Some notes on Yrichii ecology and culture
May. 8th, 2009 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bnewmanFirst, go check out Walk in the Day: the Musical — I'll wait.
edit: They're "Yrichii" now. Unlike the old name, this one is (a loose transliteration of) a native word, probably a word for "people" in the language of one of the larger city-states in the south, where contact was established first.
I'll be throwing explanatory notes and background information on the setting of Walk in the Day in here until I get around to setting up my new personal wiki. Since I love world building (all that plot, character, and theme stuff — just an excuse!), this could get long, so to spare your friends pages, I'm adding a cut.
Meta-setting:
Walk in the Day takes place in a meta-setting which I plan to use mainly for science fiction vignettes and short stories that take place on planets, focusing on natural history and anthropology (with a nod to LeGuin's Ekumen) as the sciences being ficted. For this reason, I have been deliberately vague about the FTL propulsion technology which exists in this universe — the main thing I know about it is that it enables the stories I want to tell, and not the ones I don't. One possibility would be fixed portal relics (as in the Stargate universe) which for some reason cannot be located directly on the surface of a life-world (so you'd still need spaceships).
Incidentally, speaking of Stargate (and of reversing tropes), the first-contact sequence is very much inspired by the common trope in which a (human, often American) military establishment secretly makes contact with an alien race their civilian government doesn't yet know about. It wouldn't be at all unreasonable for Yrisa to remind you of Stargate SG-1's Samantha Carter, for instance.
Anyway, in this universe, there was once an advanced galaxy-spanning culture which created the gates (or whatever else they are) used for interstellar travel, and also swapped genetic information around among many planets of interest to them. Earth is one of several planets where life evolved naturally, and a source for many transplanted species. However, it's not the only original life-world. (This gives me some freedom about how alien to make my aliens.)
Anyway, if the Yrichii seem suspiciously terrestrial for alien organisms, it's because they (and most of the other species in their environment) are derived from Earth stock. Despite their resemblance to more advanced mammals (the tarsier, jerboa, kit fox, and meerkat all come to mind), the Yrichii are actually monotremes.
Gender and social structure:
I've struggled for a while to figure out the Yrichii system of gender roles, and am finally satisfied that I know how it works. I may lose some feminist-cred here, but this is probably the simplest way to put it: To a much greater extent that in any human culture I've ever heard of, the structure of Yrichii society is that described by Rudyard Kipling in "The Female of the Species". (In fact, a filk of Leslie Fish's setting of that is probably on its way... it won't officially be part of the play, but I think it will appear on the album.)
Females are nest-mothers (grandmothers, actually) and warriors. This is why it's significant that they're monotremes: young adult females lay their eggs at home and leave their children to be nursed (it's very easy for Yrichii females to start lactating) and raised by their grandmothers. Males are gatherers, artisans, and bureaucrats. These role divisions are flexible except at the extremes — all elite warriors are female, and all accountants (really, quartermasters — they manage the clan's stored resources through the dry season) are male, but artisans and gatherers can be either. However, many specific technologies are maintained by secretive guilds, many of these are single-sex, and most of those are male. Both genders make tools, but the final assembly of weapons and the preparation of poisons are performed by those who will use them, who are almost exclusively female.
In terms of societal power structures, the civilian government is male, and the military establishment is female, and each has independent authority. (They are "separate but equal" in the American government Constitutional-separation-of-powers sense.) Often the head of the military matriarchy will be a high-ranking scout who has retired from active duty to be a grandmother, but Yrisa holds a higher rank than any of the retired scouts currently alive in her clan, so she's both the head of the military government and the field commander of her particular elite unit. She defers to Qyni, the head of the civilian council, because of his age, but procedurally it's within the bounds of tradition for her to act independently of him, or even defy him.
Males and females are conventionally considered to be smart and stupid about different things: males are shrewd and prudent when it comes to calculable risks in the middle distance, females are focused on what's right in front of them (especially if it's dangerous) but also have intuition about more distant or unexpected risks. This is mostly true.
Darkness and light:
The Yrichii are nocturnal animals. Like most nocturnal animals (particularly, like tarsiers, which they closely resemble despite not being closely related), they are sometimes active during the day, but don't like bright light. Living on a desert planet in orbit of a very hot, bright star, the Yrichii have more to fear from sunlight itself than tarsiers, whose natural habitat is shady jungle. When active during the day, they will dart from shade to shade, and are constantly aware of where around them such shade may be found (and when such shade is or is not likely to harbor another animal that might try to eat them). Prolonged exposure to sunlight will eventually blind them.
What's the big deal about the lanterns accidentally brought by the humans? They're not just big flashlights: they're strobe lanterns designed for long-range signaling. This is far beyond anything the Yrichiii visual cortex is designed to handle — tuned to the right frequency, the probable effects would be nausea and migraine for almost all, and epileptic seizures for many. To the Yrichii, their only conceivable use would be as a weapon, and actually using them as such would be much more than a war crime. Yrichii would sensibly regard it much as necromancy and the conjuring of demons would be regarded by a modern human who had inherited a horror of the idea of such things from a Catholic upbringing but knew perfectly well (until now) that stuff like that wasn't possible. The reaction of the guard of Minas Tirith to the coming of the Nazgul would also be a good point of comparison.
Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, it did occur to me that the goggles in "Walk in the Day" could well be described as "a shade for you in bright places where all other shades go out". Eric is enough of a Marty Stu already that I thought it would be pushing it to have him think of this and mention it.
Mythology and law:
The Yrichii encountered in Walk in the Day believe the universe as a whole was created by Grandmother Night. Their particular world-system was created by the Sun, a tyrannical and malevolent demiurge. (They seem to believe in multiple such world-systems — it's not clear if this belief is derived from prior contact with starfarers.) The Moon, eldest and wisest daughter of Night and the Sun, rescued the Yrichii from the Sun's tyranny and stole a portion of his light sufficient for them to see by. (Resonances with Exodus and with the story of Prometheus are intended.) Translation of family relationship terms is confounded by the unusual structure of the Yrichii family group.
The Moon's turning against the Sun is regarded as "treason", which has a special meaning: it is, in the terms of Kipling's "The Female of the Species", the erasure of male economic law in the face of the female law of survival and care for children, and in particular the voiding of agreements over foraging rights when necessary to feed starving children. The moral valence of this term is somewhat like that of "self-defense" in English. Unmitigated evil is never referred to as "treason", but as "treachery". All of these terms are translations, of course.
Planetary ecology:
The Yrichii homeworld has a very severe seasonal cycle because of its large axial tilt. In winter, most of the small amount of water on the planet is in the polar ice cap (singular). In spring, it all melts and evaporates, and is carried by strong winds to the other polar ice cap (singular). Only a little of it falls as rain in between, most of that in sudden severe thunderstorms. Dangerous hail is as common as rain. Around the edges of the polar cap in spring and fall there's a short-lived verdant tundra which is exploited by tribes more nomadic than the settled Yrichii with whom humans have made contact. In most of the rest of the world, spring is the growing time (and the spawning time — Yrichii females lay their single egg in the spring).
This is followed by the battleground of summer, in which all plants and animals take advantage of the abundance of solar energy to build biological defenses to protect their precious supplies of water. Almost everything, both plant and animal, is armored and poisonous (I haven't decided, but the Yrichii themselves may have venomous spurs, like their distant relative the platypus). This is one of the reasons it's unlikely the Yrichii will ever come to think of themselves as "nonviolent" in the fullest sense of the Quaker peace testimony — their relationship even with their vegetable crops is, while respectful, inherently violent. If you've ever been pricked by the pointy parts of a pineapple, imagine a world where that could very well kill you, set that next to the obvious appeal of a pineapple's juicy interior to a desert-dweller, and you'll have an idea.
Fall brings another brief rainy season, less fecund than spring. Many plants are biannual, producing seed in the summer which will grow into a seemingly completely different plant in the fall, and vice versa. In between gathering seasons (and, even within a "gathering season", between the sporadic rains) are times of hoarding, when food and water must be carefully managed.
Most of the water available to the Yrichii is ground water. Having evolved in this environment, they are skilled at finding buried water, and can take advantage of even slightly damp sand. They also naturally retain water very well — water discipline is built into their bodies and therefore less visibly a part of their culture than in the case of Dune's Fremen. Perennial or consistently annual bodies of standing water are very rare. On the Yrichii homeworld, oases which human desert-dwellers would consider worthy of the name are the hearts of cities which rule empires.
Much of the planet is uninhabitable even by the Yrichii. Vast regions of sun-scorched salt flats and shifting dunes stretch between habitable regions similar in character to the American southwest or the Kalahari. The Yrichii refer to these two types of regions by terms which I have translated as "expanses" and (were you wondering what I meant by this term?) "continents". The expanses are traditionally considered impossible to cross, but a few merchant empires have attempted to establish safe trade routes. Where they have succeeded, caravans must be escorted by specialized and highly trained scouts (much more elite than the ones we meet) called "expansers". This is almost certainly the term used by Nathan to render "Marine Corps", and it would have made quite an impression on Yrisa.
Among the Yrichii's natural enemies are a variety of large reptilian predators. There's something especially uncanny and horrible about a creature that needs sunlight to wake up, and can then eat you. The final ordeal which Sira and her friends had to pass before joining the Daughters of the Moon was to kill one of these creatures, which had been captured alive (at some risk, even at night when it would be torpid) for this purpose. It would resemble a cross between a dimetrodon and a gila monster, and might be as big (in relative terms) as a large tiger.
I've thought for a little bit of the probable effects on the environment of the Yrichii homeworld due to the widespread use of moisture vaporators. (Really, they should be called condensers, but I decided to keep the term from Star Wars, and yes, that's what the "vaporators" on Tatooine are supposed to be.) The ice caps will shrink a little as more water is captured in the middle and equatorial latitudes. The patterns of major storms may shift, in what direction isn't clear. There shouldn't be a major problem of upwind tribes "stealing the rain" from their downwind neighbors in any direct sense, although as weather patterns shift there will be some winners and losers. The planners of the human relief operation are aware of this probable outcome and think they are prepared to help the Yrichii deal with it. Maybe they are.
Fire:
Any skill or craft which can cause anything to glow with a color-temperature much above 1500 K is considered uncanny and ritually dangerous, even when the mechanism is well-known. (The word for this concept could be rendered into English as "photomancy".) This makes their cultural relationship with fire especially interesting.
Cooking fires use charcoal, which is either gathered from where it is naturally produced by fires started by lightning-strikes or produced in enclosed kilns by a special guild. These fires are carefully tended by guild members (in some societies, the same guild, in others a different one) so that they are always just glowing coals, and never allowed to flare or flame. Yrichii can see quite well far into the infrared, and would find a fire to be uncomfortably bright in that range, but it would not provoke in them the same instinctive aversion as full-spectrum sunlight.
In some of the larger city states, secretive guilds were (before contact) just beginning to experiment with the production of glass. There's certainly plenty of sand, but working in close proximity to a fire hot enough to keep glass molten would be very dangerous for Yrichii eyes, in addition to being dangerous in all the ways it is for humans. Smithcraft is unknown to the Yrichii due to their planet's scarcity of metals.
Food:
The Yrichii are omnivores with broadly similar tastes in food to humans, so they would be able to share with humans any foods not containing any toxin that one species can safely process and the other cannot. Their reaction to alcohol is similar (other than perhaps quantitatively) to ours, and the after-party for the initiation of the new Daughters of the Moon probably featured a form of (undistilled) tequila. Like many humans (although perhaps not many of those reading this) they are especially fond of insects. A Yrichii version of pemmican, carried by their far-ranging scouts, would most likely be made from roasted insects and seeds, sweetened with cactus nectar, and pressed into a cake — in other words, a locust Clif bar. Mmmm!
Most Yrichii societies are hunter-gatherers on the verge of the transition to horticulture, a transition which human contact will accelerate and complete. A few city-states centered on major oases are primarily horticultural. Large-scale field agriculture will probably never be possible on the Yrichii homeworld.
The Yrichii keep several kinds of insects domestically, including cricket-like species which they eat and a kind of bioluminescent silkworm which they use both for indoor illumination (for which, for them, it is quite sufficient) and fiber. Domestic larger animals have not historically played a major role in the Yrichii economy, mainly because most of the animal life on the planet is so hostile. Some cultures have domesticated birds (or bird-like animals) for eggs and meat. Humans are studying the likely feasibility and impact of introducing the chicken. (Oh, and consider the very different significance for the Yrichii of a dawn-crowing rooster...)
The Yrichii definitely have no domestic dairy livestock. (If there's a large, herbivorous mammal on the planet, it must be something like a cross between a camel and an ankylosaurus, ornery and aggressive. It would not be fun to try to milk.) However, since adult female Yrichii can lactate almost at will if they are well-nourished, many cultures have developed dairy foods based on their own milk. On the other hand, Yrichii lose their ability to digest lactose not long after they are traditionally weaned, so such foods (typically, sweetened puddings and custards) are reserved as treats and comfort foods for very young children. With the introduction by humans of electric refrigeration technology, these children will no doubt discover a taste for ice cream.
edit: They're "Yrichii" now. Unlike the old name, this one is (a loose transliteration of) a native word, probably a word for "people" in the language of one of the larger city-states in the south, where contact was established first.
I'll be throwing explanatory notes and background information on the setting of Walk in the Day in here until I get around to setting up my new personal wiki. Since I love world building (all that plot, character, and theme stuff — just an excuse!), this could get long, so to spare your friends pages, I'm adding a cut.
Meta-setting:
Walk in the Day takes place in a meta-setting which I plan to use mainly for science fiction vignettes and short stories that take place on planets, focusing on natural history and anthropology (with a nod to LeGuin's Ekumen) as the sciences being ficted. For this reason, I have been deliberately vague about the FTL propulsion technology which exists in this universe — the main thing I know about it is that it enables the stories I want to tell, and not the ones I don't. One possibility would be fixed portal relics (as in the Stargate universe) which for some reason cannot be located directly on the surface of a life-world (so you'd still need spaceships).
Incidentally, speaking of Stargate (and of reversing tropes), the first-contact sequence is very much inspired by the common trope in which a (human, often American) military establishment secretly makes contact with an alien race their civilian government doesn't yet know about. It wouldn't be at all unreasonable for Yrisa to remind you of Stargate SG-1's Samantha Carter, for instance.
Anyway, in this universe, there was once an advanced galaxy-spanning culture which created the gates (or whatever else they are) used for interstellar travel, and also swapped genetic information around among many planets of interest to them. Earth is one of several planets where life evolved naturally, and a source for many transplanted species. However, it's not the only original life-world. (This gives me some freedom about how alien to make my aliens.)
Anyway, if the Yrichii seem suspiciously terrestrial for alien organisms, it's because they (and most of the other species in their environment) are derived from Earth stock. Despite their resemblance to more advanced mammals (the tarsier, jerboa, kit fox, and meerkat all come to mind), the Yrichii are actually monotremes.
Gender and social structure:
I've struggled for a while to figure out the Yrichii system of gender roles, and am finally satisfied that I know how it works. I may lose some feminist-cred here, but this is probably the simplest way to put it: To a much greater extent that in any human culture I've ever heard of, the structure of Yrichii society is that described by Rudyard Kipling in "The Female of the Species". (In fact, a filk of Leslie Fish's setting of that is probably on its way... it won't officially be part of the play, but I think it will appear on the album.)
Females are nest-mothers (grandmothers, actually) and warriors. This is why it's significant that they're monotremes: young adult females lay their eggs at home and leave their children to be nursed (it's very easy for Yrichii females to start lactating) and raised by their grandmothers. Males are gatherers, artisans, and bureaucrats. These role divisions are flexible except at the extremes — all elite warriors are female, and all accountants (really, quartermasters — they manage the clan's stored resources through the dry season) are male, but artisans and gatherers can be either. However, many specific technologies are maintained by secretive guilds, many of these are single-sex, and most of those are male. Both genders make tools, but the final assembly of weapons and the preparation of poisons are performed by those who will use them, who are almost exclusively female.
In terms of societal power structures, the civilian government is male, and the military establishment is female, and each has independent authority. (They are "separate but equal" in the American government Constitutional-separation-of-powers sense.) Often the head of the military matriarchy will be a high-ranking scout who has retired from active duty to be a grandmother, but Yrisa holds a higher rank than any of the retired scouts currently alive in her clan, so she's both the head of the military government and the field commander of her particular elite unit. She defers to Qyni, the head of the civilian council, because of his age, but procedurally it's within the bounds of tradition for her to act independently of him, or even defy him.
Males and females are conventionally considered to be smart and stupid about different things: males are shrewd and prudent when it comes to calculable risks in the middle distance, females are focused on what's right in front of them (especially if it's dangerous) but also have intuition about more distant or unexpected risks. This is mostly true.
Darkness and light:
The Yrichii are nocturnal animals. Like most nocturnal animals (particularly, like tarsiers, which they closely resemble despite not being closely related), they are sometimes active during the day, but don't like bright light. Living on a desert planet in orbit of a very hot, bright star, the Yrichii have more to fear from sunlight itself than tarsiers, whose natural habitat is shady jungle. When active during the day, they will dart from shade to shade, and are constantly aware of where around them such shade may be found (and when such shade is or is not likely to harbor another animal that might try to eat them). Prolonged exposure to sunlight will eventually blind them.
What's the big deal about the lanterns accidentally brought by the humans? They're not just big flashlights: they're strobe lanterns designed for long-range signaling. This is far beyond anything the Yrichiii visual cortex is designed to handle — tuned to the right frequency, the probable effects would be nausea and migraine for almost all, and epileptic seizures for many. To the Yrichii, their only conceivable use would be as a weapon, and actually using them as such would be much more than a war crime. Yrichii would sensibly regard it much as necromancy and the conjuring of demons would be regarded by a modern human who had inherited a horror of the idea of such things from a Catholic upbringing but knew perfectly well (until now) that stuff like that wasn't possible. The reaction of the guard of Minas Tirith to the coming of the Nazgul would also be a good point of comparison.
Speaking of The Lord of the Rings, it did occur to me that the goggles in "Walk in the Day" could well be described as "a shade for you in bright places where all other shades go out". Eric is enough of a Marty Stu already that I thought it would be pushing it to have him think of this and mention it.
Mythology and law:
The Yrichii encountered in Walk in the Day believe the universe as a whole was created by Grandmother Night. Their particular world-system was created by the Sun, a tyrannical and malevolent demiurge. (They seem to believe in multiple such world-systems — it's not clear if this belief is derived from prior contact with starfarers.) The Moon, eldest and wisest daughter of Night and the Sun, rescued the Yrichii from the Sun's tyranny and stole a portion of his light sufficient for them to see by. (Resonances with Exodus and with the story of Prometheus are intended.) Translation of family relationship terms is confounded by the unusual structure of the Yrichii family group.
The Moon's turning against the Sun is regarded as "treason", which has a special meaning: it is, in the terms of Kipling's "The Female of the Species", the erasure of male economic law in the face of the female law of survival and care for children, and in particular the voiding of agreements over foraging rights when necessary to feed starving children. The moral valence of this term is somewhat like that of "self-defense" in English. Unmitigated evil is never referred to as "treason", but as "treachery". All of these terms are translations, of course.
Planetary ecology:
The Yrichii homeworld has a very severe seasonal cycle because of its large axial tilt. In winter, most of the small amount of water on the planet is in the polar ice cap (singular). In spring, it all melts and evaporates, and is carried by strong winds to the other polar ice cap (singular). Only a little of it falls as rain in between, most of that in sudden severe thunderstorms. Dangerous hail is as common as rain. Around the edges of the polar cap in spring and fall there's a short-lived verdant tundra which is exploited by tribes more nomadic than the settled Yrichii with whom humans have made contact. In most of the rest of the world, spring is the growing time (and the spawning time — Yrichii females lay their single egg in the spring).
This is followed by the battleground of summer, in which all plants and animals take advantage of the abundance of solar energy to build biological defenses to protect their precious supplies of water. Almost everything, both plant and animal, is armored and poisonous (I haven't decided, but the Yrichii themselves may have venomous spurs, like their distant relative the platypus). This is one of the reasons it's unlikely the Yrichii will ever come to think of themselves as "nonviolent" in the fullest sense of the Quaker peace testimony — their relationship even with their vegetable crops is, while respectful, inherently violent. If you've ever been pricked by the pointy parts of a pineapple, imagine a world where that could very well kill you, set that next to the obvious appeal of a pineapple's juicy interior to a desert-dweller, and you'll have an idea.
Fall brings another brief rainy season, less fecund than spring. Many plants are biannual, producing seed in the summer which will grow into a seemingly completely different plant in the fall, and vice versa. In between gathering seasons (and, even within a "gathering season", between the sporadic rains) are times of hoarding, when food and water must be carefully managed.
Most of the water available to the Yrichii is ground water. Having evolved in this environment, they are skilled at finding buried water, and can take advantage of even slightly damp sand. They also naturally retain water very well — water discipline is built into their bodies and therefore less visibly a part of their culture than in the case of Dune's Fremen. Perennial or consistently annual bodies of standing water are very rare. On the Yrichii homeworld, oases which human desert-dwellers would consider worthy of the name are the hearts of cities which rule empires.
Much of the planet is uninhabitable even by the Yrichii. Vast regions of sun-scorched salt flats and shifting dunes stretch between habitable regions similar in character to the American southwest or the Kalahari. The Yrichii refer to these two types of regions by terms which I have translated as "expanses" and (were you wondering what I meant by this term?) "continents". The expanses are traditionally considered impossible to cross, but a few merchant empires have attempted to establish safe trade routes. Where they have succeeded, caravans must be escorted by specialized and highly trained scouts (much more elite than the ones we meet) called "expansers". This is almost certainly the term used by Nathan to render "Marine Corps", and it would have made quite an impression on Yrisa.
Among the Yrichii's natural enemies are a variety of large reptilian predators. There's something especially uncanny and horrible about a creature that needs sunlight to wake up, and can then eat you. The final ordeal which Sira and her friends had to pass before joining the Daughters of the Moon was to kill one of these creatures, which had been captured alive (at some risk, even at night when it would be torpid) for this purpose. It would resemble a cross between a dimetrodon and a gila monster, and might be as big (in relative terms) as a large tiger.
I've thought for a little bit of the probable effects on the environment of the Yrichii homeworld due to the widespread use of moisture vaporators. (Really, they should be called condensers, but I decided to keep the term from Star Wars, and yes, that's what the "vaporators" on Tatooine are supposed to be.) The ice caps will shrink a little as more water is captured in the middle and equatorial latitudes. The patterns of major storms may shift, in what direction isn't clear. There shouldn't be a major problem of upwind tribes "stealing the rain" from their downwind neighbors in any direct sense, although as weather patterns shift there will be some winners and losers. The planners of the human relief operation are aware of this probable outcome and think they are prepared to help the Yrichii deal with it. Maybe they are.
Fire:
Any skill or craft which can cause anything to glow with a color-temperature much above 1500 K is considered uncanny and ritually dangerous, even when the mechanism is well-known. (The word for this concept could be rendered into English as "photomancy".) This makes their cultural relationship with fire especially interesting.
Cooking fires use charcoal, which is either gathered from where it is naturally produced by fires started by lightning-strikes or produced in enclosed kilns by a special guild. These fires are carefully tended by guild members (in some societies, the same guild, in others a different one) so that they are always just glowing coals, and never allowed to flare or flame. Yrichii can see quite well far into the infrared, and would find a fire to be uncomfortably bright in that range, but it would not provoke in them the same instinctive aversion as full-spectrum sunlight.
In some of the larger city states, secretive guilds were (before contact) just beginning to experiment with the production of glass. There's certainly plenty of sand, but working in close proximity to a fire hot enough to keep glass molten would be very dangerous for Yrichii eyes, in addition to being dangerous in all the ways it is for humans. Smithcraft is unknown to the Yrichii due to their planet's scarcity of metals.
Food:
The Yrichii are omnivores with broadly similar tastes in food to humans, so they would be able to share with humans any foods not containing any toxin that one species can safely process and the other cannot. Their reaction to alcohol is similar (other than perhaps quantitatively) to ours, and the after-party for the initiation of the new Daughters of the Moon probably featured a form of (undistilled) tequila. Like many humans (although perhaps not many of those reading this) they are especially fond of insects. A Yrichii version of pemmican, carried by their far-ranging scouts, would most likely be made from roasted insects and seeds, sweetened with cactus nectar, and pressed into a cake — in other words, a locust Clif bar. Mmmm!
Most Yrichii societies are hunter-gatherers on the verge of the transition to horticulture, a transition which human contact will accelerate and complete. A few city-states centered on major oases are primarily horticultural. Large-scale field agriculture will probably never be possible on the Yrichii homeworld.
The Yrichii keep several kinds of insects domestically, including cricket-like species which they eat and a kind of bioluminescent silkworm which they use both for indoor illumination (for which, for them, it is quite sufficient) and fiber. Domestic larger animals have not historically played a major role in the Yrichii economy, mainly because most of the animal life on the planet is so hostile. Some cultures have domesticated birds (or bird-like animals) for eggs and meat. Humans are studying the likely feasibility and impact of introducing the chicken. (Oh, and consider the very different significance for the Yrichii of a dawn-crowing rooster...)
The Yrichii definitely have no domestic dairy livestock. (If there's a large, herbivorous mammal on the planet, it must be something like a cross between a camel and an ankylosaurus, ornery and aggressive. It would not be fun to try to milk.) However, since adult female Yrichii can lactate almost at will if they are well-nourished, many cultures have developed dairy foods based on their own milk. On the other hand, Yrichii lose their ability to digest lactose not long after they are traditionally weaned, so such foods (typically, sweetened puddings and custards) are reserved as treats and comfort foods for very young children. With the introduction by humans of electric refrigeration technology, these children will no doubt discover a taste for ice cream.
Re: First round!
Date: 2011-02-16 07:46 pm (UTC)