Translations:Solomani/29/en

When the Vilani burst into the interstellar scene, the discovery of numerous interfertile human races, all equally alien to the rest of the life on their planets, and at the same time of many non-human sentients with clear relationships to lower animals on their planets, sparked a new (and correct) theory that humaniti had originated on a single homeworld and had been scattered across the galaxy by unknown agency. Some theorized a previous human galactic empire, but the discovery of numerous ruins of the Ancients seemed to point to them as the likely agents. The major remaining question was the identity of humaniti's home planet. Many candidates were proposed, and all had their (generally chauvinistic) proponents, but the one generally accepted by scientists was Urunishu in the Antares Sector. Urunishu possessed a native human race and a large number of species obviously very similar biologically to humaniti, from rodents to baleen whales, including a number of primate species. Unfortunately, Urunishu was undergoing an ice age, and had suffered from intermittent glaciation for several million years, making paleontological research both difficult and, due to the scouring action of glacial flow, unlikely to retain many recent fossils. It was at this point that biological progress began to suffer from the general stagnation of scientific research that was an unfortunate outgrowth of the Consolidation Wars and the Pax Vilanica.