First Ancestral Race

The First Ancestral Race, commonly shortened to FAR, occupies the deepest layer of the Evangelion mythos as a progenitor species from beyond Earth. Billions of years in the past they inhabited an unidentified world somewhere in the Milky Way, and they may represent the galaxy's earliest intelligent life. Their civilization commanded technology far beyond anything humanity possesses, and they are presumed to have been humanoid in form.

When their homeworld faced certain destruction, extinction loomed for the entire species. Rather than accept oblivion, they engineered a plan to carry their lineage to other worlds. Because every human and every Angel ultimately descends from that plan, both could reasonably regard the First Ancestral Race as gods.

The heart of their preservation effort was a set of seven progenitor organisms called the Seeds of Life, each dispatched to spread descendant life on a designated planet. A soul belonging to one of their own was sealed inside every Seed, and each Seed traveled aboard a carrier vessel referred to as a moon. Paired with every Seed was a Lance of Longinus, a failsafe instrument able to subdue and immobilize its Seed if circumstances demanded, including enforcement of the race's rule that no planet may host more than one active Seed.

The remaining population merged into seven collective life forms, one per carrier, apparently reduced to souls and gathered within the Chambers of Guf aboard each moon. Those souls would wait for rebirth on new worlds, which is why humans and Angels alike carry the souls of this vanished species.

The race also authored the documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, a copy of which rode aboard every carrier. The Scrolls function as an operating manual for the Seeds and the Spears, and they set down prophecies describing what would unfold should a Seed of Life awaken.

No individual of the First Ancestral Race is ever named or depicted; their presence survives only through their creations and through the souls carried by humanity and the Angels.

The televised series never mentions the race outright, though the idea of a progenitor civilization existed from the project's earliest days. An early planning meeting considered two such races, and the concept appeared in the Neon Genesis Evangelion Proposal two years before broadcast. Mecha designer Ikuto Yamashita has described an original setting with two advanced pre-human civilizations: the first built the Evangelions and perished by them, while the second forged the Spear of Longinus to contain the Evas and left the Angels sleeping as an automatic countermeasure. That framework was revised before the show aired. A near-reference under the name First Indigenous Race almost made it into Episode 20, and Episode 21 retains only ambiguous hints. The race was fully restored to canon through the PlayStation 2 game Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 and its expanded PSP release, chiefly via its Classified Information files and Kaworu's good ending. Thematically, the FAR echoes the Firstborn of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the monolith-building aliens who nurtured sentience across the galaxy.