How to evolve/justify pescatarian elves?
My world - basically Earth all along, unless told otherwise - is populated by humans and few fantasy-based "races" (actually, species - any interbreed offspring, if possible, is infertile): elves, dwarves, etc. Despite the fact that setting is to some extent inspired by common fantasy tropes, there is no magic at all, just hard science. All "fantasy species" in fact belong to the Homo genus and should be plausibly justified as the effects of natural evolution of (perhaps isolated) groups of hominids.
Elves, in addition to some other stereotypical elvish traits (slender, pointy ears etc.) are known to not eat meat of any mammal or bird, while having no problem with milk, eggs, fish and seafood (insects, amphibians and reptiles are a grey zone, read: I have no idea here).
Sure, I can come up with some cultural reason for this, but instead I would like to actually hardwire this trait somehow in their biology. Meat of mammals and birds should be just inedible, though, not poisonous or otherwise deadly: I don't want them to die just because they ate some food offered by humans!
Why these kinds of meat could be inedible for a hominid?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/94297. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
0 answers
0 comment threads