The Great Race of Yith
As much as people like to rag on H. P. Lovecraft for being racist, the only group he actually called "The Great Race" were these weirdos!
Kind of similar in concept to the Elder Things, the Great Race of Yith was a pre-human sentient species that ruled earth millions and millions of years ago.
So, what makes them so "great?" The Yithians are the only creatures to have mastered time travel, of a sort. They could transport their minds throughout history, swapping with the bodies of anything else with sufficient intelligence. In fact, when the time came for their species to finally go extinct (at the hands of the Flying Polyps), the Great Race of Yith simply projected themselves billions of years into the future, swapping with the bodies of the beetle-like Coleopterous race, which will dominate the earth after humanity is gone.
The Yithians appeared most prominently in The Shadow Out of Time, in which they swapped with a professor for a period of several years, simply to learn more about human culture. He, in turn, learned about the Great Race of Yith.
The Great Race of Yith
As much as people like to rag on H. P. Lovecraft for being racist, the only group he actually called "The Great Race" were these weirdos!
Kind of similar in concept to the Elder Things, the Great Race of Yith was a pre-human sentient species that ruled earth millions and millions of years ago.
So, what makes them so "great?" The Yithians are the only creatures to have mastered time travel, of a sort. They could transport their minds throughout history, swapping with the bodies of anything else with sufficient intelligence. In fact, when the time came for their species to finally go extinct (at the hands of the Flying Polyps), the Great Race of Yith simply projected themselves billions of years into the future, swapping with the bodies of the beetle-like Coleopterous race, which will dominate the earth after humanity is gone.
The Yithians appeared most prominently in The Shadow Out of Time, in which they swapped with a professor for a period of several years, simply to learn more about human culture. He, in turn, learned about the Great Race of Yith.