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TNG's The Gambit: Part II dates the age of Vulcan enlightenment to about 2,000 years prior.

PICARD: Think, Tallera. Two thousand years ago your people were being consumed by war. But when peace came to Vulcan, the resonator became useless. That's why it was dismantled.

Star Trek: Enterprise (which takes place two centuries earlier), likewise says that Surak lived 1,800 years earlier:

ARCHER: Surak I've heard of. He's the father of Vulcan logic.

V'LAS: Even after eighteen hundred years, we consider him the most important Vulcan who ever lived.

All this would suggest that the Romulans left Vulcan around the 4th century (since we know they left in opposition to Surak's teachings), and became a whole new biologically distinct species in less than 2,000 years.

Based just on the human experience, this would seem to be ludicrously fast: Earth evolution tends to be counted in a span of millions of year, not thousands. And Vulcans are known to have longer lifespans than humans: a one-to-one comparison would be an isolated group of humans evolving into a whole new species in around 500 years, which we know simply does not occur.

Has this ever been addressed or handwaved in some way? I'm looking for official canon sources, but I'm open to ones lower down the canon ladder as well.

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  • "since we know they left in opposition to Surak's teachings" - could you add a citation for this part, please? Commented Feb 18 at 18:10
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    Do we know just how biologically distinct Romulans are from Vulcans? There might not be much to explain in the first place. Commented Feb 18 at 18:36
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    The distinction is small enough that they can crossbreed (but who can't in the Star Trek universe?) but enough that, at one point, a medical treatment for Vulcans didn't work on a Romulan, but a Klingon treatment did. Commented Feb 18 at 18:38
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    The Romulans may even have re-engineered their genome, which would account for the brief divergent evolution period. Commented Feb 18 at 18:39
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    Given that Klingons changed appearance/behavior in a matter of years I think your assumption that species can't change fast in ST may not be founded. Commented Feb 18 at 21:33

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In TOS Spock speculated Romulans were a lost colony that got cut off from Vulcan during their final big war. (This ambiguity only possibly adds a couple of hundred years at most to the Enteprise version of events.)

Balance of Terror Transcript http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/9.htm

STILES: We know what they look like.

SPOCK: Yes, indeed we do, Mister Stiles. And if Romulans are an offshoot of my Vulcan blood, and I think this likely, then attack becomes even more imperative.

MCCOY: War is never imperative, Mister Spock.

SPOCK: It is for them, Doctor. Vulcan, like Earth, had its aggressive colonising period. Savage, even by Earth standards. And if Romulans retain this martial philosophy, then weakness is something we dare not show.

Keep in mind that Earth in 1996 Star Trek had interstellar travel sleeper ships that surely the Vulcans would also have had during Surak's time.

By the time of ST:Enterprise the Romulans got a bit Flanderized (simplified - to put it more kindly) and it was strongly implied that they were on the opposite side of a war when Surak got nuked. And by implication left at the end of the war.

Enterprise Awakening http://www.chakoteya.net/Enterprise/83.htm

AREV: His body, yes, but his katra was spirited away before the last battle against those who marched beneath the Raptor's wings. Those who wanted to return to the savage ways.

Anyway regarding the OP concern that the Romulan separation is not long enough for genetic drift. Well that's true - but you don't know what the founder population was like either. If Australian aborigines founded a Mars colony they would look artificially far more separated from African genetics just because they spent 50,000 years in Australia first. And if some lost tribe of Neanderthals made it to Mars it would seem like 200,000 years. Romulans could be like Vulcan Neanderthals, and no - that's never been in any publication either I'm aware of.

Not to mention radiation or genetic engineering as real world possibilities that also have no mention in any canon I'm aware of.

No doubt Memory Beta will cover any Romulan novel and comic appearances. See for example the Apocrypha section at the bottom of https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Time_of_Awakening

Anything post Enterprise will be consistent with the notion that they left to reject Surak. Anything prior to Enterprise will likely be more consistent with Spock's speculation of a lost colony when Vulcan was recovering from war. And for the record Enterprise is not in my head canon.

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  • Good point about the nature of the Romulan founder population. When I read the question, I thought about "The Island of the Colorblind" by Oliver Sacks. More in a Doylist vein, I also thought about the fact that the writers of Star Trek generally have a terrible track record with evolutionary biology. Commented Feb 19 at 16:15
  • It is opinion that civilization on Vulcan has risen to interstellar travel and then fallen several times, and that the Romulans separated from the Vulcans many thousands of years before the time of Surak. See my answer below and the link. scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/270692/… Commented Feb 19 at 16:40
  • The two explanations are not necessarily exclusive. It may be that the Romulans left Vulcan due to the last conflict as described in Enterprise, but that doesn't mean they settled an empty world...they may well have gone to an existing colony established long ago. Those refugees could have had a major impact on the culture of that colony, without being genetically representative of the resulting population. Commented Apr 7 at 1:37
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In my opinion, the best and most detailed explanation for this never appears in any Star Trek episode or movie, but in one of the Star Trek books entitled The Romulan Way by Diane Duane and Peter Morwood. I highly recommend the book. Without giving away any spoilers, the book agrees with the general idea discussed in earlier episodes that Romulans are Vulcans who rejected Surak's teachings, but it adds lots of details about these Vulcans in exile and the early history of their new colony long before they ever encounter the Federation. It was so well written that it actually makes many of the later actions of the Romulans make much more rational sense.

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    If you think this book answers the question asked, you need to explain why, ideally with quotes. Commented Apr 6 at 22:24
  • If I did that, it would ruin the story, but it goes so far as to provide specific detailed history which explains the genetic divergence between Vulcans and Romulans, how they made such a distant colony without conventional warp drive, and why more contemporary Romulans are predisposed to distrust of other races and xenophobia. Read the book, and see if you still think this deserves a downvote. My copy is in storage, so I won't be quoting it here anytime soon. Commented Apr 6 at 22:35
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    I've read it. It's not a bad foundation for an answer, but you need to explain why..you can't just airily wave your hand at a 250 page novel and say "the answer's in there somewhere". If you're concerned about posting spoilers, that's what the spoiler tag is for. >! Commented Apr 6 at 22:42
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    I didn't know about the spoiler tag. Normally I would agree with you on the lack of specificity within a 250 page novel, but there are two main story arcs which are roughly evenly represented in those pages as I recall. If you separated them, you could easily imagine one of them being named "Introduction to Early Romulan History." Sure, if I had the book and a couple hours to kill to write the equivalent of a short paper summarizing it all with proper citations, I could, but suffice it to say for now, that novel should answer OP's question. Commented Apr 6 at 23:32
  • If you can't be bothered or don't have the time to write even a short explanation of why this book is relevant, I'd suggest you delete the answer and repost it as a comment. Commented Apr 7 at 6:49
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It is my belief that the split between the Vulcans and the Romulans happened many thousands of years before the reforms of Surak. Possibly several tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before the reforms of Surak.

I discuss my theory in my answer to this question:

How did Romulans and Vulcans split 1600 years before developing warp drive?

And if necessary I can copy that answer here.

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