Quote Originally Posted by Quor View Post
1 - natural evolutionary drift. If we take Emet in the MSQ at his word, he's lived "a thousand thousand" of our lifetimes. Maybe he was exaggerating (he is Emet after all) but assuming he wasn't using hyperbole, and assuming an average age of 50 years among the "civilized" races of the world, that's 50x1000x1000=50,000,000. 50 million years of existence. Even just assuming an average age of 30 that's still 30 million years. That's a long time for life to develop. Whether it developed "naturally" from primordial muck or was a result of creations made by the Ancients that now had souls of their own and were living free on the world is a point of debate, but the fact remains that the modern races possibly had the time to evolve normally from whatever ancestors came before them.
I believe the Sundering was established to have taken place about 12,000 years ago, a bit before the First Umbral Era. Emet-Selch's statement was almost certainly hyperbole, making mock of how brief the modern races' lifetimes are compared to an Ancient's.