The Teletubbies are the direct descendants of genetically-engineered soldiers, bred to fight during the apocalyptic wars which wiped civilisation from the face of the planet.

Their evolution followed a peculiar, degenerate route. Since the TeleTroopers, their ancestors, were created in a laboratory with a view to making the most efficient killers possible, a multitude of features and abilities which would improve their chances of survival outside of the rigid environment of breeding-ground and battlefield were simply never bred into them.

When the TeleTroopers manning the antisatellite weapon which is seen today as the Teletubbie house were attacked, they were thrown out into an utterly inhospitable environment. Forgotten about in the chaos and confusion following the war - meagre survivors on a planet which had just seen the annihilation of billions - and subjected to powerful mutagens released by the weapons deployed in the war, they began to change. Primarily, and in droves, they changed from being living TeleTroopers to being dead TeleTroopers.

Those who survived were, self-evidently, those who were able to survive. The first generation of TeleTroopers forced to live on the surface was a sorry community, and most of the soldiers died. The next few generations were critical in the evolution of the race from TeleTroopers into TeleTubbies, and it's worth digressing for a moment to discuss some of the features of the Troopers, in order to see what pressures forced their development.

Their most impressive feature was their chameleonic skin. The TeleTroopers were able to cover themselves in any texture or pattern imaginable in order camouflage themselves. This ability meant that clothing was superfluous, so they had had fur bred on to them to keep them warm, and a pouch of fur, nappy-like, protecting their genitals in a fashion similar to certain reptiles. They had two means of communication apart from voice; a radio transceiver, and the facility to create patterns of text or images on their skin. They also had physical hardware grown into them, in the form of a self-destruct mechanism, primed to go off if captured, or voluntarily if the TeleTrooper found himself in an impossible situation.

These features, much though they made the TeleTroopers awesome fighting machines, proved to be liabilities the moment they found themselves in the changed circumstances following the rupture of their complex. The chameleonic skin, so handy when it comes to camouflage, carries with it a hefty penalty; it is even more brain-intensive than vision. The entire surface of the TeleTroopers was like an enormous retina-in-reverse, high on detail and completely controlled by the Trooper's consciousness. A mind capable of controlling such a surface comes at a price. Huge swathes of common sense, nous, and butt-finding-with-the-aid-of-both-hands were cut, and the size of the cranium ramped up to accommodate the still massive cerebellum.

This large size of head was acceptable for TeleTroopers, since they were all vat-grown at the barracks in order to precisely control their development. The moment they had to fend for themselves, however, they started breeding au naturel, and there was very swift and very steep evolutionary pressure in the direction of smaller heads. If you're giving birth, a big head is something you would really rather not be pushing out of you. Most of the first generation of female TeleTroopers who had survived the war died trying to give birth to the second generation. The survivors were the ones with a tendency to give birth to smaller-headed babies, so this trait came to the fore. The race started to lose its fierce cunning, and at the same time, the brains' control over the chamelonic skins retreated across the bodies. The skin left behind still had the ability to change its colour, but there were no nerve endings left to effect that change. Increasingly, the bodies of these creatures were born locked on one, usually garish, hue. The fact that any potential large predators which may have made use of this bright colouring had been wiped out in the war ensured that it proved no disadvantage to the rapidly evolving soldier race.

At the same time, their in-built reliance on HQ caused them to accept food from the systems being repaired by the Noo Noo, further degrading their need for intelligence (and hence scrubbing any evolutionary advantage which might have been conferred by retaining some of their faculties). What little mind was left after a few generations of this selective breeding was easily destroyed by overdoses of 'Tubbie-Custard'.

Meanwhile, it was apparent that the TeleTrooper mind was not the only casualty of the evolution of the species. The mechanical devices which the body had been bred to grow inside itself (such as the fragmentation 'suicide' grenade), not having any effect on the Tele chances of survival, were beginning to atrophy. The creatures were still growing metal components inside themselves, but these were merely degenerate, non-functioning throwbacks, similar to the appendix or coccyx in the modern human. The only difference being that when a human falls over, you can't hear his appendix clanking and jangling like a collection of bells, or his coccyx emitting a 'parp' like a child's bicycle horn when he sits down.

...To Be Furthered...