Recursive Precursors

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The Protheans were not the first. They did not create the Citadel. They did not forge the Mass Relays. They merely found them, the legacy of my kind. —Sovereign, Mass Effect

Precursors are a staple of a great many Sci Fi and Fantasy settings. While Precursors come in many different varieties, the defining aspect of the Precursors is that they existed in the time before a setting's contemporary civilization.

Recursive Precursors occur when the concept of a Precursor is applied recursively; such beings served a similar role to the Precursors as they do to contemporary civilizations. The odds are surprisingly high that the Precursors to the Precursors had even had another race that served as their own Precursors, and so on, forming a long line of ancient civilizations faster than you can say Yo Dawg...

Of course, having a long series Precursor races carries some Disturbing Implications. Beyond the fact that the Precursors]] existed in the time before the setting's present civilizations, another important aspect of the Precursors is that they are no longer around, due to Precursor Killers, being Sealed In A Can Of Some Sort, Ascending to some sort of higher reality, dying out for mundane reasons, and so on. While the last two options are certainly a possibility, when dealing with large number of Recursive Precursors, there's generally a not so pleasant reason for all of them not being around, which has some odds of being One Of Their Own.

Naturally, this is a Sub-Trope of Precursors. When Creating Life is involved, this trope is highly compatible with Recursive Creators, but is otherwise not related to other "Recursive Tropes" such as Recursive Reality and Recursive Fanfiction.

Examples of Recursive Precursors include:

Anime and Manga

• In Gall Force: Eternal Story, the Solnoids are the precursors of humanity; in Gall Force: Stardust War it's also revealed that the Solnoids also have precursors. Finally, in Gall Force: New Era, it's revealed that due to a Stable Time Loop, all the races in the story are each other's precursors.

Fan Works

• Across the various universes that can be reached by magical gates in Desperately Seeking Ranma there are acknowledged to have been several generations of Precursors to Precursors to Precursors. The civilizations which engaged in the war that spawned the weaponized automated time machine which causes so much trouble in the story were one such; the Silence Glaive is known to be an artifact from an even earlier generation.

Film

• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, there are multiple races of Precursors, starting with the Celestials, who created the hyperdrive triangle which makes galactic civilization possible. After them came the Rakata, who built a massive Empire, are the reason Tatooine is a desert, and left behind things such as The Star Forge.

Literature

• In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, when the humans make First Contact the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who sent them the blueprints for the device used to access the setting's Portal Network, they reveal that they were not the original creators of said Portal Network. It is also revealed that whatever being(s) did create the Portal Network had their own Precursor(s) the creator(s) of the universe-who may be God- left a message in the form of the numerical sequence of Pi.
• David Brin's Uplift series. The original Precursors, the Progenitors, existed a billion years ago. They uplifted non-sapient races into intelligent beings. The races they created themselves uplifted more species, and the process has continued to the present day.
• In Larry Niven's Known Space universe, there are two sets of precursors. First there were the Thrintun (AKA "Slavers"), who seeded the galaxy with the ingredients of life so it would grow and evolve into unique delicacies for them to eat (being hypnotic slavers, they were defeated by the Tnuctipun in the inevitable Turned Against Their Masters, and they took all sentient life with them. Talk about bad parenting). Then there were the Pak, a race of more recent aliens with three life stages (child, breeder, Protector) only sentient in the third stage, and programmed to be homicidal to anything that could conceivably threaten their descendants (mutations were not recognized). Earth was a Lost Colony of them who couldn't advance to Protector stage when their supply of tree-of-life root ran out due to a lack of thallium in Earth's soil.
• In Strata, archaeology has uncovered several layers of Precursors that died off for various reasons (including one race that died of shock on discovering that they had Precursors). At the end of the book, the heroine meets a representative of the first ever Precursors, who reveals that they are actually the only Precursors, and they planted all the archaeological evidence of other Precursors to give the universe more of a sense of history.
• In Planet of Adventure, the humans of Tschai are broken down into groups based on which alien species they are associated with. Each group regards their masters as the "real" precursors, although an outsider can tell that this is ultimately not true.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5: Lorien and the rest of his kind were this to the other First Ones, like the Vorlons and the Shadows.
• Battlestar Galactica: The People of Kobol were Precursors to the People of Earth and the 12 Colonies, but there was presumably no one before them unless you count whatever "It" is that doesn't like being called "God" and the Head People.
• In Doctor Who, we have the Eternals, some of which were apparently the seldom mentioned gods of Gallifrey; Precursors to the Time Lords who are themselves (sometimes) cited as the reason for there being so many races of Human Aliens, Rubber Forehead Aliens, and Humanoid Aliens in the Whoniverse.
• In Red Dwarf it is speculated that all life in the universe originated on Earth, with humans acting as the Precursors to countless other races, who in turn acted as Recursive Precursors to even more sentient creatures.
• In the Stargate Verse, the Goa'uld were originally thought to be the ones who had built the Stargate network, come to Earth to find slaves, and built the Pyramids to land their spaceships. SG-1 quickly discovers that while the Goa'uld were indeed the ones on Earth thousands of years ago, the Stargates were actually built by their precursors, the Ancients, millions of years ago. Stargate Universe revealed that the Ancients had found signs of their own Precursors (or God), but the series ended before they could be revealed.
• The Star Trek Expanded Universe is full of these. There's all the uberpowerful noncorporeal life, and the ancient humanoid preservers, and a hundred or so other ancient powerful empires.

Mythology

• In Greek Mythology the first major figures are Gaia and Uranus, whose children were the Titans, many monsters, and the Gold race of men who died out by not reproducing. Then Cronos, the leader of the Titans, castrated Uranus and overthrew him, then Cronos' kids overthrew him (yeah, they've kind of got a children killing their parents theme here). Also Zeus created the Silver race of men, but they were too warlike and he had to destroy them, so Prometheus made the Bronze race who were our ancestors.
• Norse Mythology is kind of similar, with Odin and his brothers killing the primeval giant Ymir, making the world out of his body, and instituting the rule of the Aesir.

Video Games

• The Precursors of the contemporary object of worship -- "The Maker" -- in the Dragon Age series were the seven Old Gods of Tevinter. Their Precursors were the nine Elven gods ("Creators"), and their precursors were the Forgotten Ones.
• In Homeworld, the ancient Hiigarans left their warp core to be discovered by the Kushans 3000 years later. But the Ancient Hiigarans never built the core, they found it. It was made by a still older race known only as the Precursors, who, according to legend, are said to have originated from beyond the galaxy.
• The Mass Effect universe has a bunch of these, one of which–a Reaper called Sovereign–provides the page quotes. Of course, due to the Law of Conservation of Detail, only two of these races–the billion or so year old mechanical Reapers and the 50,000 year old Protheans, respectively the first and last in the line of Recursive Precursors–are relevant to the plot.
  • The third game reveals that the Protheans weren't as benevolent as originally thought, having united the Galaxy by expansionism and imperialism, with their belief that the strongest race should lead the Galaxy. If the Protheans lost, they would freely serve any race who managed to beat them. No-one did.
  • Javik reveals that the precursors to the Protheans were the Issuanon, whose ruins on Ilos were where the Protheans first discovered Mass Effect technology, much like Humans had from the Prothean ruins on Mars.
  • Towards the end, it is even considered that the Citadel Races might become the Precursors for the next generation of galactic species.
• Halo‍'‍s Forerunners had the preceding species Precursors, who were rumored to have exceeded technology and become transentient. By the time of the Flood invasion, many believed the Precursors were legend, unaware that they had defeated the Precursors millennia before and the Flood was their revenge.
• In the Star Control series, the first Precursors we know of is the race that left behind the massive battleship that the Ur-Quan use, who themselves Turned Against their Dnyarri slavemasters, who themselves had killed their own Precursors, the Sentient Milieu. The reason for the original Precursors not being around anymore was eventually revealed in (the often-ignored) Star Control III ; they were wiped out by an Even More Advanced race, possibly their own Recursive Precursors.
• The Free Space series has some in-universe speculation on this. The Ancients were the Precursors to the modern-day Terrans and Vasudans, but they were wiped out by a total enigma of an advanced species called the Shivans, who are now attacking the Terrans and Vasudans. One character speculates that the Shivans have been around for a really long time, and exterminating any civilization that evolves to a certain point like they did the Ancients, though there is no direct evidence that this is the case.
  • Some Word of God statements about the never-made third game implied that the Shivans themselves are an engineered species, so that would be another Precursor race who did the engineering.

Tabletop Games

• In Warhammer 40,000, Eldar are a borderline example of a Precursor Race, in which case their creators, the Old Ones, would be Recursive Precursors as well, alongside the Necrontyr/Necrons, and the C'tan Star Gods.
• Forgotten Realms elves dominated Faerun before they torn both continent and their civilizations apart in Crown Wars, which left them weakened and gradually displaced by human expansion, all the while Dwarven and Giant kingdoms still fought each other. But the Elves in turn took the world from Dragons' claws. That's where we switch from merely mythical era to the Time Abyss of Creator Races about whom little is known: Dragons fought giants after knocking birdlike Aearee out of Toril's sky... Aearee in turn spread when Batrachi got themselves extinct, before their time there were Sarrukh and Fey, and so on. And before that was "Time of the Rauth"—prehistorical era when something was going on too, but what is completely lost by now.
• Eberron has a long history of being ruled by demons, then dragons, then giants, then goblinoids (in Khorvaire), then finally the common races. Some of them are still around to some extent, from the Dragons of Argonessen to the Demon Wastes to whatever is happening in the depths of Khyber.
• The Gurps Traveller supplement Alien Races 3 discusses this as an optional alternative for lore about The Ancients. However the normal canon does not discuss this much.