So, I just found this list
https://www.humanjourney.us/discovering-our-distant-ancestors-section/detailed-list/
It was a bounce of a Reddit discussion about how to make non-human peoples distinctive. The discussion quickly wandered more toward SF and creating aliens, but one post made the interesting observation that if you took this list (211 items) and simply modified one or two, you'd have a folk both different yet still relatable. I think that's pretty valid. I plan to go through the list in detail myself, but thought I'd offer it up here for the rest of the Presently Assembled.
As a postscript, I do tend to fall in the camp of making non-humans pretty close to human. Get too far away and you really are in SF territory. That's fine for some writers; it's just not for me. I'm more interested in letting my non-humans be bipedal, carbon-based life forms. Let the biology be pretty similar. It's the sociological (anthropological doesn't quite feel right in this context) differences that are the most interesting, because they offer the most opportunities for story telling. History tells stories; science just tells facts. (I know that's not really fair, but it's concise!)
https://www.humanjourney.us/discovering-our-distant-ancestors-section/detailed-list/
It was a bounce of a Reddit discussion about how to make non-human peoples distinctive. The discussion quickly wandered more toward SF and creating aliens, but one post made the interesting observation that if you took this list (211 items) and simply modified one or two, you'd have a folk both different yet still relatable. I think that's pretty valid. I plan to go through the list in detail myself, but thought I'd offer it up here for the rest of the Presently Assembled.
As a postscript, I do tend to fall in the camp of making non-humans pretty close to human. Get too far away and you really are in SF territory. That's fine for some writers; it's just not for me. I'm more interested in letting my non-humans be bipedal, carbon-based life forms. Let the biology be pretty similar. It's the sociological (anthropological doesn't quite feel right in this context) differences that are the most interesting, because they offer the most opportunities for story telling. History tells stories; science just tells facts. (I know that's not really fair, but it's concise!)