First. I enjoyed the story a lot. I've never really been exosed to this sot of tale (other than the Shape of Things to Come... >_>)... so I will be at least trying to check out what steve talked about in his intro. Awesome stuff.
The story itself. Well it would have been nice to have looked into the tree side of it more, or how the transition of humans actually happened. But it could have got bogged down, and its a creation myth... you just have to say 'this happened', and its not really questioned. At least not at the time the tale is told. As for all the types of human, at first I was dissapointed; just crossing humans with animals didn't seem that interesting, and well I've seen that movie. But by making who races of people like that, split by species and not just belief; we could be more brutal to each other. Its probably easier to dehumanise someone what is half bee, when if you are half cat yourself. And we've never really needed a reason to murder people.
This is why humans were put as warlike beasts that needed to be destroyed. At the point we changed over, we were. So we were stuck in that for as instinct took over. We are then warlike once things started going well for each specific race.
I think it would have been interesting to see this story a few million years down the line, when they are actually telling it to humans again. I'd like to see how it twisted and turned with each telling down the ages.
For the sexism. I didn't see it. In almost all cases I saw it as man, as in human. And only when refering to individuals it seemed to go into detail. And crabperson, butterflyperson, and whaleperson just don't work as well when you say them. Whalepeople dounds like a band from the 70's.
And for evo.shandor who didn't like the closing quote. When I heard the quote I didn't take it as being about a war disaster, I saw it as refering to other disasters; from global warming or something else. In this case, it may have been America that was a part of it. And if its War that ended it; well your country sold weapons all over the worlds for decades. It breeded the idea of war, and sometimes would fund both sides. Even if you stop weaponising them, it won't stop the country acting exactly like it was before. It will get them from somewhere else. And for rogue states, and other things; America may have been involved or at least been able to do something about it, but chose not to. As for suicide bombers... not American caused I grant you, but they themselves will not end the world; because it doesn't ever work.