Hominids of the Ringworld

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In the Ringworld series of novels by Larry Niven, the Ringworld is populated by a vast variety of hominid species, ranging in intelligence from merely animals, to full sapience.

These beings, like the humans of Niven's other Known Space works, are descendants of the species called the Pak, whose "breeder" stage resembled homo habilis, and who utilize a symbiotic virus (which grows inside a plant called Tree-of-Life) to then develop into a hyper-intelligent Protector stage. The Pak Protectors built the Ringworld, but for some unknown reason, the Protectors and the Tree-of-Life died off, leaving the Breeders to breed and mutate randomly. The ecology of the Ringworld was left with many empty niches, and as the breeders evolved they moved into these niches, developing into a bewildering variety of species-- predators, herbivores, aquatic mammals, tree-dwellers, etc.

By the time of the setting of the Ringworld novel, there were hominids occupying every possible environment on the Ringworld except the bottom of the two deep oceans. Examples include the high altitude adapted Spill Mountain People (actually many unrelated but similar species created by parallel evolution; the Spill Mountains are far apart, and the Spill Mountain People cannot travel the lowlands, so each group evolved in isolation), the carrion-eating Ghouls who serve as both cleanup crew and undertakers to the other species, and the Grass Eaters, who graze on plants and travel in herds. Arguably the most significant species are the City Builders, who spread across the entire Ringworld and mastered interstellar travel using Bussard ramjet motors cannibalized from the Ringworld's orbit-stabilizing system. Eleven hundred years before the events of Ringworld, they experienced a technological collapse (later found to have been engineered by the Pierson's Puppeteers), known as the Fall of the Cities. This phrase is not a metaphor; the City Builders had mastered magnetic levitation and had many floating buildings thus supported. Even a millennium after the Fall, the City Builder language is still used as a lingua franca on many parts of the Ringworld. Many also practice rishathra (inter-species sex for diplomatic purposes), a practice apparently started, or at least formalized, by the City Builders.