It is heavily implied that the barast did not spread to large areas of their world until after they had achieved a high level of civilization. One scene has a gliksin and a barast ancestor looking across the Mediterranean; the gliksin ancestor eagerly sets off to explore the new, strange place, while the barast ancestor notes its existence and goes home. This is consistent with their hunter-gatherer lifestyle which favors high levels of knowledge concerning the land and low migration, including a general avoidance of danger. Also, it is mentioned that barast are naturally of higher intelligence than gliksin, with average IQ being 10% higher before a several generation eugenic campaign, during which the least intelligent 10% were voluntarily sterilized to increase the species intelligence (no data is given on the post campaign IQ comparison). It is theorized that this difference is an additional reason for the lower occurrence of extinction events: because of their higher intelligence, the barast were able to recognize far earlier in their civilization that over-hunting would deplete a species.