Rakata vs. Bivall

On my daily rounds of going over Wookiepedia looking for information I found something interesting.


Don't they look similar? Could the Bivall be an descendants of the Rakata?

 

They share humanoid frames, eye stalks, and maybe beak-like mouth structure. That's it. The eyestalks are shaped differently and positioned differently, neck structure is different, skull structure is different (Rakata have elongated skulls, Bivall have large ornamental crests), and the hands have differnt numbers of digits.

So, a descendant via natural biological processes, no not likely. As possible Rakata+other species crossbreeds created via the Mother Machine, sure, good possibility of that, but that's true of pretty much any humanoid species in the gaalxy at this point.

 

The Chiss, Sullustans, Stennes and Zabraks show how Human-derived species can evolve to look very different. Having the Bivall come from the Rakata isn't so far-fetched.

 

An interesting note on this: the OS original stated that Sionver wanted to keep her species' identity low-key, so she never spoke of it. This was a few years ago, before the "Bivall" name was released (which is fairly recent). The assumption had been, at the time, that there was a connection with the Rakata.

 

As far as I know all so called near-Human species share a common ancestor, the Zhell. They lived on Coruscant 200,000 BBY and later became the Humans which evolved into Mirials, Zabraks, Rattataki, Arkanians, Chiss and many others. I don't know if there are any pictures of Zhell.

 

The Rakata have had countless, innumerable generations to slowly adapt and change into a distinct subspecies. They don't even necessarily have to be Rakata from Lehon that slowly evolved, they could be from an old Infinite Empire colony world that got cut off when the Empire collapsed, before reintegrating with galactic society generations later as the Bivall. I'd love to see them fleshed out some more.

 

Why there is two things that could have happened to the Rakata.

This could mean that a few surviving Rakata would have stolen tech from the Star Forge and were hidden in the Unknown Regions and evolved into Bivall.

This could mean two things the Rakata on Lehon died out or they could have had a messed up gene pool like said above and also evolved into the Bivall.

 

The inference from the Republic report is that the rediscovered Rakata from Lehon lacked a sufficient population to sustain themselves once reintegrated into galactic society, but as you mentioned it fails to take into account former colony worlds. That first piece of information you mentioned, if memory serves, comes from The Unknown Regions which is easily one of my favourite sourcebooks in the history of the EU and refers to surviving Rakata spreading throughout the Unknown Regions in an area known as the Rakatan Archipelago. Only two of the worlds even had galactic level technology and the implication was that they were hidden from, and hostile to, the outside galaxy. However, I see no reason why some other colony world within the mainstream galaxy couldn't have given rise to the Bivall.

 

Or that the Bivall originated from Rakatan colonists who chose to flee to known space instead of staying in the Unknown Regions.