Family Matters

I was feeling nostalgic the other day, and I began perusing through the hominid family album. The current scientific consensus is that humans evolved from earlier species of hominins, as found in the fossil record. I studied some of this stuff long ago, and I really wasn’t up to the date on the current paradigm in regards to our human evolutionary path. I asked the oracle, err I mean, an AI, to give me the goods and provide me with a chronological list of hominin evolution that led to humanity. The story is a messy one, as AI-1 rightly pointed out, and there’s no neat path between earlier hominid species and humans. A few of them were just evolutionary branches that came to an end.

The response to my query was a long one. AI-1 gave me a thorough answer with the specific hominin species and pertinent stats along with descriptive tidbits of interest like behaviours and key anatomical features. I prefer to see complex information in diagrammatic form, however, so I went to another AI model (AI-2) with this information and asked it to create an infographic. I only used the general headings as per AI-1's output, so I could test if the second model knew what’s up by filling in the species details. This is the prompt:

Beautiful anthropological scientific illustration of the chronology of hominin species and evolutionary paths. Label as follows:

Earliest Hominins (~7–4 million years ago, Miocene-Pliocene)

Australopithecines (~4.2–2 million years ago, Pliocene-Pleistocene)

Early Homo Genus (~2.8 million years ago onward, Pleistocene)

Later Archaic Humans (~800,000–200,000 years ago)

Use a radial diagram with humans at the center representing modern times. Use background with close-up of cave drawings to add aesthetic touch.

AI-2 used the general headings and added the specific hominin group along with the general chronology. To ensure alignment, I crosschecked the results between the two models. The alignment was fantastic, to use a descriptive term, with timeliness and labels correctly added. AI-2 even added a few more species.

There are probably better ways to represent the flow of hominid evolution diagrammatically. I thought I would give the radial style a try.

Then I had another idea that made me chuckle. If our human species can be understood in this manner, then the evolution of an alien species could also be diagrammed this way. I asked AI-2 to leave everything the same in the diagram but change the hominins to an alien species. Beyond a few stylistics changes, I did not add anything else to the editing prompt.

I got a little thrill when I saw the image pop up. Generally speaking, the look of each figure corresponds to the epoch in which they appear with modern aliens looking sleek and sci-fi. I also liked the names for the different species. I wished it had changed the name of the epochs to correspond with their alien origins. A whole set of possibilities opened up. I could alter any parameter to create a new species. Which I did by prompting the AI-2 to create a species that evolved in an aquatic environment.

Art considerations aside, this would be an excellent tool for any science fiction story teller. It allows the visualization of developed species and may even spark new ideas. I could ask it to alter the planet’s gravity or oxygen content. I could go on generating species, but I ran out of credits, so I will leave you with a diagram depicting the evolution of our icy overlords.

For some reason, it misspelled intelligence 🤔

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