The scene at the end of ‘Oathkeeper’, season 4 episode 4, where a White Walker takes Craster’s last newborn son generated much speculation about the White Walkers and their true nature. One of thirteen White Walkers collects the offered baby, and pricking the baby’s cheek with his fingernail transforms it. The White Walker, possibly the Night’s King, is dressed in fine black clothes with pointed teeth and a skull crowned with horns. Although showrunners Benioff and Weiss have stated that with the scene they wanted to take a deep look into the world of the White Walkers while preserving their mystery, there is some food for thought about where the White Walkers come from. Along with the Valyrians, both races stand out as being distinctly nonhuman when compared to the other races of the World of Ice and Fire.
The Doom. In the late 1970s scholars became intrigued by the possibility that the dinosaurs would have continued to evolve if they had not been almost wiped out in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 66million years ago: An asteroid at least six miles in diameter hit the Earth, creating the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. We say almost wiped out as only avian dinosaurs survived the extinction event in the long term, a small number of non-avian dinosaurs may have survived in very small numbers before dying out but evidence for these Paleocene dinosaurs remains controversial. While avian dinosaurs evolved into birds in the post-extinction event world, we can only speculate as to what the non-avian “terrible lizard” dinosaurs, the vast sauropodomorphs (such as Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus) and carnivorous theropods (Tyrannosaurus) would have evolved into if left unchecked.
The Lizard-Lion King. In 1977 the Japanese science fiction writer Aritsune Toyota became one of the first people to propose the idea of sapient dinosaurs, inspired by John Ostrom’s 1964 theory that Deinonychus may have been warm-blooded. Expanding on the idea of warm-blooded dinosaurs Toyota developed the idea that some dinosaurs could have evolved to acquire intelligence and develop technology. Around the same time Carl Sagan and the psychologist Harry Jerison also speculated about dinosaur species evolving into sapient dinosaurs.
The sapient dinosaur idea led in 1982 to the Dinosauroid, a hypothetical upright, bipedal, half-man and half-dinosaur, created by Dale A. Russell, fossils curator at the National Museum of Canada. Russell theorised a possible evolutionary path for Troodon, a dinosaur that perished in the extinction event 65 million years ago. The Troodon were small dinosaurs not unlike the raptors from Jurassic Park in appearance, about 1m tall with a retractable sickle-shaped claw on each second toe. What Russell had noted about the Troodon, was it’s encephalization quotient (EQ), a measurement based on brain size that is used to estimate cognition and intelligence. The Troodon had an EQ six times greater than other dinosaurs and was probably about as intelligent as an opossum. If Troodon continued to evolve at the same rate, today it would have a brain of similar size to a human. As Troodon had fingers capable of holding objects and binocular vision, Russell thought they could evolve into the bipedal Dinosauroid, with a beak, large eyes and three-fingered hands, speaking a language that resembled birdsong.
Some palaeontologists reject the humanoid dinosaur idea as arrogance, thinking the Troodon would simply have evolved into a dinosaur with a human level of intelligence, large eyes and three fingers. Just a couple of years after Dinosauroid, John C. McLoughlin, a science and science fiction writer proposed an intelligent evolved dinosaur using as a base another large-brained maniraptoran (having long arms and three-fingered hands and a lunate wrist bone) dinosaur, the dromaeosaurs. This theoretical evolved dinosaur was depicted wearing jewellery and carrying a weapon it had invented.
Game of Thought. The fossil record gives only a partial picture, as the conditions have to be right for something to fossilize, it is estimated that less than 1% of all the species that have ever lived have been fossilized. The number of species in the fossil record covers millions of years and is still less than 5% of the number of known living species. There could have been dinosaurs a lot more intelligent that Troodon that did not make it into the fossil record. As dinosaurs existed for around 160 million years and we have only been around for less than half a million years, it could be argued that the really intelligent dinosaur population built a spaceship and left before the asteroid hit. As the fossil record from 66million years ago is so incomplete, it would be hard to provide concrete proof that they didn’t. Some palaeontologists say that they could have engaged in a self-destructive nuclear war and 66million years later, there would not be much trace, just as there will not be many traces of us in 66million years. This is just a thought game, like we are doing here with Game of Thrones, no one thinks that super-intelligent dinosaurs evolved and nuked each other, but the possibility that they could have and we can’t prove they didn’t is entertaining.
The Last Dragon. The appendix to A Game of Thrones describes the dragonlords, of whom only the Targaryens remain, as having a “striking (some say inhuman) beauty” and the kindly man recalls that “the dragonlords of the old Freehold were strong in sorcery, and lesser men defied them at their peril.” Could the real origin of the dragonlords, rather than Valyrian shepherds who discovered and tamed dragons with magic, be that they descended from a common ancestor? It seems that the Targaryens and the Last Dragon in particular have certain physical traits that cannot be explained by simply being shepherds with magical ability. Daenerys Targaryen has no magical training but has an affinity with dragons and a natural resistance to fire.
Dragonlords of Ice and Fire. While the existence of fire dragons is accepted in the known world, the existence of the ice dragons described in Old Nan’s tales is not proven, they are said to stalk the Shivering Sea and the White Waste, dwarfing the fire dragons of Valyria, living ice with pale blue crystal eyes, their breath a blizzard which freezes their prey solid. If the Targaryens are evolved from fire dragons, could the White Walkers be descended from ice dragons? Like the dragonlords they are strong sorcerers and have certain invulnerabilities and distinctive physical traits.
When discussing this evolutionary relationship between dragonlords and dragons, White Walkers and ice dragons, or even ourselves and primates, people often get confused and ask the question: “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys today?” The answer, we didn’t evolve from monkeys, monkeys and us both evolved from something that looks a bit like a monkey, an evolutionary ancestor known as the Most Recent Common Ancestor (sometimes called the Last Common Ancestor or concestor, as MRCA also has a different meaning in genealogy). This common ancestor between two species evolved, some one way and some another way, creating two or more different species. In our case one species eventually became common and pygmy chimpanzees, and the other species eventually became us.
So who knows, at some time during the Dawn Age, there may have been some kind of primal dragonosaur that evolved into two species of dragonosaur, one line kept becoming more humanoid and intelligent to eventually became a dragonlord, the other kept its massive size and fearsome natural defences and became a dragon. In the arctic conditions of the Land of Always Winter something similar may have happened to ice dragonosaurs to evolve into the White Walkers. How they evolved from something reptile-like to mammal is another question, but it is something humans did, and suggests that the common ancestor of the dragons and dragonlords (or ice dragons and White Walkers) was an amphibian creature, or something very similar called an amniote (the only difference is in their eggs). The gigantic fossilised bones said to be the sea dragon Nagga, which form Nagga’s Hill on Old Wyk in the Iron Islands, may be an example of such a primal dragonosaur described above. The Drowned God is said to have changed Nagga’s bones to stone, rather than tens of thousands or millions of years of fossilisation.
Sweet Atavism. One piece of evidence that the dragonlords of Valyria may have an evolutionary relationship with dragons is the character Sweets from A Dance With Dragons. Sweets is a hermaphrodite of Valyrian ancestry and has both male and female genitals. A human cannot have a complete set of both male and female genitalia as the genitals develop from primitive embryonic structures that become male or female structures when the embryo takes on a distinct sex in its seventh week. For example, the labioscrotal folds of an embryo become either the scrotum in a male embryo or the labia majora in the female embryo, the same is true for the rest of the genital structures. No human has ever had complete, fully functional, male AND female genitalia, only intersex genitalia that combine male and female structures.
In Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History, Septon Barth claims that dragons are not male or female; while Maester Aemon believed that they could change sex. Septon Barth, Grand Maester Munkun and Maester Thomax all had different theories about how dragons mated and it is difficult if not impossible to be able to tell what sex a dragon was as they have no external sex organs. It may be the case that dragons or one of their evolutionary ancestors had both male and female sex organs. If the Valyrians were related to dragons, a real phenomenon called atavism could have given Sweets hermaphroditism. Atavism is the rare reappearance in a living organism of a trait from a distant evolutionary ancestor, in this case having both sets of sex organs that the dragons or their ancestors once had.
Sometimes called “reverse evolution,” atavism happens when a gene sequence preserved in our DNA that has been switched off for thousands or millions of years suddenly switches back on due to a mutation. In humans atavisms can include being born with a short vestigial tail, hypertrichosis (“werewolf syndrome”), or large canine teeth.
Early human embryos progress through some features of their evolutionary ancestors during development but these usually disappear before the final stage. Human embryos have a tail, one-sixth the length of the embryo, but this is absorbed as the embryo grows into a foetus. If the tail does not disappear it is an example of human atavism. One of the most dramatic examples of human atavism is snake heart, where the circulation and structure of the heart resemble those of a reptile, there have been only two known cases. The heart of an early stage human embryo resembles that of a fish, one of our earliest evolutionary ancestors, later it resembles that of a reptile, one of our more recent ancestors, before becoming recognisably human. Atavism is often used as evidence that evolution is real.
The possibility of the White Walkers and any future characters descended from dragonlords having atavastic traits from dragons could add a mutant or super power dimension to A Game of Thrones. But do the White Walkers even reproduce? There is still so much we don’t know about them, as discussed in previous post The Others
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