorn of his glamour, the psykana mask of health, wisdom and purpose I am told he manifests to those few he meets in person. In this room, he is a fragile thing, bird bones gathered in a tight wrapper of thin skin, hunched inside a worn robe. His eagle-staff, his rod of office, leans against the table as if it is too heavy for him to hold. \- *Saturnine* >My lord, Malcador, how old *are* you? I mean to say, I've been in your service for centuries since you become First Lord, and you've not aged a *day* in all that time. Even when my sight was failing for good I could tell. >Well... you're cutting straight to the point now, eh? >Time is not on my side, I'm not going to waste it being polite. >'Very well then. **I am six thousand seven hundred and eighteen years, two hundred and forty one days, eleven hours eight minutes and fifty six seconds old.** And there are days when I feel it. >That... is not what I was expecting to hear. \- *First Lord of the Imperium*
The Emperor is. Other Perpetuals, some of which are older, remember him in very ancient times (Oll Person met him outside of Nineveh in the Assyrian Empire, maybe even earlier). Malcador claims to be "only" 6 thousand years-old Edit: the shamans is old lore whose validity is a matter of discussion. But even back when they were explicitily official, after them psykers disappeared for a very long time.
If the Shaman backstory ever does become complete canon I wouldn’t be surprised to get an explanation of “they carried out an immense ritual which pledged all of their power and the power of all Human Psykers past, present and future to the destruction of Chaos” and then a little footnote of (the ritual was strong enough to affect twenty thousand years of future history) just to crowbar the canon together.
Stealing psychic power from future generations? Don’t think I’ve heard of psychic ability being leeched away or stolen before, but I like it.
On the other hand there's no evidence that the Old Ones didn't engineer Humans to have psychic capabilities; experimenting on us early in our evolution to see what happened. This was a species that measured time in millions of years, so far from something they were incapable of. And whilst we were left to evolve by ourselves that could be why humans are nowhere near to Eldar in terms of psychic affinity. You are definitely right to point out the distinct lack of psychic species in the galaxy. The two notables we have, other than humans, are Eldar and Orks who were both created / adapted by the Old Ones. In fact, isn't it a little weird how few there are? Necrons have none. Tyranids only have it when they ingested Eldar DNA. Tau have none. Kroot again have to consume it from others. It gets to the point where you have to wonder why humans are so different. They were known to the Old Ones, and the Eldar refer to us from back at that time. Given how little it seems to occur naturally you could even hypothesise that psykers in our galaxy nearly only ever come from Old One engineering. I was really surprised when I saw the Kin had psykers, and then intrigued that yet again we see how it's warp but not really the warp - using technology to channel warp energy rather than have a psyker with a direct connection. Yet again another species without psychic powers. But maybe the humans are just special.
The Old Ones went extinct some 65 million years ago. Humans evolved 3 million years ago or so
To add the first evidence of a mammal that can be called a primate in the fossil record is 55 million years ago. Thats 10 million years after the old ones got genocided by the ctan and necrons The olacental mammals at the time of the war in heaven that we are closely related to where similar to marmots. Unless there is a old one that survived there is more likely that if any entity did effect humanities evolution it was either aeldari gods(maybe isha?) Who where millions of years away from becoming slaanesh first meal or a shard of one of the ctan Or maybe Gork and Mork created humanity because the necrons went to sleep and the eldar where no fun ta krump
Humans did not just evolve 3 million years ago; we've been evolving for at least 500 million years, a long continuous chain right back to the beginnings of life on this planet. Old ones could have come in at any point during that time and messed with things. We need not have been hominids, or even primates at that time for them to have done it. It's like how birds are still dinosaurs; you never lose what you once were no matter how much you have changed in the intervening time. Who knows how many species of various types they were experimenting on that went extinct, and how many (maybe like us) went on to be the dominant species of our planet. Added bonus - it means a certain percentage of lemurs are also psykers.
> Added bonus - it means a certain percentage of lemurs are also psykers. We do know they made the jokaero (the super-tinkering apes), so it's not as though something being kind of funny was going to stop them.
Aren’t kroot natural ability to find habitable planet and some form of warp navigation actually their own psychic ability?
Good point
Great response. Only thing I'll add is that the Nicassar aren't the only psykers among the Tau. The Nagi, for instance, are considered psykers as they use their psychic abilities to enable a lot of their brainwashing abilities
Humans were definetly augmented by both the old ones and the necrons. The Null gene is evidence of that.
You mean the Pariah Gene, and that bit along with a lot of 3rd edition Necron lore was retconned by the 5th edition. Now Blanks are something of a natural negative polarity to the psykers' positive polarity.
Just because it is from an older book, doesnt mean its retconned. In fact, almost all of the older necron lore is still perfectly fine and part of the lore. The new necron lore has it very firmly established, that the Triarch Praetorians messed with multiple younger species. Nulls being a special genetic feature of humanity is also still very much established lore.
This is actually addressed in one of the Farsight books. Tau individually have weak souls, so weak that predators of the warp can’t really detect them most of the time. Hence why they’re able to warp travel without a gellar field and live. However as a collective they are incredibly powerful in the warp. This comes from a deamon of Tzeentch who possessed a member of the water cast while thinking about the species. That doesn’t mean that the Tau are off the gods radar, Khorn very badly wanted to take Farsight as one of his champions. Tzeentch was very interested in the race as a whole.
It’s literally just age of the species. Tau have only been sentient and somewhat in civilizations for 6-7,000 years. Humanity is 40,000ish years ahead, and didn’t have psykers for most of that time.
I guess this is the best explanation I've heard. Except the Emperor has been around for a long time, and humans had druids before that.
Yea but where and how the emperor actually came to be is still quite muddled. Was it a handful of shamans doing a suicide ritual? Is he a one-off god/monster/force? Is he a DAoT super weapon designed to -think- they’re the god emperor? Psykers are still incredibly rare in humans, 1 of billions. But with infinity-quadrillion humans around there are enough to notice/use/have a “place” in society. The equivalent ratio means there’s like 1-3 psykers in the entirety of the tau empire, which is totally possible (outside of nicassar etc). Just spitballing the numbers here
Based on number per capita, if there was only one psyker among thousands of humans, that's still more than we have now.
It’s less than one psyker per thousand^3 (billions). That’s a thousand-thousand-thousand
[In prehistoric times there were only a few hundred thousand humans.](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c) So, if the Emperor was the only one, that's actually a lot, given the number of humans. But, there were also druids, so it's actually pretty common compared to 40k, on a per capita.
*if he was even there In most fields you exclude outliers when drawing conclusions, and regardless of backstory- the emp is a hardcore outlier. (No psykers even close to him, appeared vastly earlier than most psykers.. maybe, has no true backstory, is immortal etc) There’s also the generally cloudy history of Tau, being discovered M34 in “Stone Age” like society. That could equate to prehistoric man, which wound give humans 200k to a million years head start on Tau as far as “souls” are concerned. The Tau have rapidly improved technology but my original “40,000 years ahead” may be drastically underestimating the societal head start humans have. 40,000 years before 40K (0AD) the pyramids are were thousands of years old and modern Homo sapiens had been around for 2 hundreds thousand+ years.
If you only have 5,000 humans, and you're looking for an event that's one in a billion, it's probably a bad idea to exclude the only event, even if it's an outlier.
It’s actually the reason why that event is an outlier and why we exclude it. If* that event even happened. If something happens once in 5,000 tests, then never again for multiple billion tests, then appears routinely every 2 billion tests- but at a level/scale entirely different from the original event- you would conclude the original event doesn’t fit the population and would be excluded. Any conclusions based on the subsequent events would have no bearing on the first/original, or vice versa. Source: i am a doctor/scientist that deals with population statistics all the time 👍
I mean, I have a PhD in astrophysics, but I didn't think that was relevant to the discussion. In astrophysics you discount outliers because they're often due to equipment failure, which we don't have here because the Emperor isn't a sensor ghost. I don't know why you discount outliers in population statistics, but I'm sorry to hear you do. The very poor SHOULD be counted, imo. That you'd just write them off is upsetting. But, again, probably not relevant to this discussion about fiction. Anyway, even if you don't count the Emperor because he is "too powerful" (which is silly since you're trying to determine the power of human psykers), you'd still have druids and the like. Malcador wasn't the first of his kind.
When did the Old Ones have anything to do with human souls? They were long gone by the time the first “humans” started walking around on two legs. Tau just have very weak ‘souls’, as they are more closely linked with the material universe then they are the Warp. The Eldar have very strong and bright souls, and have a much closer relationship with the Warp. If an Eldar soul is a full ten course meal, then a human soul is a sandwich, a beer, and a packet of crisps. They are linked to the Warp but are still very much of the material universe. A Tau soul would be three stale biscuits and a glass of water, they just don’t have a close enough relationship with the Warp to manifest psychic powers; it would be like trying to fill a bath using a water pistol- they don’t have ‘nothing’, but it not enough to actually do anything.
Almost seems like something or someone engineered them to be that way, huh?
Did someone?
The first Tau codex seems to strongly hint at it with how a warp storm appeared that stopped the Imperium from exterminating the primitive tau, during the tau warring period the aun suddenly appear without explanation and smoothly unite everyone, and I think there's even mention of the tau eventually stumbling onto a damaged ship practically tailor-made to show them how to make their own. (It was a common belief around then it was aeldari interference) Since then this really hasn't been mentioned, so who knows what GW's stance is.
Its a fan theory
Its an in-universe theory, pretty much confirmed in multiple books.
It's not confirmed. There are multiple nods to this theory, but nothing definitive. And there will never be anything confirming or infirming it, as it's part of the mysteries of the setting.
Sure - same as the existence of the old ones is only a legend.
Tau have "dense" souls that gives them a mild resistance to psychic powers, and more importantly Chaotic corruption, with the drawback of of having no psykers. Some humans [have the same trait](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/The_Assignment), though Tau are consistent in being, well, Tau level or thereabouts on that scale. While it could be natural, somebody tampered with their society by introducing the Ethereals, which advanced them societally by centuries practically overnight, and set them up to advance technologically at a pretty high rate. Again, while the nature of their souls could be natural, they might have had a bit of biological engineering added into the mix by their interlopers. Before you ask, no, we don't know who it was, or why. If it was one of the tabletop races, Eldar or Necrons would be the smart money, though it could have just as easily been one of the spooky minor xenos species that don't have a tabletop presence. The reason why looks fairly obvious from the 50,000 foot view: to set up a species who will build a star empire that's resistant to Chaos. It's fun to speculate if this was an experiment that went on too long, or a long term plan to manufacture an ally or a subject in the region, or to sow the seeds for the next galactic superpower to follow in Mankind's wake (because humanity is *always* doomed). Though personally, I find the straightforward explanation to be boring. If we ever learn more about the primitive Tau's benefactors, I hope it's a huge curveball.
They haven't been around long enough to develop them. It took humanity thousands of years and routine exposure to the Warp via space travel to start developing psykers on any meaningful level, the Tau have started on the lower end of the psychic bell curve and are still playing catch up with Warp technology. Maybe one day in the far future, the Tau will exhibit the variance in psyker ability humanity does, but not for a long time yet.
Psychic plot armour basically
Headcanon here: The T'au are a rogue Old One's pet project to "fix" the Necrontyr. That's why they're so dim in the Warp (as the Necrontyr were), why they're so technologically inclined, why they fall to infighting without the Ethereals' influence, even why their symbology shares similarities with the Necrons.
The necrontyr weren't that dim, were they? The C'tan got a lot of soul power eating them. But, it is true the tau are advanced like the necrons.
Keep in mind necrontyr numbers in the trillions. They were likely as populous as humans currently are, if not even more since they had even shorter lifespans which normally goes hand in hand with more offspring.
Once upon a time, humans had no psykers either, and when we started to exhibit our first, they remained so few as to be almost unheard of until the Age of Strife really took off.
The Emperor existed basically since the dawn of man, by most accounts. The druids seem pretty old as well.
The Emperor has been retconned to be the first and greatest psyker. The only Perpetual that is older than the Emperor is Ollanius Perrson and he is at least 8,000 years older than the Emperor. Not a psyker in the slightest old mate Oll
Yeah, but there weren't that many humans in the past. [Only a few hundred thousand.](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c) So, just one is actually a lot on a per capita.
You're not wrong. In the early Bronze Age, when the Emperor was born, the human population would've been lucky to number over 10 million worldwide. And psykers would remain relatively rare occurances for another 25,000 odd years. But all the same, the point is that once upon a time the human species had not expressed any psykers at all.
The tau have psykers- it's the etereal caste. But they are very few.
Pretty sure what the Ethereal cast is isn't really known. However, most books say their abilities to control the tau are hormonal.
In Warhammer Dawn of War, they're psykers. That game is canon, even if old.
Do you have a citation where I could read that lore? Like a game book or something? Everything [I've read on the wiki's and in codexs](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ethereal) hint at their diamond shaped organ on their forehead admits a pheromone, and that's how they control. That and we'll reasoned logic arguments about the Greater good. [Like, there is literally a book with a dissected ethereal talking about how smelly the diamond is.](https://images.app.goo.gl/oag3kBfdHW1rABp77)
Lo book, only Dawn of War game, which is canon, but old.
I don't think the games are canon, or the necrons would still be trying to end all life and worshipping the C'tan. Also, I remember playing those games, but I don't remember the tau being explicitly psychic. Just game mechanics, not in the game lore.
The games have to respect the canon precisely, otherwise they don't get the license. Still, the game being old, that canon might be outdated. Of the tau, only the Etereals were psykers. The necrons still try to end all life - but there are exceptions. Some still worshi the Ctan. I've read that one dinasty considers themselves alive, and the other races as abominations!
They completely re-conned the necrons after 4th. So, like, the 3rd edition codex was clearly canon when it came out (the first one I read) but isn't canon anymore. The game is like that. But, again, I'd really like it if you had a game video or something in which they said the ethereal's were psykers, because I remember playing the game through as tau, and I don't remember that part being stated.
It's the Etherals abilities, summoning some ghost squads. It doesn't say that they are psykers, it just plays like that.
Phil Kelly's Farsight books strongly suggest they're psykers (personally I prefer to ignore his stuff, but there it is). I'm not sure what books say it's hormonal.
I'm just reading it off of the wiki's.
Well there is this one Tau warrior who got possessed by Khorne
Just a tidbit but I would say orginally tyranids did not have psykers they just got onto craftworlds went nom, nom, nom and poof the Zoanthrope strain was born.