The Chipmunks’ species

As some of you may know, I have believed since before I joined the fandom that the AATC characters are a species of chipmunk that evolved to be human-like. I just never liked the aliens or mutants theories because not only are they outlandish, cliché, and dark, but it’s also contradicted by several pieces of evidence in the 80s series like the existence of more chipmunks. Especially with the mutants theory, if the main 6 getting turned into mutants was a one-and-done event, it limits the possibility of introducing more chipmunk characters.

I could go on at length with individual topics about their species like their taxonomy, diet, morphology, and evolutionary history, but I’ll save those for another time. As someone with knowledge of those fields of study, I am biased towards this theory, but there are some advantages if the franchise wanted to adopt something like this in the future.

First, the idea of a non-human sapient species that evolved and exists alongside them is something not often seen in media these days. And it could lead to a lot of backstory and lore to flesh out the AATC universe. Second, it could educate audiences about some of the natural science concepts I mentioned earlier and give environmental messages by showing how chipmunks could be affected by the actions of our human society. Third, it can expand on AATC as a concept by introducing new characters. Making the AATC universe far larger than just the main 6 themselves could risk overshadowing them, but they could still lean into to the musical basis of this franchise by having new characters tap into music types the main 6 rarely do.

What do you all think? Is there potential in emphasizing the chipmunks’ species and going into detail about it?

Quote from Optimistic Alvin

Hmm...

I personally don't like the mutant theory either. And the alien theory is a bit absurd too. I mean, if the chipmunk are aliens then it's quite a big coincidence that they happened to look like chipmunks which we have here on Earth.

I have heard of cross-breeding, but I'm not sure if that's considered evolution. Cross-breeding doesn't seem possible with chipmunks and humans anyway.

Yeah. Humans, chipmunks, and all other animals would be closer related to bacteria and viruses than to extraterrestrials. So why should we just assume aliens would look like anything here on Earth? Heck, alien life may not even be carbon based.

Cross-breeding between humans and chipmunks would not be possible. Not only would trying to get lucky with a rodent be a crime against nature, their genetics are far too dissimilar to produce a viable offspring. The last common ancestor between primates and rodents split off before the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs (yes I had to specify non-avian because birds are dinosaurs too LOL). And chipmunks have 38 chromosomes whereas humans have 46.

A natural explanation could be convergent evolution, where organisms develop certain traits independently despite being from different lineages. There are many examples I could explain but one of my favorites is that the loss of legs has evolved in lizards at least 6 separate times, even though only one is the true snake lineage (basically all snakes are legless lizards but not all legless lizards are snakes). Something similar could have happened to chipmunks in the AATC universe. Maybe there was some event or change in their environment that led them along a path similar to our own evolution; standing mostly upright, complex problem solving intelligence, and developing language.