Hmm? All of these answers are in the story quests:
The primals are just materialized aetherial manifestations of the fervent prayers of living beings. It is said that primals are created by transferring aether from the crystal mediums using the aether of the praying subjects. As such, they can be recreated infinitely so long as they have both praying subjects and crystals. That also means that these are merely the visual manifestations of something else in the minds of the believers and are completely unrelated to the original beings. Such examples are of the "saint" shiva who was just a powerless human (elezen) and had no such powers of ice, the king thordan, who was just a knight and did not have the noted abilities you see, and the primal Bahumut, while he was a living, powerful dragon, was not the monster you see in Dalamud. Futhermore, this technically means that the twelve (real gods and goddesses or not in the lore) when summoned in the way we see them in the ending of 1.0 are also "primals", but were not given such nomenclature due to propaganda (from your point of view your enemies gods are evil, but yours are not). Likely will be the case with the primal manifestations of the warring triad.