Their opposable digits evolved slightly differently than ours, with two of their ‘fingers’ bending backward, and two forward. Their ‘hands’, therefore, evolved as having two fingers and two thumbs each, making them extremely dexterous, but without anything analogous to our palms. Their wrists simply ending in four flexible joints from which their thick interlocking fingers and thumbs protruded.

Their hind legs were bent backward, lending them to something closer to a rhythmic hop than our own run. Thus their hunting tactic had been more of an ambush than a pursuit, but their powerful legs could carry them over great distances with ease, making migration a natural step in the development of their species.

As time passed, the developing intelligence of this species began to discover the benefits of agriculture, as humanity also would many light-years away. This began with planting crops apparently at random along their path, but returning prior to harvest to reap the rewards.

Their primitive culture continued much like this for millennia, longer even than the Stone Age of the first cavemen. Because of their nomadic way of life, the concept of property came much later, and with far greater brutality than even our own prehistorically violent past. At inherently strategic places at the touching points of their great continents, certain tribes began to settle and fortify. As their still nomadic cousins passed by with the changes of the seasons, these first settlers became traders and primitive hoteliers. As the populations of these first cities and towns grew, the cost of maintaining their ever larger populations grew accordingly, and eventually the concept of tax and levy came to them. With taxation came feudalism, with feudalism came further fortification, and soon the towns became city states, bordered by great walls, imposing their costs upon the still migratory peoples of the great continents they bordered.

Partly as a consequence of these levies, the migratory paths of the remaining nomads started to be pushed into new sea-lanes, a revolution in naval technology and navigation driven by the necessity to survive.

Over time, the fortified city states became nations, expanding their borders into the wide open continents to either side of them, and claiming more and more of the lands of their nomadic cousins. As these burgeoning empires, and their great dynastic families, made the agriculture of the nomads a permanent feature of the land, the nomads were forced into ever more isolated patches along the coast, migrating between distant free lands on their ever improving ships.